Corn harvest in Iowa. Would you like that in your Big Mac, your gas tank, or both?Photo courtesy of USDA NRCS. What do industrially produced meat and corn-based ethanol have in common?

Well, they both thrive on the assumption that it's good idea to devote vast swaths of land to an incredibly resource-intensive crop--corn--and then run that crop through an energy-sucking process to create a product of dubious value.

And ... they both got tagged as major drivers of climate change this past week.

Ethanol took the harder blow of the two, I think. It came wrapped in the Oct. 23 issue of Science. In a concise and devastating "policy forum" piece, a team of authors led by University of Minnesota researcher Tim Searchinger fingered a gaping defect in existing European and pending U.S. climate policy: biofuel gets treated as carbon-neutral, ignoring carbon emissions from land-use change. According to the paper ($ub req'd), the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union's cap-and-trade law, and the final version of Waxman-Markey (the House climate bill that passed over the summer) all contain the a "far-reaching but fixable flaw":

[They] does not count CO2 emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks when bioenergy is being used, but it also does not count changes in emissions from land use when biomass for energy is harvested or grown. This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass, which may cause large differences in net emissions. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon.

Or, as Searchinger put it to a Wall Street Journal reporter, "Literally, in theory, if you chopped up the Amazon, turned it into a parking lot, and burned the wood in a power plant, that would be treated as a carbon-emissions reduction strategy."

The implications of the flaw are staggering: existing climate law, coupled with U.S. and European biofuel mandates, could lead to vast forest clearing--unleashing a gusher of greenhouse gases in the name of ... averting climate change. That's sort of like trying to save your sight by gouging out your eyes. The authors state:

One study estimated that a global CO2 target of 450 ppm under this accounting would cause bioenergy crops to expand to displace virtually all the world's natural forests and savannahs by 2065, releasing up to 37 gigatons (Gt) of CO2 per year (comparable to total human CO2 emissions today). Another study predicts that, based solely on economic considerations, bioenergy could displace 59% of the world's natural forest cover and release an additional 9 Gt of CO2 per year to achieve a 50% "cut" in greenhouse gases by 2050. The reason: When bioenergy from any biomass is counted as carbon neutral, economics favor large-scale land conversion for bioenergy regardless of the actual net emissions. [Emphasis added.]

It should be noted that this "flaw" in U.S. climate policy is no accident. House Ag committee chair Collin Peterson fought like a pitbull to enshrine it in Waxman-Markey. To the agribusiness lobby Pererson represents, tarnishing the good name of ethanol is tantamount to setting fire to a Bible during Sunday school.

Another article in the same Science issue explores another massive problem with biofuels: water scarcity. As the author puts it: "A widespread shift toward biofuels could pinch water supplies and worsen water pollution. In short, an increased reliance on biofuel trades an oil problem for a water problem." (Emphasis added.)  According to the author, it takes between 90 and 190 liters of water to extract a kilowat-hour worth of oil. To get thhe same amount of energy from corn-based ethanol? Try 2.2 and 8.6 million liters of water. Ouch.

As for meat, get this: two researchers associated with the World Bank claim in a new World Watch piece (PDF) that meat production is responsible for more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions. Previously, the most widely cited estimate came from the FAO, which reckoned meat contributes an already-stunning 18 percent.

So why the difference in assessments? The biggest factor is respiration--the breathing out of C02--by livestock. According to the authors, livestock respiration adds massive carbon to the atmosphere--that factor alone, they claim, is equal to 13 percent of global annual GHG emissions.

I don't have the scientific chops to assess their reasoning. I do wonder if the vast number if the C02 breathed into the air by farm animals isn't partially offset by the vast number of wild animals elimainated by meat production. It's not a pretty thoughtm but think of the habitat swallowed up by corn and soy fields globally--and the billions of animals who now monger exist to breathe out carbon.

However, I agree that meat production is deeply implicated in climate change--and must be cut dramatically. But I find these authors' conclusion stunning: They want to replace industrially raised meat with industrially raised soy. In place of a chicken in every pot, they want to see a "chicken" in every pot. They call on the food industry to dramatically scale up the production of highly processed fake meat--and even offer marketing advice. They declare:

A successful campaign would avoid negative themes and stress positive ones. For instance, recommending that meat not be eaten one day per week suggests deprivation. Instead, the campaign should pitch the theme of eating all week long a line of food products that is tasty, easy to prepare, and includes a "superfood," such as soy, that will enrich their lives.

They also express enthusiasm for "artificial meat cultivated in laboratories from cells originating from livestock, sometimes called 'in vitro' meat."

Sorry, but given ideas like that, I'm not ready to let a couple of World Bank guys dictate the future of cuisine. Getting a carnivorous culture to reduce meat consumption is going to be tricky no matter what. Rather than push folks to embrace soy weenies and test-tube "shmeat," I'd rather see a revival of minimally processed rice and beans, a move toward meat as a side dish, and a return to diversified farming that uses manageable amounts of manure to nourish cropland. Let's ban the CAFO--but not eviscerate what's left of our palates.

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A group of prominent ecologists and climate scientists have an important article coming out in tomorrow's issue of Science, in which they call for "fixing a critical climate accounting error." The error is ignoring a significant source of global warming pollution related to using biomass for energy ("bioenergy").

I know that most people's eyes glaze over whenever "accounting" is mentioned and others tune out when discussion turns to "climate," so the number of people interested in "climate accounting" may be vanishingly small. But this article is important and not as obscure as it sounds.  Getting the accounting wrong means that more CO2 is going into the air than we are acknowledging; and that worsens global warming.  CO2 has the same effect whether we count it or not, but we can't reduce emissions that we don't admit are happening. Global warming is too serious of a problem for us to use incomplete balance sheets.

The Science article points out that the climate legislation pending in Congress hasn't yet accounted properly for emissions from bioenergy.  We need to get this right so that climate legislation promotes bioenergy that helps us fight global warming rather than costs us forests.

This is where the principles of ecology come in. Barry Commoner annunciated five laws of ecology during the 1970s. The first two are:

The first law means that to understand the implications of using biomass for energy we can't just look at the impact on the land where the biomass came from, we also have to consider the ripple effects, whether on neighboring farms or forests half way across the world that are connected through global commodities markets. Remember, everything is connected to everything else.

A corollary of the second law is that everything has to come from somewhere. In the case of biomass, the carbon it contains comes from CO2 in the atmosphere. That's why there is an environmental opportunity in replacing fossil fuels with biofuels. But whether there are in fact net environmental benefits or costs depends on what would have happened to that carbon if it wasn't used for energy. Remember, everything has to come from somewhere.

The key sentence in the Science article is:

Bioenergy therefore reduces greenhouse emissions only if the growth and harvesting of the biomass for energy captures carbon above and beyond what would be sequestered anyway, thereby offsetting emissions from energy use.

In other words, the clean energy merits of biomass depend on the specifics of how it is harvested and how the land it comes from is managed.

The climate bills currently under consideration in Congress, however, fail to distinguish between the carbon footprint of burning biomass from a mature forest and burning crop waste. Instead, all "renewable biomass" is assumed to be carbon neutral and any biomass that isn't considered renewable is assumed to have no environmental benefits. As a result, there is a huge, if obscure, fight going on over exactly how "renewable biomass" should be defined in the legislation. The need for a more nuanced approach was flagged by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman and Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson, and needs to be addressed as clean energy and climate legislation moves through the Senate.

We have to get biofuels right to get the pollution reductions the clean energy bill is designed to achieve. Otherwise there will be a perverse incentive to clear forests for bioenergy production even if the net emissions are actually higher than from continuing to burn fossil fuels. This incentive will get larger over time as the cost of emitting fossil fuel CO2 rises as long as net emissions from bioenergy CO2 remain free.

The solution is to stop assuming that burning biomass is always carbon neutral and fix this climate accounting error by recognizing that everything is connected to everything else.

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John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles

Two new documentaries show the damaging effects of the world's addiction to oil, each film from its own unique angle. Crude, which opened in New York on Sept. 9, traces the story of a lawsuit brought by 30,000 rural Ecuadorians against Chevron, which denies responsibility for turning their traditional rainforest home into a dumping ground for crude oil waste, sickening and killing generations of people. And Fuel, which opened in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 18, follows director Josh Tickell on his quest to convert the world to biofuels, eliminating the need for oil and thus -- hopefully -- for lawsuits like the one in Ecuador.

Oil pollutes the water sources of the Ecuadorians in Crude.Both films succeed in engaging viewers with compelling characters and stories -- from the chipper Tickell driving his sunflower-painted, biodiesel-fueled Veggie Van across the country, to the earnest and dogged Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo visiting the grave of his murdered brother. And both expose the utter stupidity and reality-denial of Big Oil, an industry unafraid to trample anything or anyone blocking its path to profit, even as the product still driving those profits grows ever more obviously obsolete.

"It's overly simplistic to say these are greedy companies who want to make money at all costs," Joe Berlinger, who directed Crude, told me on the phone the day after his film's New York release. (His previous work includes Metallica: Some Kind of Monster). "But there's an institutional blindness to the impact of their activities on other parts of the world."

