Biofuels could make climate change worse

Biofuel is receiving lots of attention as a renewable energy source that could reduce use of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. But the climate bill proposed in the U.S. House does not account for the carbon cost of cutting down trees and could actually make climate change worse by encouraging deforestation, National Public Radio reports.

Tim Searchinger of Princeton University is the author of a recent article on this problem in the journal Science.

“Even if you were to cut down the world’s forests and turn them into a parking lot, and take the wood and put it in a boiler — which obviously releases enormous amounts of carbon from the trees — that is treated as a pure way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Searchinger says. “And that’s obviously an error.”

And that error isn’t trivial. It’s now enshrined in European law as well as the Kyoto climate treaty.

“The problem is that when the world agreed to a treaty that limited the amount of carbon that goes up the smokestack, they didn’t agree to limit the amount of carbon released by cutting down trees,” he says.

While activists have focused on stopping the development of new coal plants as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there has been little focus on the need for policies to preserve forests which sequester carbon. This weekend as people around the world gather at events designed to educate on the need to reduce CO2 emissions it will be interesting to see if biofuel policy emerges as a priority.