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Yeah, seems like they're forgetting the part where they need to bury the corn in bedrock to keep the carbon sequestered.
No they aren’t. Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral. Fossil fuels increase atmospheric carbon. Now, if we did make biofuels and reinject them into the ground, yes it would reduce atmospheric carbon. But neutral is strictly better than increasing, regardless yes?
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That makes no sense with the definition of ‘renewable’. Trees grow again. They are renewed. What is this junk?
The soil gets depleted when biomass is consistently taken away. It might be possible to avoid it but that's cost center.
Crops can be rotated.
Trees can be non-clear cut when harvested.
None of this changes the definition of renewable.
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That it isn't sustainable. As Eating the Earth points out, by growing trees to then cut them down again we're not accounting for the cost of using that same forested land for anything else, like a forest which is a great carbon sink. Instead burning wood pellets is considered renewable until you consider the cost of using that land for something else in which case it isn't a renewal resource.
That makes no sense with the definition of ‘renewable’. Trees grow again. They are renewed. What is this junk?
Forest are only carbon sinks if they stay as a forest. The second you cut one down it goes from being a sink to source. Searchinger's argument states that more forests will be grown to be cut down if burning wood pellets (that are shipped from North America to the EU) is considered renewable and that means you're now cutting down even more forests to clear land for growing more trees. The land used is not free; it could have instead stayed a forest and remained a carbon sink. When you compare wood pellets using for generating energy and compare it to other forms of energy generation it no longer holds up as a renewable resource after you take into account the land that could have been kept instead as a forest and carbon sink.
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The EU does something impressively crazy burning 23 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2021. https://unece.org/media/press/372591 It's labeled as 'renewable' electricity.
It's labeled 'renewable energy' (not electricity), if wood pellets are sourced from sustainable renewable forest growth. What is your argument?
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That makes no sense with the definition of ‘renewable’. Trees grow again. They are renewed. What is this junk?
It makes perfect sense. Forest are only carbon sinks if they stay as a forest . The second you cut one down it goes from being a sink to source. Searchinger's argument states that more forests will be grown to be cut down if burning wood pellets (that are shipped from North America to the EU) is considered renewable and that means you're now cutting down even more forests to clear land for growing more trees. The lan…
This is obvious to anyone who has spent much time in a forest, because if this wasn’t the case, forests would be sitting on thousands of feet of sequestered carbon. Instead of a few feet (typically) of non-mineral soil.
Forests also (typically) go through cycles of burning.
The highest rate of carbon sequestration is when a forest is in the 3-25 year old range, because that is when the bulk of the actual growth is occurring.
Renewable doesn’t mean ‘indefinite carbon sink’. Renewable means ‘renews’.
This entire discussion is incredibly ridiculous.
I read the whole article and I still don't see how Big Ag misled anyone. I may be misunderstanding, but it seems that the author is trying to differentiate between growing corn for food vs growing the same corn for ethanol. I assume the entire reason the lobby exists is that farmers want to grow corn for food and ethanol. But the researcher lost interest before proving anything around there. Maybe ethanol is actually…
And then there's the federal US sugar cartel keeping prices artificially (no pun intended) high.
We've known for decades that it requires more energy to produce corn ethanol than is delivered in the ethanol produced. A lot of the necessary inputs are petroleum-based. This is not news. What MIGHT be news is that the environmentalists who have been pushing biofuels as a "green" alternative to oil have finally figured out this basic physical fact.
For years I saw saturation ads for the Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation on PBS, I found out years that this is the prime beneficiary of the ethanol program. Farmers growing corn for ethanol are growing broke despite subsidies. The program is an environmental disaster because people in the Mississippi River basin should be growing anything except corn because corn is a crop that requires huge imports of nitrogen fer…
They should switch to growing sugar cane. There's a high demand for sugar, plus sugar works even better than corn for ethanol.
I read the whole article and I still don't see how Big Ag misled anyone. I may be misunderstanding, but it seems that the author is trying to differentiate between growing corn for food vs growing the same corn for ethanol. I assume the entire reason the lobby exists is that farmers want to grow corn for food and ethanol. But the researcher lost interest before proving anything around there. Maybe ethanol is actually…
This is an excerpt from Eating the Earth. The entire point of the book is that when we consider land use, we're not accounting for other uses for that same land (or how other land would be used) because the land, prior to Searchinger's work in the field all calculations did not consider this factor. Even after Searchinger published their work showing the flaws on land use, it was often ignored. If you find the excerp…
... and be overwhelming underwhelmed?