Political Ecology

Sarah Lyutse of the NRDC reports as follows: Last week, NRDC released a new fact sheet on the VEETC, highlighting how our government’s biggest incentive program for biofuels has almost exclusively supported the production of corn ethanol which, when all direct and indirect costs are added, creates more global warming pollution than the oil it [...]

The 107 million tons of grain that went to U.S. ethanol distilleries in 2009 was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels. More than a quarter of the total U.S. grain crop was turned into ethanol to fuel cars last year. With 200 ethanol distilleries in the country [...]

Daniel Hillel and Cynthia Rosenzweig have written a very good summary of carbon sequestration in soil: “Soil and Carbon Climate Change: Carbon Exchange in the Terrestrial Domain of Agriculture”, CSA News, Vol. 54 No. 6, June 2009.  If you somehow missed the soil classes in your geology courses, this article illustrates the big picture. Why [...]

Previous studies estimated that a gallon of corn-based bioethanol requires the use of 263 to 784 gallons of water from the farm to the fuel pump. But these estimates failed to account for widely varied regional irrigation practices, the scientists say.The scientists made a new estimate of bioethanol’s impact on the water supply using detailed [...]

Tijs Lammens, at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and colleagues studied the conversion of glutamic acid to -aminobutyric acid (GABA) using a decarboxylase enzyme. Glutamic acid is a major component of the waste formed when grains, such as maize, are converted into bioethanol. Because glutamic acid contains nitrogen, it could be used to make nitrogen-containing industrial [...]

The quantity of land available to grow biofuel crops without impacting food prices or greenhouse gas emissions from land conversion is limited. Therefore, bioenergy should maximize land-use efficiency when addressing transportation and climate change goals. Biomass could power either internal combustion or electric vehicles, but the relative land-use efficiency of these two energy pathways is [...]

Last week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted a low-carbon fuel standard that requires greater use of fuels that cause lower greenhouse gas emissions, compared with gasoline. Corn-based ethanol doesn’t meet that test and won’t benefit from the new standard, CARB says, because diverting corn into ethanol production increases deforestation and the clearing of [...]