In rural Ecuador, as in many other places off the radar of American consumers, that impact manifests itself in the form of communities that "have been systematically poisoned," as Trudie Styler (wife of Sting and co-founder of the Rainforest Foundation) put it in the film. Her involvement in and support of the case make up just one part of the starry journey that ultimately led to lawyer Fajardo being featured in Vanity Fair and giving a press conference at the Live Earth concert in New York in 2007.

"Pablo Fajardo walks into a room and just reeks of authenticity and heroism," Berlinger said of his film's central character. "This guy has this incredible story. [He] pulls himself up by the bootstraps, gets himself educated with the help of the Catholic church, because he's motivated to do something about the injustices that he saw as a young man working in those fields. I mean, you can't make this stuff up."

Fajardo's story infuses Crude with what Berlinger calls "the human element," something he thinks is often missing from the environmental movement. The passion and struggle of Fajardo and other characters -- like Maria Garofalo, whose 18-year-old daughter has to travel 18 hours to receive cancer treatments, which she can only afford by continuing to work in the fields -- embody the film's larger theme of environmental justice and oppression.

"It's kind of a wake-up call as to how we treat our indigenous people," Berlinger said. "We are eradicating the knowledge and the culture of people who have lived in harmony with nature for millennia, and we should be cherishing their view of consumption and interaction with nature as opposed to eliminating it."

Berlinger acknowledged that his film is a departure from the theme -- heard more loudly in environmental conversations -- of the effects of burning fossil fuels. "This is a film about the devastating effects of the procurement of those resources," he said. "Part of the debate about renewable energy should include, obviously, the impact of production on people and the environment."

Crude tells the story of those who suffer so we can get our oil fix. Fuel explores the ins and outs of that addiction, and promotes a solution that could kick the habit: biodiesel.

Fuel director Josh Tickell and his Veggie Van.Speaking through a sometimes-fuzzy cell phone as he crossed mountains in an algae-powered vehicle on his way to Reno, Fuel director Josh Tickell explained how, from its beginnings, "diesel was based in one concept, the nexus of efficiency and sustainability." Part of his film tells the story of Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine, whose values of social and economic justice sometimes went hand-in-hand with his engineering. His engine was created to run on vegetable oil, with the hope that this would "put power back in the hands of everyday farmers."

"This is the kind of engine we'd all be driving today had Diesel's engines been realized," Tickell said of his car, the Algaeus. But Rudolf Diesel disappeared mysteriously from a ship crossing the English Channel in 1913. Some suggest foul play on the part of competing business interests may have been involved.

Tickell remains remarkably upbeat about biofuels, despite the recent media backlash against them, which, he said, "decimated the biodiesel industry." His current tour across the country in a fleet of algae-powered vehicles focuses on dispersing information about biofuels and engaging politicians with that information.

"We're dissolving the barrier between this movement, which is largely an individualistic movement of personal choice, and what should be, needs to be, and will be a political movement," Tickell said. "We've got to get the environmentalists to get that we have allies in our local political leaders."

Tickell planned to meet with Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons in Reno, where Gibbons would pour a gallon of algae fuel into the Algaeus. A symbolic gesture, surely, but Fuel shows how it was an accumulation of such small steps that propelled biodiesel on its original path to popularity. Although he said he's "not going to hold [his] breath for Congress" to pass sweeping climate legislation, Tickell sees the tide turning toward renewable energy.

"We're in a time of tremendous sea change," he said. "The corporate concept of a triple bottom line -- incorporating sustainability and your ecological footprint into your product -- it's that triple bottom line that's guiding the next generation of energy companies."

Put together, Fuel and Crude offer a wide-ranging look at the vast, complex system of interests swirling in the orbit of one magnetically addictive resource. Rather than being disheartened by this intricacy, though, viewers can find inspiration in both films' stories of struggle and triumph. A goofy college graduate driving a van that smells like French fries can help spark a shift to a new kind of fuel -- and all of a sudden veteran truck drivers are filling their rigs with biodiesel and calling our dependence on foreign oil "a flat-ass shame." A man born into poverty in the Ecuadorian jungle can rise up as a leader for 30,000 of his people, who marvel at his picture in the pages of Vanity Fair. These struggles are far from over, but they're stories we need to hear. Both new films tell them with spirit and compassion.

Watch the trailer for Crude:

And for Fuel:

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Alexander unveiled his nuclear plan in July.One of the few Congressional Republicans who talks about the need to address climate change, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, made an interesting argument against wind and solar energy this week. He’s concerned about the amount of land required to produce energy from wind and solar, writing in the Wall Street Journal, “I fear we are going to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment.”

He draws on a recent study by Nature Conservancy scientists who detail how much land is required to produce energy from different sources, an issue they dub “energy sprawl.” Alexander focuses on a small part of their findings—that wind and solar plants require a good deal more physical space than nuclear plants:

It’s a disingenuous argument, because the problem with nuclear power has never been land use. (See Radioactive Waste Disposal, Cost, and Security for more on the very difficult nuclear question.) I’m not arguing here that Alexander’s dead wrong in his long-standing love for nuclear energy, just that this is a thin argument for nuclear.

Oh, and Alexander says he won't support a cap-and-trade climate bill unless it includes his personal wish for 100 new nuke plants.

Bonus second point: If you’re an environmentalist who cares about endangered species and wild places, you shouldn’t be concerned about wind farms or solar plants. You should worry about biofuels.

At least, I’m having a hard time avoiding that conclusion after looking at a key graphic from the energy sprawl report:

Courtesy PLoS ONE

The chart measures the land required per unit (terawatt-hour) of electricity from different sources. Note that the top five sources are all for biofuels, derived from different crops. Note how much less land wind, solar voltaic and solar thermal energy require in comparison.

I won’t rehash the economic and ecological problems with biofuels here, but this should cool off the notion that wind and solar won’t fly for land-use reasons. Of course some places are more sensitive than others, but if there’s room for mountaintop removal coal mining, we have room for wind and solar plants.

There’s a certain man-bites-dog appeal in stories about environmentalists who oppose clean energy projects because they disrupt wild places and endangered species. Take the conflict over solar panels and transmission lines in the Mojave Desert. Or the quarrel over the Cape Wind project at Nantucket Sound. Or the fight over wind turbines in the Flint Hills of Kansas.

These conflicts are intriguing, sure. But the sprawl study, which appeared in PLoS ONE, the online journal of the Public Library of Science, suggests that biofuels such as ethanol pose a far greater threat to open lands.

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I borrowed this title from a post by John Guerrerio over on Examiner.com.

When several scientific studies began publishing reports that supported the common sense contention that food-based biofuels usurp farmland the Renewable Fuels Association (which just spent almost a quarter of a million dollars last quarter on lobbying) had to cobble together some kind of defense.

Bob Dinneen, head of the RFA, has been using the Huffington Post blog to disseminate this false dilemma, see here and here.

I'd debate John on the Examiner blog in the comments but they only allow a thousand words characters and no active links to verify claims. So I have to take him to task here.

In some ways biofuels are worse, and in some ways they are not, depending on what metric you are measuring and what biofuel you are talking about. For example, tar sands do not have nearly the impact on food prices, biodiversity, or the Rhode Island sized Gulf of Mexico Dead zone as corn ethanol, but corn ethanol produces less GHG than oil from tar sand (although not less than conventional gasoline depending on type of land displaced, nitrous oxide released from fertilizers, and time given to displace fossil fuels).

In addition, "biofuels" can be gaseous, liquid, or solid. They can come from landfill gas, used restaurant grease, or our food supply. They can help drive the orangutan to extinction as is the case with palm oil, or capture a powerful green house gas as is the case with manure treatment methane digesters.

At some point, environmentalists are going to have to face some harsh realities. In addition to subsidizing and mandating the use of environmentally destructive corn ethanol our politicians have just permitted the construction of a pipeline to deliver oil made from Canadian tar sands. Jobs, pork barrel politics, and the illusion of energy independence will always trump environmental issues.

The market funds Canadian oil to satiate consumer demand while corn ethanol is kept out of bankruptcy via subsidization by taxpayers who are then forced to consume it via government fiat. It does not matter which is worse in the aggregate. Both ideas are worse than just using regular sources of petroleum and certainly worse than investing in the replacement of our conventional internal combustion engine car technology, which wastes 80% of the fuel in a gas tank regardless of what it is made from.

Here is a study, for example, that measured several types of biofuels against their fossil fuel equivalent and found in most cases that biofuels were actually worse and this does not even include land displacement or higher than realized nitrous oxide releases from nitrogen fertilizers (which can make corn ethanol up to 50% worse than gasoline).

Ironically, in this post, John tells us about the latest finding from NOAA:

Whoosh, right over his head.

