Rethinking biofuels in Europe

Biofuels have been touted as the best hope for reducing reliance on fossil fuels and limiting greenhouse gases. Now many scientists are raising doubts about that. Reporter Kathleen Schalch examines the debate in Europe over the costs and benefits of biofuels.
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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in, Boston. Scientists say to fight global warming; the world has to wean itself off oil and other fossil fuels. But what kind of energy should we move toward? A few years ago, there was a lot of excitement about bio-fuels. Those fuels come from plants, such as ethanol from corn. The US Congress set targets to triple domestic bio-fuels production; the European Union mandated an even steeper increase.  But many in Europe now question the wisdom of this policy. Kathleen Schalch has the second in a series of stories on energy in Europe, she reports from Brussels.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: European cars may be small and fuel-efficient compared to American cars, but they still burn a lot of fossil fuel.  Just two percent of the energy that powers them comes from renewable resources, like bio-fuels.  But by the year 2020, that’s slated to rise five fold.  The increase isn’t just a goal, it’s the law.

FERRAN TARRADELLAS: And if a member state by 2020 don’t have this 10 percent target, they are going to break the law, and we are going to open an infringement case against them.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: That’s Ferran Tarradellas, Energy Spokesman for the European Commission. There are a number of reasons behind Europe’s sharp turn toward bio-fuels.  As in the US, one goal was to help domestic farmers.  Another was greater energy security for the EU, which now imports nearly 90 percent of its oil. But the main reason for the bio-fuels target is its potential to slow climate change.

FERRAN TARRADELLAS: Bio-fuels, by definition, have no emissions, because the plants where bio-fuels come from absorb the CO2 that they produce when they are combusted.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: Of course, in real life, it’s hardly such a neat closed loop, because it takes energy to produce the bio-fuels themselves. And not all bio-fuels are created equal.

FERRAN TARRADELLAS: For instance, bio-ethanol from Brazil saves 80 percent CO2 emissions compared with oil.  Other crops produced in Europe, their levels of savings arrive only to 35 percent.  And there are other crops that don’t even arrive to this 35 percent.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: And Tarradellas says, under Europe’s mandate, bio-fuels must create at least 35 percent less CO2 overall than petroleum.

FERRAN TARRADELLAS: So, we don’t want any bio-fuel.  We only want sustainable bio-fuels or good bio-fuels.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: But good is in the eye of the beholder.

ARIEL BRUNNER: I think the case is building, and it’s really a question of getting people to realize that there’s been a huge hoax being played of them.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: That’s Ariel Brunner, with the conservation group Birdlife International.   He says the EC’s rationale for bio-fuels rests on a huge accounting error.   It doesn’t factor in the land it will take to grow all those new bio-fuels crops.  Brunner predicts Europe’s new bio-fuels mandate will prompt farmers in places like Indonesia and Brazil to chop down more forests, drain more wetlands and plow up more grasslands, releasing the huge amounts of carbon stored in these natural ecosystems.

ARIEL BRUNNER: The worst you can do is destroy a peat land forest in the tropics, because there you lose the carbon in the trees, but also the carbon in the peat soil, which is massive.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: Princeton University Environmental Policy Researcher, Tim Searchinger, has calculated how long you would have to burn various bio-fuels to offset their land use impact.

TIM SEARCHINGER: For corn ethanol, our calculation was a payback period of 167 years.  For soybean bio-diesel, we came up with roughly the same numbers.  For bio-diesel made directly from palm oil in Southeast Asia, we’re almost certainly talking several hundred of years.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: Searchinger says, in many cases, we’d be better off just continuing to burn gasoline. The European mandate does acknowledge the land use problem.  It disqualifies bio-fuels produced by directly destroying valuable ecosystems.   But environmentalists like Ariel Brunner say that still leaves a gaping loophole, that’s because the rules don’t account for the indirect impact of bio-fuels on land use, as fuel crops displace food crops.

TIM SEARCHINGER: So you will not be able to cut down rainforests to produce bio-fuels and sell those bio-fuels on the EU market.  But you will be able to sell to the EU market the stuff coming from your old plantation, and then chop forest for a new plantation that will be supplying the market you were supplying before.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: The bottom line, critics say, is that new bio-fuels mandates add to the overall demand for cropland.  And they say bio-fuels targets in the US and Europe are setting off a global chain reaction that could lead to a huge increase in the rate of deforestation.  That argument has put bio-fuels advocates on the defensive.

AMANDINE LACORD: Of course you don’t want the forests to be cleared just like that.  I mean, no one wants that.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: But Amandine Lacord, of the European Bio-diesel Board, bristles and the notion that bio-fuels are to blame.  She says there’s simply no way to know whether farmers are clearing land they wouldn’t be clearing anyway.

AMANDINE LACORD: So in our view, if you were to include today a penalty for instance, of indirect land use change effects on bio-fuels, that would be unfair because how are you going to calculate that precisely enough?

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: A similar argument has been raging in the US.  Regulators in both California and the EPA decided that indirect land use impacts are a valid part of the bio-fuels equation.  But alarmed lawmakers from ethanol producing states fought back, and added a provision to the climate bill just passed by the House of Representatives.  It would bar the EPA from factoring in indirect land use for five years, and require more study.  An EU study is underway as well, but meanwhile, says Nusa Urbancic, a Policy Officer at a group called Transportation and Environment, Europe’s new bio-fuels targets have already created a lot of momentum.

NUSA URBANCIC: Because as soon as you start an industry, well, it’s always difficult, it’s always somebody’s profit that you jeopardize.  Because, I mean, the argument of bio-fuels industry, yeah, but we have already invested so much, you have to give us the target.

KATHLEEN SCHALCH: Ultimately, just about everyone agrees that there’s a brighter future in new generations of bio-fuels, made from such things as plant and animal waste.  These wouldn’t compete for land, and would potentially have a far smaller carbon footprint than today’s bio-fuels, but they’re likely years away.  For the World, this is Kathleen Schalch, Brussels.

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