Lots of folks have decided to drive cars powered by biofuels, feeling good about the switch from fossil fuels and hoping the biofuel decision is an ethical and effective response to global warming, but the science is starting to accumulate indicating that biofuels are not an effective answer.

I know this may not be what a lot of people want to hear. And it's no doubt true that if you simply measure the gases at the tailpipe, it would appear that biofuels are cleaner than fossil fuels, but once you start measuring the complete environmental picture of biofuels, it turns out that biofuels are simply not green. I don't believe that ethanol, biodiesel and the other internal combustion options for loco-motion have any real merit.

The NYT carries a story today here that covers two papers recently published in the journal Science that includes the following:

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”

If you want to read the articles themselves, not dumbed down through the NYT, you can go to the journal Science online here.

The key issue here is sustainability, imho. Quick fixes that look like solutions need to be analyzed in their entirety to measure their true and complete costs.

The NYT also carries an article today that mentions "inertiatives." These are public policy measures that make complete sense and can't be enacted for some reason. An example in this story is the installation/conversion of dometic hot water production in the State of Hawaii to solar. Read that article here if you want. There is lots of sun. Hawaii ships in copious amounts of power, fuel, and it is a no-brainer to convert the islands to solar production of domestic hot water, yet it is apparently not possible to enact this simple, sustainable, cost-effective public policy.

The Hawaii article mentions the "blue line" project and I wonder if we have ever done that in Olympia. It's an exercise where folks take blue chalk and mark the waterline projected by a sea-level rise of one meter. It helps put the issue of global warming in perspective. I think we might want to think about doing that project later this year.

Lots of folks think that global warming is not that big a deal. Rob R has said he thinks my posts are a bit alarmist. But the first NYT story carries this line:

The Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change has said that the world has to reverse the increase of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to avert disastrous environment consequences.

Disastrous environment consequences. Should that be toned down a bit? Does that seem a bit alarmist? All that I will say about it is that if/when the biomass hits the fan I expect to be there to tell the children and grandchildren of the global warming deniers, the folks who have deliberately dragged their feet and opposed important changes that there was plenty of reason to know that change was urgently required and the costs were shifted to the generations to come by folks who felt they had a God-given right to drive Hummers and who thought that calls for essential change were alarmist.

We will pay some of the costs ourselves as the recent "unusual" flooding in the area has shown. We will pay some of the costs for global climate change a the "unusually" strong tornadoes in the country showed earlier this month, but I believe that substantial costs are being shifted to generations to come by a short-sighted national energy policy and we can do something about that once we are sufficiently alarmed.