And here's a nice piece of contradiction where he begrudgingly concedes that:

Factorially? The Nature Conservancy, as you might guess, is all about conservation. Conservationists (hunters and fishers) are often "conservative." In a masterful piece of diplomacy, these researchers coined a new term for indirect land use change (a term the RFA and the likes of John here have been busily denigrating) called "energy sprawl." It's like an atheist calling herself a secular humanist in an attempt to dodge the negative connotation religionists have given to the word atheist. It’s a robust term because to denigrate it you have to defend sprawl.

In the above article John tells us that the Nature Conservancy is just as wrong as every other researcher that has findings not supportive of food based biofuels. Biofuel missionaries are prone to cherry pick their science.

I know this post is getting long but I have just barely scraped the surface. I begin the line by line parsing below:

The concept is simple to understand, not simplified. If you divert food into gas tanks, someone will make up the difference by putting more land under the plow.

The dozens of recent peer reviewed studies have hardly rushed to judgment. Claiming that biofuel critics are not also critical of oil from tar sands is a strawman argument. The land displaced by tar sands is minuscule on a gallon per gallon basis compared to food based biofuels.

Unlike John, who feels compelled to refute the Nature Conservancy study in defense of food-based biofuels, I wouldn't want to refute the WWF study. But don't fall for this false dilemma. Oil sand has nothing to do with biofuels. In addition, here is what the WWF said to Obama in 2008:

John continues ...

Again, no. How badly a biofuel increases emissions depends on what kind it is, where it is grown, and how many decades or centuries it will be grown. This has been documented in several studies now. From Wikipedia:

He continues ...

"Anti-biofuel number crunchers?" I think he means authors of published peer reviewed science papers. He goes on to link to photos of tar sand mining, which is analogous to coal mining except you get a liquid fuel instead of a solid one.

"Destroy a forest worse?" A destroyed forest is destroyed. It is a step function, not a matter of degree. It is destroyed or it is not. And yes biofuel production really can destroy forests just as bad. But the real clincher is that most of the destruction done by biofuels is in tropical forests, which are far more biologically diverse and store far more carbon than high latitude northern forests. It takes decades to centuries to recapture the carbon released by a destroyed forest.



From here:

He continues ...

That number represents the total area of tar sands in Canada, not what is actually being mined and according to Wikipedia, only ten percent of those reserves are concentrated enough to be economically mined. So, make that 3.5 million acres, or 5,400 square miles. You could drive a car at 60-mph around a circle that big in 4 hours. Our ethanol crop alone usurps about 30,000 square miles every year, never mind the impact of canola, soy, palm, and cane, and the area of land converted to biofuel crops grows every year along with government mandates for biofuel use.

What does this have to do with food-based biofuels? This is another case of bait and switch. Not that I wouldn't support a magical technology like that, but good God, Joule Technologies is just another snake oil sales firm. How naïve can you get? The EPA was counting on Cello for most of our cellulosic fuel next year, a company just convicted of fraud.

Note that John's argument oscillates between calling land use change a crock, and claiming oil sands are just as land intensive (land use change isn't a crock), one argument contradicting the other. The EPA looked into the land use issues associated with tar sand oil and found what I did. Gallon for gallon, and over all they are not anywhere near as land intensive as today's food-based biofuels. This is a false dilemma, don't fall for the bait and switch.

The term "dirty" is not well defined. This is a debate technique where you deliberately choose words that can mean just about anything. It is left to the imagination. And he is flat out wrong about the energy balance of corn ethanol being better than oil sands. Roughly 70 percent of the energy contained in a gallon of corn ethanol came from fossil fuels. His contention that the environmental degradation gallon for gallon of tar sands is worse than corn ethanol is also pure conjecture.

Note how he conflates the fact that tar sand oil is more carbon intensive than food-based biofuels with land displacement use issues. Don’t fall for it.

The above comment is riddled with errors. For starters "we" do scrutinize fossil fuels. Our politicians ignore that scrutiny for personal gain, just as they are allowing continued subsidization and mandated use of corn ethanol.

It is a strawman to say that because biofuels can't sustain our society that we don't foster their development. The government is flushing billions down the toilet on corn ethanol and cellulosic. The government isn't throwing billions of dollars at Canadian oil, we consumers are. That is being driven by and paid for by the market, not by government handouts. I agree that our government should not allow the use of such a carbon intense fuel. The hard reality is that oil is fungible. If we don't buy it, someone else will.

The above comment continues the attempt to connect tar sand oil to biofuels. There is no connection. Why would a serious researcher compare apples to oranges? Direct costs obviously favor tar sand oil over biofuels, which is why one has to be subsidized and use mandated and one does not. One is kept out of bankruptcy only by continued government largess and the other sustains a profit in the market. Biofuels disrupt food supplies, destroy vast carbon sinks and biodiversity. The tar sand oil creates more CO2 than conventional oil but usurps very little in the way of carbon sinks and biodiversity.

Here we go with the vague terms again. What exactly is the definition of "cleaner?" This is also pure conjecture, but even if future scientific studies prove biofuels "cleaner," there still is no connection between tar sand oil and biofuels.

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Fixing the bioenergy accounting loophole

Special Series: What's the deal with offsets?Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / GristThe compliance market for offsets proposed under the House's American Clean Energy and Security Act would not just mean more opportunity for companies already in the business of selling carbon offsets. It would also result in a major realignment in the types of offsets offered, shifting away from renewable energy to offsets derived largely from land use, land use change, and forestry projects (otherwise referred to by the clunky acronym LULUCF).

That's because Waxman-Markey, as the House bill is known, excludes all forms of energy production, including renewable sources, from the huge carbon offset program it would create.

"Since fossil fuels used to make electricity are capped, there is an automatic 'credit' from purchasing renewable energy due to the need to hold fewer allowances," said David Hawkins, director of the Natural Resource Defense Council's climate center. "Creating an offset credit for those renewable kilowatt hours would be double counting."

Aside from the carbon price, which would help to level the playing field for clean energy, as Hawkins noted, other mechanisms will also drive renewable energy development, including the renewable electricity standard, which specifies that the United States should get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources or energy efficiency by 2020; CAFE standards that regulate auto emissions; and already-approved federal stimulus money for research and development.

But the prospect of agricultural and forestry offsets presented an irresistible opportunity for Big Ag, and just days before the House passed Waxman-Markey on June 26, the House Agriculture Committee, led by Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and supported by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, won some key victories for their constituency that critics argue would impede the country's ability to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the reasons corn ethanol and, to a lesser extent, soy biodiesel, have fallen out of favor in many circles is because of the international leakage issue. When American farmland is turned over to growing crops for biofuel production, that reduces food availability on the international market, pushing prices higher. People in developing countries can't afford corn and soy at these prices, so they cut down rainforests to increase local supplies. When the resulting loss of carbon sequestration from deforestation is calculated, biofuels typically do not show a net reduction in CO2 emissions over fossil fuels.

Many people in agriculture regard biofuels as an economic godsend that can help save struggling farms (witness the huge boom in biofuel production in the first half of this decade as oil prices reached historic highs). And they have been dismayed by carbon accounting reports that have shown their product to have an about equal warming effect as fossil fuels, information that led California to exclude corn ethanol from its renewable energy fuel standard.

Rep. Collin Peterson used his position as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee to win key concessions for farm interests in the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill.Courtesy AFLCIO2008 via FlickrPeterson and the House Agriculture Committee won a concession that international leakage won't be calculated as part of American biofuels' carbon footprint for five years, making it appear more desirable on paper. At that point, there will be an evaluation, but the USDA will have veto power over any decision to count leakage.

Environmentalists argue that there is no point to growing biofuels if there is no net climate benefit, and increased water consumption and fertilizer runoff associated with these crops could make them an environmental net negative.

Profit motives seem a clear driver for the leakage exemption. But it is also partly explained by farmer culture, which is generally more alarmed by the issue of energy security than climate change, said Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Awarding the USDA oversight of offsets, rather than the EPA, was another big win for the Agriculture Committee. Many environmentalists say the EPA would be better at oversight because its mandate is to protect the environment, whereas the USDA's is to look out for agricultural interests.

But Stallman said such criticisms show "a huge lack of understanding about what the overall role of USDA is. Yes, production agriculture is a part of its portfolio, but certainly not its priority."

In addition, the USDA currently runs a variety of conservation programs, he said. "They are required to do oversight. They are required to set up the regulations; they are required to handle compliance. And they have a network of over 2,000 local offices across this country that do that. EPA doesn't begin to have that kind of network."

Specifically, Stallman believes USDA is better equipped to oversee a LULUCF-focused carbon offset program than the EPA because it already staffs soil scientists, plant biologists, and agronomists, the people who will calculate to what degree carbon is being sequestered or not emitted based upon any given practice.

Michael Wara of Stanford Law School, however, said he is afraid that the USDA would follow the lead of voluntary offset markets such as the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) and the U.S. Department of Energy's Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases program, which don't do on-site monitoring or use third-party verifiers but rather estimate carbon uptake based on soil type, climate zone, and other factors.

Furthermore, deciding what makes a quality offset involves a lot of subjective decisions, Wara said. "Agency discretion is fairly broad, and a number of choices are defensible."

For example, reducing the use of fertilizer would likely qualify as an agricultural offset. Fertilizer is released from soils into the atmosphere in the form of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, and the production of synthetic fertilizer is carbon intensive. However, over-fertilization of fields in the United States is already declining as a result of other policies the USDA has implemented and the rising cost of fertilizer. So how do certifiers take into account the likelihood that fertilizer use would have continued to fall, even without an offset program?

"That's going to be a very subjective question," said Wara. "How fast would it have fallen? Would it have leveled off? The USDA faces political pressure from its constituency, which is used to subsidies that are considered to be more like entitlements. So the whole concept that practices change and you might not be entitled to the same level of crediting is not one that's going to be very popular or familiar to farmers."

Stallman said he expects to see offsets' validity reviewed regularly as natural part of the process, negating the need for a periodic, formal review. As an example, he points to no-till farming offsets currently traded on the Chicago Climate Exchange. These offsets are temporary, not permanent. Farmers usually sign a contract for five years, a period during which they agree to implement certain practices. Scientists then calculate a carbon credit for that time frame.

"At the end of five years, there's nothing to say that there would be another contract available just like that," said Stallman. "Maybe the USDA would come in and say, given technological changes and other developments that are occurring, the amount of carbon you're going to reduce by using that practice is a new number."

While he admits that calculating business as usual versus additionality for offsets can be tricky, Stallman expressed faith in the system. "I would support anything that ultimately qualifies as an offset. My assumption is there's not going to be an offset granted unless the additionality requirement is met."

The Offsets Integrity Advisory Board that would be created under Waxman-Markey could be a venue in which to review such issues, according to Daphne Wysham, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an independent think thank in Washington, D.C. But her optimism is tempered.

"The question is, once you've got all these interest groups in place, how easy is it to make these changes politically?" The USDA overseeing these offsets "is like the fox guarding the henhouse," she said.

--

Below, watch Bob Stallman's testimony before the Senate environment committee on climate legislation and the agriculture sector. (Read a related Grist story.)

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George Voinovich (R-Ohio) [UPDATED]

This post was originally published on the website of the Center for Public Integrity and is reposted on Grist with CPI's kind permission.

More than 460 new businesses and interest groups jumped into lobbying Congress on global warming in the weeks before the House neared its historic vote on climate change legislation, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of just-disclosed lobbying records shows.

The surge in the 12 weeks leading up to the June 26 vote meant that about 1,150 different companies and advocacy organizations were promoting their vision of how the nation should tackle climate change, a more than 30 percent cumulative jump over the 880 companies and associations that were storming Capitol Hill on the issue as the year began. Some 190 of the interest groups that were lobbying in the first quarter of the year did not continue their lobbying in the April-June time period.

It’s impossible to say with certainty how much money was spent on lobbying the climate bill, since businesses don’t have to detail expenses for separate issues they are pushing in Congress — like climate, health care, the economic stimulus, or taxes. But so many groups were lobbying climate that even if the issue consumed only 10 percent of their efforts, the cost would have been more than $27 million in just the second quarter-from April through June.

The interests were wide-ranging. It’s no fluke that farm interests took center stage as the vote approached, considering that nearly 20 companies and organizations that produce or promote biofuels — including refiners and would-be refiners of plant matter from corn to wood chips to algae — started lobbying climate legislation for the first time. But they were joined by a host of others. American Superconductor of Devens, Massachusetts, pushed for the electricity grid modernization in the bill — a move that would enhance the market for its superconductor wires, which the company says can carry ten times the power of traditional copper cables and potentially double the power capacity of wind turbines. Electric grid investment also was a primary goal for PickensPlan, the advocacy project of billionaire T. Boone Pickens, which joined the lobbying fray in the second quarter. Pickens had sunk millions into the Texas wind power he touts as an important domestic resource, but electricity from the rural plains isn’t going anywhere without more wires. In fact, Pickens last month postponed his power plan due to financing problems.

Numerous religious groups, from Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, to the National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, have been lobbying on the bill over the past year. In the second quarter, another advocacy group joined in: the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, concerned about possible subsidies to “faith-based” organizations for energy system retrofitting.

T. Boone Pickens. Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/ / CC BY 2.0

About 30 higher education institutions and associations — from Ivy League to community colleges — also joined in lobbying on the climate bill in the final weeks before passage, most with an eye on federal money that might be available for climate-based educational programs or research. The Exploratorium — a San Francisco-based, interactive science museum — along with four other science centers, said in a letter to the climate bill’s authors, “we see few more important issues for our future as a species” than global warming; the organizations wanted to be sure that institutions like science centers and natural history museums also would be eligible to compete for climate education grants.

“The closer we got to finishing the bill, the more intense the frenzy to get little pieces into the bill,” said a senior Congressional staffer. The aide believes the integrity of the legislation held up, nevertheless, even as the measure ballooned from the initial 648-page draft to the 1,428-page mammoth passed by the House. The main goal — reducing the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent by 2020 — remained intact, the source said. “It worked out okay, but sometimes at the end of the day you felt like you had been pawed by a lot of people — all your good friends who just wanted to help you out on this piece of legislation.”

Companies and advocacy groups that started lobbying on global warming in the second quarter, according to filings with the Senate Office of Public Records.

Adage LLC
Algenol Biofuels, Inc.
American Sugar Cane League
Aurora Biofuels
Corn Refiners Association
Fulcrum Bioenergy, Inc.
GeoSynFuels
Green Earth Fuels
Growth Energy
Kai Bioenergy
National Biodiesel Board
New Generation Biofuels (Formerly H2Diesel)
Patriot Renewable Fuel
Petroalgae, LLC
Poet LLC
Renewable Biofuels
Novogy
Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative
Targeted Growth

What did all these groups get for their lobbying dollars? In the case of agriculture — with nearly 80 total businesses and interests groups lobbying — it’s pretty clear, due to the high-profile showdown forced by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., who threatened to deep-six the bill. To gain his votes and those of other committee members, the climate bill’s authors, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and his global warming subcommittee chair, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., agreed to enhance the benefits farmers would gain for participating in the nation’s effort to cut greenhouse gases. And the legislation gave some protection to the makers of ethanol, the fuel alternative distilled mostly from corn, despite opposition from critics who claim it’s not as green as portrayed.

Agriculture-based alternative fuels were especially well represented among the new lobbying entrees. For instance, there were lobbyists from technology firms claiming they can make fuel from new sources, with at least four separate companies touting the promise of algae (Algenol Biofuels, PetroAlgae, Kai BioEnergy, and Aurora Biofuels). There were also companies like sugar maker Florida Crystals, which operates the largest biomass power plant in North America, and was pushing for greater support of biomass power development.

But the biofuel lobbying powerhouses remained the companies that refine ethanol from corn, especially POET Biorefining of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In 2007 POET overtook agricultural giant and longtime industry standard-bearer Archer Daniels Midland as the nation’s leading ethanol producer, and its first foray into lobbying on climate was the second quarter of this year.

Former NATO Commander Wesley Clark

Leading the charge for POET was the new interest group it helped create with several other ethanol makers last fall, Growth Energy. Retired four-star general and former NATO commander Wesley Clark is the group’s public face, but there’s also a team of lobbyists behind the scenes. In addition to its chief executive Tom Buis, a long-time fixture in the farm lobby, and former Iowa Republican congressman Jim Nussle as special adviser, the group paid $30,000 to Kountoupes Consulting last quarter. That brought on board former Clinton administration congressional liaison Lisa Kountoupes, who also had been a staffer to Energy and Commerce chairman emeritus John Dingell, and Melissa Shannon, former legislative aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Since the House vote, Growth Energy has added even more Washington firepower, hiring Anne Steckel, former aide to Illinois’ Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the majority whip, and Ted Monoson, former aide to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). With what is widely seen as a tough battle coming in the Senate over the climate bill, Growth Energy’s CEO Buis says there is plenty of work ahead, beyond the changes made at the behest of House Agriculture committee chairman Peterson.

“What he did was stand up for all of rural America and say ‘We’re gong to be impacted by this and we want some of these issues addressed,’” said Buis. “Did he get them all addressed to satisfy everyone? I think that obviously Senator [Tom] Harkin [D-Iowa] and the Senate Agriculture Committee are going to be addressing other concerns. Because if you look at the Senate, it’s going to have to address ag issues, because I don’t see how you get to 60 votes without it.”

Even so, it’s still energy interests and heavy energy users that dominate the lobbying scene. Leading the pack were manufacturers, with about 200 companies and advocacy groups, followed by the power companies and utilities, with some 130. Coal and coal utility interests were seen as making out well in the House climate bill, especially regarding provisions requiring the federal government to initially give away carbon emissions “allowances” that likely will eventually be worth billions of dollars. But not all energy interests gained in that deal, which likely will slow the move to low-carbon forms of electricity generation. Enter a new interest group: America’s Natural Gas Alliance, representing more than two dozen producers of natural gas that are independent — that is, not affiliated with a larger oil company. The alliance, which represents about 40 percent of U.S. natural gas production today, argues that they should be fueling a much bigger share of the nation’s electricity production since natural gas is the least carbon-intensive fossil fuel. The coal industry has argued that such fuel-switching could be costly, but ANGA is plying the Senate, the White House, and Obama administration energy and environmental officials with maps showing how new drilling techniques mean the nation can rely more heavily on natural gas without fear of the price spikes that have previously plagued the fuel.

ANGA’s argument is being aided by a team from Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates, including Joel Malina, a former political aide to New York Democratic Representative Nita Lowey, and Jack Howard, who was on the White House staff of both President Bushes. Howard had also been a senior adviser to GOP House Speakers Dennis Hastert and Newt Gingrich, as well as former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

Rod Lowman, who spent 17 years in Washington defending the plastic industry against environmentalist critics as president of the American Plastics Council, is now pushing the benefits of natural gas as president of ANGA. “The principal question we’re getting, quite frankly, is ‘Where have you been?’” says Lowman. “The utilities and the coal industry have been at this for a very long time.” Because “most of the deals had been cut” in the House by the time ANGA started lobbying on May 1, he says the group is focusing its sights on the battle on the other side of the Capitol. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chair Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, says that battle will begin September 8. “The Senate will be looking at those emissions allowances, looking at offsets, looking at renewable energy standards — all those things will be revisited — and we want to make sure we are a part of that discussion,” says Lowman. “We will be a part of it.” And so, apparently, will more than 1,100 others.

David Donald, M.B. Pell, Joe Kokenge, Josh Israel, Te-Ping Chen, and Sarabeth Sanders contributed to this article.

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Recently, there has been some blog chatter about my comments on the future of lithium ion batteries -- my goal here is to clarify my stance.

I do believe that these batteries have been over-hyped in terms of technology available today. However, little focus was given to my statement that Khosla Ventures is backing the technology because the "lithium-ion markets are here today. We're investing because there are great markets."

So what kinds of technology are we investing in? I think the traditional approach to lithium ion battery making, such as A123, is going to be competing in an overheated, nearly-commoditized market and will probably not (I guess never say never!) get down the cost curve in the next 5 years. (Longer-term forecasts are futile because so-called experts can make anything they want up -- we all know long term we will be on fusion power.)

A number of incremental improvements are underway, but they will at best offer a 2X improvement in price performance. A123 may be a best-in-class battery, but it lost out in the GM Volt race to the LGChem battery, which at the pack level delivers less than 50 KWhr/kg. (Actually, 8KWhr deliverable power, since the battery is cycled to less than 50% of nominal capacity, and a 182kg pack weight, including all the safety systems!) At the pack level, per usable KWh, the costs per KWh including safety systems and packaging are far higher than the $1000/KWhr bandied about and the $250/KWhr that will make batteries truly competitive -- and many of these system-level costs will be difficult to reduce without radical changes in the battery cell design and manufacturing approach.

Indeed, the manufacturing processes used for Li batteries for automobiles are quickly becoming mature. They represent improvements, but not radical changes, to techniques used in batteries for consumer electronics. We cannot expect significant increases in performance absent fundamentally new approaches. One thing to look at is the closeness in performance among many electrochemistries -- it is precisely because the battery cells are made in much the same way. This generation of cells will address perhaps 10% of the cars by 2020, according to some believable forecast -- not insignificant, but not profound, either. Plenty of billion-dollar market caps can be built within this 10%.

Two fundamental problems limit the cost trajectory of these traditional batteries. First, liquid, flammable electrolytes and their related problems cause large "safety" tradeoffs. Hence our investment in Seeo, which is taking a high-risk (mostly because it is so novel) approach to solid electrolytes. They have made far more progress than I would have expected.

Second, the actual capacities of existing battery cells are still fall far below their theoretical values, for the active materials in widespread use (Mn and PO4-based cathodes). That tells us that in order to get to the theoretical values, we need to execute higher-risk, but higher-payoff, cell designs and manufacturing technologies which unlock their full potential and reduce the cost of production. This is what Sakti3 is trying to do with solid-state batteries, with good success.

Selecting manufacturing processes that have been used successfully in lab-scale demonstration, in pursuit of "world's best," will not work for automotive markets. What is needed is scalable, low-cost manufacturing technology. Without that, the role of lithium ion batteries as a meaningful tool of carbon reduction will remain fairly limited (though market caps will continue to be high, especially after the A123 IPO, which is expected soon).

These are the types of approaches that have the potential to truly be disruptive and address the markets that really affect overall carbon emissions of cars, especially in emerging economies. Even more disruptive approaches that we have not invested in today may be on the horizon. If EESTOR-like approaches work (I am somewhat skeptical of this particular company, though I believe new science similar to that proposed in its patents is possible), then so much the better. But there is very little visibility today on these radical approaches. I would say these are in the domain of a hope and a prayer.

New manufacturing technologies and chemistries hold out more hope than the traditional style of lithium battery. Of course even the existing players like A123 will not stop where they are, and some of them will try innovative, maybe radically innovative approaches. Even the old lead-acid battery suppliers like Firefly and other lead acid battery makers are making a play to reach electric-car specifications.

What appears more predictable is that traditional bulk cell approaches are not likely to yield the cost equations to make for rapid penetration. If they are successful, it is more likely because oil went to $200 per barrel than any "performance" on the part of these batteries. $200 oil is a different ballgame that may make even cruder lithium ion batteries viable economically.

The key problem is, costs have to come down, or oil prices have to shoot up, for most traditional battery ventures to make big winners of entrepreneurs and their investors. But new technical approaches that change the cost and safety equation (with significant new technology risk) will make the battery technologies competitive even if oil prices stay below $100/barrel. That is what we look for in investments -- more technical risk now, less market risk later, and bigger breakthroughs for society. We are dealing with much harder science and technology, so we will see much higher rate of failure, but the wins will be bigger.

We will likely ship a billion new cars worldwide in the next 15 or so years. The key question is not whether hybrid or EV cars/batteries will be successful financially (they probably will), but rather what it will take to get 80% of these billion cars to be low-carbon cars. The most important thing to remember is economic gravity: the cheapest thing ends up winning. Our hope is to win that battle over the long term, because it will take these breakthroughs to change the overall carbon trajectory for passenger cars.

With electric cars, there is yet another major risk: in the foreseeable term, China/India and even the US will be "plugging into a lump of coal" for years to come. And though renewable electricity from wind and solar is a good goal for these cars, it will likely be much more costly (about 5X higher currently in India where a new coal plant costs 4c/KWh), so economic gravity again dictates high-carbon electricity to power these expensive electric cars. Another breakthrough is needed there.

Back in 1990, everybody assumed the digital world would be interactive TV ... before the Internet came from left field, from an unlikely instigator: the web browser. Right now, it's too early to tell what the instigator will be for energy. In the interim, I see plenty of money to be made in both batteries and biofuels, but it will take more than current biofuels and current batteries to make the car world low-carbon. It will require a Black Swan of automotive propulsion.

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Clean energy opportunities

Real climate action--or agribusiness as usual?Photo: mike138After the House narrowly passed the Waxman-Markey climate legislation, there was some talk that the bill might be "strengthened" in the Senate.

The bill's sponsors had faced a serious slog in getting it through the House, and were forced into making large compromises with the energy and agribusiness industries. Perhaps a more effective bill, the thinking went, might emerge from the Senate.

I remember thinking, really? Have these people not heard of the Senate Agriculture Committee?

I watched with deep cynicism the proceedings of last week's ag committee hearings on climate change (video here). The terms of debate were not encouraging for anyone who takes the threat of climate change seriously.

Essentially, debate broke down into an unedifying dichotomy between those who argued (like USDA chief Tom Vilsack and ag committee chief Tom Harkin [D-Iowa]) that climate legislation can be rigged to benefit Big Ag, and those who argued (like American Farm Bureau kingpin Bob Stallman and Sen. Saxby Chambliss [R-Ga.]) that climate change is a liberal fantasy in search of big taxpayer bucks (unlike, say, the agribiz lobby's ruthlessly defended ethanol program).

Having watched from afar as House Ag Committee chair Collin Peterson essentially mugged Waxman and forced him to write an agribiz-friendly code into the climate bill, I sense a similar hijacking in the works in the Senate. Indeed, like Peterson, committee chair Harkin has already signaled that he plans to use the legislation to boost corn-ethanol interests: he aims to insert a clause that would raise the maximum ethanol blend to 15 percent from 10 percent, usurping the EPA's authority to decide on this issue. "It is my feeling that EPA has a strong bias against ethanol," he complained earlier this month.

Around the time of the the hearings, Vilsack unveiled a USDA study showing that agriculture would benefit from the cap-and-trade legislation that came out of the House. Not long before, the Environmental Working Group released a stinging assessment of the agriculture provisions of the House bill

The agriculture provisions of the bill ... open two loopholes that threaten to let coal-fired power plants and other big climate polluters off the hook and slow progress toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

EWG's analysis essentially backs up my own at the time of the House negotiations--that the concessions won by Peterson essentially pay farmers for upholding the (chemical-intensive) status quo.

Indeed, the agribusiness lobby is rather desperate to turn climate legislation into a tool for maintaining the status quo. A cap-and-trade regime that raised the price of synthetic fertilizer and diesel would cut into profits of the agribusiness giants, because it would leave farmers with less cash to spend on pricey inputs like GMO seeds. Farmers might even experiment with different systems! The trick is to rig cap-and-trade to deliver "offset" payments to farmers for essentially doing what they're already doing.

By rigging up a robust offset market for input-intensive practices, the higher costs imposed by climate legislation can be negated or more than negated, preserving markets for agrichemical giants.

I understand the necessity of getting a climate bill through Congress, and I realize that in our political system any climate legislation will inevitably be deeply compromised by industrial interests. Of course, it will be a bitter irony if our nation's first comprehensive climate policy ends up bolstering a chemical-intensive, greenhouse-gas-spewing food system.

For another vision for the future of agriculture, check out the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition's excellent policy paper [PDF] on the very real climate benefits of doing precisely what climate legislation seems unlikely to do: create incentives for less chemical- and energy-intensive farming systems.

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On Monday, the latest entrant in the biofuels sweepstakes takes the wraps off a solar-powered technology designed to transform C02 and sunlight into ethanol.

"We capture the energy of the sun into a solar converter," says Bill Sims, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Joule Biotechnologies. "Inside exists a solution of brackish or gray water, nutrients and highly engineered photosynthetic organisms that directly secrete biofuels. There's no intermediary that has to be introduced or processed."

So far, Joule's "helioculture" technology has only produced ethanol in the lab. But, says Sims, "We're moving the lab outside as we speak. We aren't expecting any surprises." The company, backed by Cambridge venture capital firm Flagship Ventures, plans to begin construction of a pilot production plant in early 2010.

Like Solazyme and other startups that aim to produce biofuels from such things as algae and wood chips, the advantage of Joule's technology over corn ethanol is that it does not displace agricultural land used for food production.

"We wanted to find a way to make new classes of fuels that could be dropped into the existing infrastructure and not limited by arable land or crops," says David Berry, a MIT-trained bioengineer and a Joule co-founder. "Algae is what we would like to think of as a classic feedstock biofuel. We are going directly from the sun to fuel production."

Berry and Sims claim Joule can produce 20,000 gallons of "SolarEthanol" a year for every acre of photobioreactors it builds, all at a cost less than the equivalent of oil priced at $50 a barrel. They say the fuel contains 100 times the energy storage density of conventional batteries, making it a more efficient way of storing and transporting solar energy.

Joule will offer coal-fired power plants and other carbon emitters the opportunity to convert greenhouse gases into gas for transportation. But Sims and Berry said the company's production plants won't necessarily have to be located next to fossil fuel power stations.

"CO2 is available by rail, truck and pipeline, so we don't feel particularly hampered," says Sims, whose previous venture was a LED lighting company.

Joule isn't the only company tapping the sun to produce green fuels.

Stealth startup Sundrop of Pojoaque, N.M., last year signed a deal with solar power plant developer eSolar to use its heliostat field and power tower technology. The company, backed by marquee Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, has remained close-mouthed about its plans. Sundrop CEO John Stevens would only tell me at the time that the startup "uses low-cost concentrated solar energy to drive renewable energy into fuels."

Ethanol is just the first product Joule plans to produce. The company has bioengineered other organisms to create 10 chemicals and other fuels in the laboratory, according to Berry and Sims.

"Green chemicals" are expected to be a multi billion-dollar market, and startups like San Diego-based Genomatica have also created bioengineered organisms to produce petroleum-free industrial solvents. Earlier this year Genomatica announced it had made a microbe that ingests sugar and water and secretes methyl ethyl ketone, a solvent used in paint. The company designed the green solvent to be produced at defunct corn ethanol plants.

So far, the dozens of corn-free ethanol startups have produced more press releases than petroleum substitutes in any substantial volume. For their part, Joule executives say they expect to go into commercial production in the second quarter of 2010.

"At that point we'd be ready to drive commercial relationships, partnerships and the like," says Sims.

Read Todd Woody's past Green State columns.

--

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Photo: Dog CompanyThe climate and energy legislation that the House passed in June would increase revenues for farmers, according to a preliminary analysis released by the United States Department of Agriculture on Wednesday.

The study contradicts claims from some major agriculture groups that the bill would be economically catastrophic for farmers. Instead, the study predicts that farmers and foresters would benefit directly both from pollution-permit revenues allocated to the sector and from selling offsets to polluters.

The report estimates that from the allocation of pollution permits, farmers will bring in an additional $75 million to $100 million each year from 2012 to 2016. And the offsets market created by the bill has the potential to generate income of $1 billion for the farm sector each year between 2015 and 2020, and $15 billion to $20 billion annually from 2040 to 2050.

"In the short term, the economic benefits to agriculture from cap-and-trade legislation will likely outweigh the costs," USDA head Tom Vilsack told the Senate Agriculture Committee on Wednesday. "In the long term, the economic benefits from offsets markets easily trump increased input costs from cap-and-trade legislation." The benefits of climate legislation, he said, "can outpace, perhaps significantly outpace, the costs."

The study, which evaluates potential impacts on the ag sector in the short, medium, and long term, predicts higher costs for inputs and energy. But it also highlights the potential for significant income growth for farmers. And Vilsack said the estimates for economic growth are conservative, as the study, in its own words, "assumes no technological change, no alteration of inputs in agriculture, and no increase in demand for bioenergy as a result of higher energy prices."

"It's quite possible that farmers will actually do even better than we predict," Vilsack said at the Senate hearing. "Farmers are innovators. One of the reasons they have been successful is they have been adapters."

Vilsack went toe-to-toe with some ag-state members of the committee who repeated claims that the climate bill would be detrimental to U.S. farmers. After Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) suggested as much, Vilsack countered, "I guess I approach this from a slightly different viewpoint on the capacity of agriculture to innovate."

Vilsack also noted that farmers are well-positioned to become providers of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels derived from plants and manure, and that such endeavors could create new jobs in rural communities. Those sorts of positive impacts are difficult to account for in an economic analysis, he said.

"This is a new world here," Vilsack told reporters after the Senate hearing. "And how in the past have farmers reacted to a new world? They have embraced it, they have utilized technology, and they have become the most productive farmers in the world. Why are we going to stop?"

Agricultural groups and farm-state legislators have been divided over the climate bill. The House bill includes significant concessions to the industry, granted at the behest of House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson. The American Farmland Trust, the National Association of Wheat Growers, and the National Farmers Union back the bill.

But some ag-state reps weren't won over by Peterson's efforts, and many major agricultural groups opposed final passage of the bill, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, American Farmers and Ranchers, the National Chicken Council, the National Corn Growers Association, the National Council of Farm Cooperatives, the National Pork Producers Council, and the National Turkey Federation.

The Ag Committee also heard testimony from John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who outlined potential threats to agriculture should global warming continue unfettered, including increased drought and pestilence and decreased productivity. To prevent that, said Holdren, "every effort should be made" to prevent the global average temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Holdren also teed off on senators skeptical of cap-and-trade, the administration's favored approach to addressing climate change. After Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) suggested that they could put a cap on emissions but not create a trading market for carbon credits, Holdren bluntly pointed out that the entire point of a cap-and-trade plan is to allow businesses to "find the most economical way to achieve the emissions reductions."

Agriculture Committee Chair Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who in the past has expressed pessimism about the chances of passing a bill this year, affirmed at the hearing that his panel understands the need to act and will be willing participants in crafting legislation. President Obama, he noted, wants legislation in place before world leaders meet to hash out a new climate treaty in Copenhagen in December. "We will do our darnedest to try to meet that deadline," said Harkin.

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Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

Hi. I love your column. I just wanted to see if you were aware of the company Mean Green Trucking and Transport ... We run our fleet of moving trucks on recycled veggie oil and biodiesel. Our NYC warehouse is solar powered. And we plant a tree with every move.

Chris K.
Tarzana, Calif.

A. Dearest Chris,

My fingers are exhausted from waving tiny flags all weekend, and I can barely click through my email for questions about green moving companies. So we round out our moving revue with your letter. The hopefully only time I have used a product endorsement to introduce a topic.

Cargo beep-beep.Once upon a time in 2006, I responded to a question about green transcontinental moving companies, finding none. As you later pointed out, I overlooked yours. When you wrote, you said it was the only one of its type, which seems plausible. But today, for those who have the money and loads of stuff required to hire movers, there is more than one biodiesel-spewing, tree-planting, cross-country moving service.

I have not used such a moving service, so the use of this letter is as I said only a device to introduce the topic. I have not vetted any of these moving services, nor do I wish to pack up my things here in the stacks and try any of them out.

But I can mention the emissions factor for diesel fuel: 22.3 pounds of CO2 emitted per gallon burned. Biodiesel is considered by the EPA to reduce lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions over 50 percent from this sad baseline. Logically, then, if you must drive a diesel truck any distance, biodiesel makes the carbon footprint better.

"Green" moving companies not only run biodiesel in their trucks. They also run energy-efficient offices, recycle cardboard, and lend out reusable boxes. Some plant trees and offset their emissions, which are steps with questionable effect but certainly good intent. These are all improvements over the status quo. To start you movees off on your hunt for green moving companies, I offer Chris's Mean Green Trucking, another lead in California, one in New York, and a somewhat faceless national affiliation of green movers.

Now let's wrap up the moving revue and allow another three years to pass quietly by before revisiting the topic. Before I move along, I will quickly mention the other major aspects of green moving to consider. We can avoid solid waste problems by planning ahead and averting last-minute jettisoning of possessions that could be reused or recycled. Advance planning will also help us properly dispose of household hazardous chemicals. It's just too tempting to use a time crunch as an excuse to throw toxic stuff into the trash.

Wistfully,
Umbra

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

"I've looked at this a lot, and it seems to me that ethanol already helps our carbon footprint and it's only getting more efficient in the way it's produced. Corn ethanol is a step on the way to cellulosic ethanol, which is also going to benefit Minnesota. I'm in the pro-ethanol camp."
-- Sen. (elect) Al Franken, D.-Minn.

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"The President has been very, very clear about this. He wants the biofuel industry to take hold in this country. He wants us to break our addiction to foreign oil. The only way we can do that is by producing our own fuel and the biofuels industry is the way we are going to do that.

"Corn-based ethanol will continue to be part of the solution but by no means the only way to produce ethanol.

"We are working very hard to make sure that we maintain the infrastructure of the ethanol industry in the United States ... There will likely be some companies that will succeed and some companies that won't, but it won't be because we haven't been giving them an opportunity to succeed."

-- USDA Secretary Tom Vlsack, in an interview with Reuters

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Here's a King 5 News video clip and here is a short article from the online Seattle PI, demonstrating how much easier it is to fall back on science when there's money involved. The PI article suggests that Seattle quit because of this EPA study, which came out in May (Figure 2 shows soy biodiesel worse than regular diesel). It also suggests that this is a temporary situation when it isn't. Quite a change from a year ago when permission was given to invest ten million dollars of the Seattle Employee's retirement funds in a local biodiesel refinery now sitting idle.

Here is a quote from an article I wrote in the first week of April:

And here is the information presented to that particular politician via email prior to that meeting.

The city of Berkeley also stopped using biodiesel. Seattle is located in King County, which dropped biodiesel earlier in the year. That leaves Washington State, which still has laws on the books mandating ever-increasing blends of biodiesel in all state vehicles.

Higher level politicians appear to be taking a wait and see position. Visit their websites you'll find they are still gushing over how biofuels are going to stimulate the local economy (refinery death watch), fight global warming (not), and make us energy independent (80% of biodiesel was being shipped overseas).

What should have been obvious from the beginning is that growing both food and fuel will take more land. That land has to come from somewhere. It is coming from existing ecosystem carbon sinks. It should also have been obvious that food processors would be competing for the same feedstocks as the fuel processors, thus temporarily driving the price of both up, which in turn is the signal needed by farmers around the world to start torching grasslands, rainforests and peat bogs, which will in turn lower the price of feedstocks again, until the next biofuel mandate causes another round of price signaling and land clearing. There are 3 billion more people on the way.

It was just about four years ago that I first suggested this was a really bad idea. Be sure to read all of the comments from that post from four years ago.

The food based biofuel issue is in many ways analogous to the coal issue in that change is going to have to come from the bottom. Get off your butts and join some peaceful protests.

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Meet the LooWatt: a waterless eco-commode made from poop that turns your #1 and #2 into CH4. It's the diaper genie of the sustainability set.

Tofu man, chew
We can't be sure whether this specialty tofu has anything to do with George Clooney, but you can't go wrong when your Hot Dude promises to be sweet and tender and he's got his own theme song.

Get a blue clue
Fatboy Slim and other Brit celebs you don't recognize suggest you get blue in the face right here, right now. They also suggest you get your mind out of the gutter.

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Mr. potato fan
Be a spud stud in this raincoat poncho made from tater-based bioplastic. It's 100 percent biodegradable, compostable, and unattractive. But it's embedded with seeds that'll sprout once you're done with the slicker … or get caught in a rainstorm -- whichever comes first.

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Henry Waxman and Ed Markey seem to have mastered the art of the non-concession concession: striking deals with potential opponents in ways that meet their needs while minimizing (though not entirely eliminating) the negative impacts.

Similar to their distribution of allowances, which seemed at first glance to be a massive giveaway but turned out to be far more equitable, the latest compromise between Waxman and House Agriculture chairman Collin Peterson seems to fall into this category. The agreement installs a five year moratorium on calculations for how ethanol and other biofuels affect international land use. Climate pollution is released into the air when American farmers switch their land from growing food to growing fuel, and South American agricultural interests burn the rainforest to clear land to grow additional food to fill the gap.

At first glance, that seems pretty bad, and in some ways, it is. As Environment America’s Anna Aurilio pointed out in E & E (sub required), "No one should be trying to legislate away scientific inquiry.” That’s true – and if there’s a possibility of undoing this concession, we should seize it. But in terms of actual impact on land and greenhouse gas emissions, this concession may be minimal. The 2007 law that mandated a “Renewable Fuels Standard” already exempts 15 billion gallons of ethanol from these land use requirements, and production may not exceed that mark, or exceed it significantly, within the moratorium’s five year time frame – meaning that this provision may have little immediate effect.

However, this concession does essentially punt the question down the road, which means that environmentalists and others concerned about ethanol’s impact (like anyone who pays more for food as a result of ethanol mandates), will have to be very vigilant five years from now to ensure that EPA does actually assess whether ethanol and other biofuels that destroy rainforests should qualify under the Renewable Fuels Standard.

There’s another way in which the legislation may make this concession less damaging than it seemed at first glance. The bill’s tropical forest provisions, which I summarized in this Center for American Progress post and here at Grist, will make deforestation much less financially attractive. By valuing forests for the carbon they store – and by providing incentives for reforestation – they make expansion into pristine areas much less likely. At current carbon prices, a hectare of rainforest could be worth $10,000. Depending on the price of carbon and the price of ethanol, it may make more strict financial sense for land owners, communities, and governments to invest in conservation instead of destroying forest for agricultural land for biofuels or other purposes.

In some cases, that will even be true in the United States where agricultural land values are much higher – farmers may be able to make more from reforestation or restoring their land to native prairie than continuing ethanol production, leading to a welcome conversion of at least marginal land to carbon-sequestering Nature.

The other main concession Waxman made was giving the Department of Agriculture primary jurisdiction over deciding what agricultural activities could qualify as offsets. As Tom Philpott chronicled here at Grist, if USDA continues its long tradition of altering science to meet whatever Big Ag’s financial interest du jour is, that could mean farmers would just get credit for pouring Monsanto’s Round-Up pesticide on genetically engineered crops.

But there’s some hope that USDA would actually apply science. In addition to bringing offsets to scale, we must also ensure that the offsets markets have high standards of environmental integrity to ensure that offsets result in real and measurable greenhouse gas reductions while bolstering efforts to conserve soil, water, and fish and wildlife resources. Tom Philpott added in an email (echoed by this post) to me that while we should view USDA’s promises with skepticism, he’s cautiously hopeful all the public scrutiny of these decisions will at least somewhat improve USDA’s commitment to the environment and science.

“I think the ag lobby will be surprised by the amount of scrutiny on ag offsets,” he said. “They are used to operating in obscurity, and haven't fully adjusted to this new era of public interest. Meaning that people like you and me can play an important role as watchdogs as this thing develops.”

At the end of the day, that’s the conclusion we need to draw. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey’s policy mastery and skillful negotiating diminished the negative environmental impacts of the compromises that are necessary to build a majority behind real action to solve this great global crisis – but we’ll have to remain involved for years to make sure those negative consequences stay diminished.

UPDATE: Ben Geman at E & E has news of how the bill’s biomass and biodiesel provisions have been changed:

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Agriculture, energy, and global warming are inextricably linked, which is why America’s farmers must be a part of the solution to global warming. Today the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture conducts a hearing on the American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454. A close review of the legislation reveals that it provides a significant opportunity for U.S. farmers to increase their income while safeguarding their livelihoods and the nation’s food and energy supplies.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack called reductions of carbon dioxide a "new income source [that could] change the old ways of supporting farms." He has urged farmers to seize the economic opportunities from reducing greenhouse gas pollution and "not to be fearful of this future." H.R. 2454 recognizes and rewards the benefits farmers can provide to the United States and the world in ending our dependence on fossil fuels and confronting climate change.

H.R. 2454 offers an opportunity for farmers to diversify their sources of income and cut costs by increasing energy efficiency. With modest improvements, ACESA can designate a more explicit role for agriculture in the carbon offset market without jeopardizing the gains for farmers already included in the overall legislation. ACESA rewards good practices and provides the tools to ensure that American farmers can benefit from solutions to global warming.

Here are eight reasons why farmers should support this bill:

1. Farms and forests can reduce global warming pollution.

U.S. agricultural and forest lands sequester 246 million metric tons of carbon annually, absorbing 13 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. With the appropriate incentives these lands could ultimately absorb 50 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. H.R. 2454 promotes U.S. agricultural lands as a carbon sink by encouraging low tillage practices, tree and perennial planting, erosion prevention, rotational grazing, agricultural carbon offsets, and a market for carbon sequestration.

2. Farmers can grow dollars by selling “carbon offsets.”

H.R. 2454 establishes a carbon offsets market that would allow farmers to create and sell carbon offsets to polluting entities in lieu of reductions by polluters. This would reduce the cost of emissions reductions for polluters. Farmers would be paid for their longstanding carbon sequestration and land stewardship efforts. By increasing carbon sequestration and reducing emissions from greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide on the farm, farmers can qualify for carbon offsets that would generate increased farm revenue. The Energy Information Administration has estimated the value of agricultural offsets to be close to $24 billion annually.

U.S. agriculture produces 413 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, while generating two-thirds of all nitrous oxide emissions and significant methane emissions. These two gases are more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. Overall, the agricultural sector is responsible for 6 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. U.S. agriculture must take the lead in reducing these on-farm greenhouse gas emissions. There are many opportunities for farmers to make reductions and reap profits.

The offsets program can be improved by involving the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Environmental Protection Agency’s process to develop the offsets rules and market operation. USDA’s expertise and presence in nearly every state should assist in the development of measurement methodologies to enable ACESA’s Offsets Integrity Advisory Board to determine scientifically rigorous high-quality offsets.

3. Farmers can earn new income by leasing their land for wind turbines while continuing to farm.

The renewable electricity standard in H.R. 2454 requires utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2020 (see Title I, Sect. 101). Farmers can help utility companies meet this goal by installing wind turbines, solar panels, and other renewable energy technologies on their land and buildings. Leasing land for a single utility-scale wind turbine could provide a farmer with about $3,000 a year in income. The Department of Energy estimates that if 5 percent of the nation’s energy comes from wind power by 2020, rural America could see $60 billion in capital investment. Farmers and rural landowners would derive $1.2 billion in new income, and 80,000 new jobs would be created over the next two decades.

4. Farms will produce the cleaner fuels of the future.

The current renewable fuels standard establishes ambitious targets and strives to produce advanced biofuels that deliver measurable lifecycle greenhouse gas reductions, minimize the use of food-based feed stocks, and adhere to certifiable environmental and land use safeguards. H.R. 2454 works with the RFS to promote advanced biofuels grown and produced in rural America.

The RFS has a production target of 21 billion gallons of advanced biofuels by 2022. It provides appropriate flexibility to allow producers to meet the RFS mandate with significant contributions from third generation biofuels without dictating a specific type of biofuel product or technology. The approximately 15 billion gallons of existing and future conventional ethanol production capacity would be exempt from greenhouse gas reduction targets.

5. A safety net to protect rural families from higher energy prices.

H.R. 2454 provides for a monthly cash energy refund for rural consumers experiencing a loss in purchasing power due to energy costs. (Title IV, Section 432).

6. Energy efficiency measures would reduce farmers’ electricity bills.

The energy efficiency standard in H.R. 2454 provides farmers with the opportunity to make significant energy efficiency upgrades. Farmers are eligible for federal tax credits for energy-efficient appliances to help them reduce energy use. Dairy farms, which use more energy than most farms due to the energy-intensive nature of milk production, could in particular benefit from the savings from using energy more efficiently. Installation of energy-efficient lighting, ventilation fans, and milking systems could save a farmer hundreds of dollars a year.

Energy expenditures represent 6 percent of total national farm production costs, costing farmers over $10 billion per year. Recent increases in oil prices and volatility will make energy costs even more of a burden for farmers.

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy estimates that the potential for energy and cost savings in agriculture is over 98 trillion British Thermal Units and $1 billion annually. The potential efficiency savings for agricultural producers is 5.8 percent compared to the 2002 consumption total of 1.7 quadrillion BTUs.

7. Scientific review would help identify future threats.

The evidence of harms from global warming are mounting at an alarming rate. To ensure that farmers and agriculture can identify and respond to climate changes, the bill establishes an interagency National Climate Change Adaptation Council that would assess the impacts of climate change on agriculture and other sectors. A fund is also established to provide money for state and local adaptation projects, including on farms. (See Title IV, Sect. 462).

8. The American Clean Energy and Security Act protects farmers from stormy forecasts.

Inaction on global warming represents ongoing adherence to today's status quo of volatile energy prices, extreme weather events, and increasing dependence on disaster assistance. Agriculture is particularly vulnerable to the increased water shortages, widespread drought and floods, and lower crop yields that would result from global warming. H.R. 2454 makes the reductions in greenhouse gas pollution scientists urge to prevent the worst impacts of global warming.

To read more of Caldwell's analysis and reports, please go to the Energy and Environment page of the Center for American Progress website.

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Michael Kanellos said the following in his Greentech Innovations Report last week:

Down in the comment field, the CEO of Imperium lambasted him for telling the truth and then gave us his version of reality:

According to Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and his crack international team of researchers, Imperium's version of biodiesel is actually about 70% worse for global warming than regular diesel and that is not counting land displacement impacts! Ah screw the science. Global warming isn't real anyway, right? It's energy independence we are after:

I have two problems with the above statement. First, according to this link, Imperium was one of several biodiesel companies slapped with a tariff for exporting their product to Europe where they could undercut other producers thanks to a loophole that allowed them to take the dollar per gallon blending subsidy even if the fuel is not used domestically. The energy independence argument bandied about by biofuel publicists takes a distant second fiddle to profit. And second, last time I checked, they were not even using American grown crops to produce it. The canola oil came from Canada, got refined into biodiesel, and was shipped off to Europe. God bless America, energy independence here we come.

Oh, and that is not a picture of the Imperium refinery. It's a picture of Gas Works Park in Seattle, just a few blocks from my house. These are the rusting remains of yet another energy technology that pressurized coal and piped the resultant gases throughout the city for heating and lighting, which is the very same technology being proposed by the "Clean Coal" advocates--nothing new under the sun. The pipe from that processing plant still protrudes from my basement wall. (photo credit Sea Turtle via the Flickr Creative Commons license).

Cross posted from http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com/2009/06/dead-as-latin.html

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What GHG footprint? Peterson, right, with tractor rep. House Ag committee chair Collin Peterson (D.-Minn.) has already made it clear that he's furious that the EPA has proposed a framework for assessing the greenhouse gas footprint of ethanol. Now he's vowing to use his clout to crush the historic Waxman-Markey climate change bill, unless Congress passes a bill that would revoke the EPA's proposed rules. Here is the Saturday Agriculture Online:

Friday, the ag committee chairman, Representative Collin Peterson (D-MN), told Agriculture Online that he will work to defeat any climate change legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives until his "Renewable Fuel Standard Improvement Act," becomes law. And he has let the House leadership know how he feels.

"I've told them I want this passed. I want it signed by the President before I'll support anything else," he said Friday in a telephone interview from St. Cloud, Minnesota.

The man seems quite serious; he has entered vote-counting mode, and is planning to collaborate to shoot down Waxman-Markey with Republicans who oppose it on principle. According to Ag Online, Peterson ...

... thinks he may have enough votes to defeat Waxman's bill when the full House votes on it. Peterson's bill that reins in the EPA has the backing of his committee's top Republican, Representative Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, all 29 Democrats on the committee, and by Monday, probably most of the Republicans. As of Friday his bill had support from a few other House Democrats, with 42 co-sponsors joining Peterson and Lucas in opposing the EPA. House Republicans are expected to vote as a block against the climate bill, anyway. So Peterson said he'll need 37 Democrats to defeat the climate bill.

Forget that the $5 billion+/year federal ethanol program has often been marketed by its legislative champions as a climate-change remedy. Forget that the assumptions behind the EPA's proposed framework are extremely generous to the industry; and forget that the framework won't directly effect corn-based ethanol, which is grandfathered in by the 2007 Energy Act.

As I wrote last week, Peterson appears to be frightened that if the EPA goes on record admitting that corn-based ethanol is an ecological bust, the industry could be penalized by the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade scheme. He also no doubt wonders how long ethanol's champions can maintain $5 billion-plus per year in federal support, if the main environmental agency considers it a net greenhouse gas emitter. As a result, he's essentially mounting a jihad against the EPA's ability to assess and regulate the corn-based fuel.

People who champion corn-based ethanol as a "bridge" to a cellulosic future can take little comfort from the Congressman from Minnesota. Just last year, Peterson wondered aloud whether cellulosic “would ever get off the ground,” and declared it at least 10 years away from viability.

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