Die aaklige newe-effekte van biobrandstof

[Rooi Jan]

Ek wil nie op die biobrandstof mense se parade kom reen nie, maar dit is 'n groter ekologiese ramp as wat dit help. Op klein skaal vir eie gebruik is dit goed, maar as die wereld groot gaan daarmee vererger dit net die situasie:

The Clean Energy Scam
Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. "You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html
Gaan lees gerus die res van die (baie lang) artikel. Hier is 'n prentjie om te wys wat van die Amazone oorbly as die mense begin boer om petrol te maak. Skrikwekkend...
http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2008/0803/wbiofuels_0407.jpg
A tiny sliver of transitional rain forest is surrounded by hectares of soybean fields in the Mato Grosso state, Brazil.

[Rooi Jan]

En dis nie al probleem nie:

Another Problem with Biofuels?
Wednesday, Mar. 12, 2008 By BRYAN WALSH

It's called the dead zone. Agricultural fertilizer byproducts like nitrogen are running off farms and into the Mississippi River, which then spills out into the Gulf of Mexico. Those chemicals help feed crops on land, but as they build up in the still, warm waters of the Gulf, they in turn feed excess growth of algae. When algae dies and decomposes, the process sucks much of the oxygen out of the water. A sea without oxygen is little different from the surface of the moon — nothing can live there. Fish and other sea life flee, or suffocate. That's the Gulf's dead zone, and last year it reached 7,915 sq. mi (20,500 sq. km) — nearly the size of the New Jersey. Worse, the dead zone is getting bigger, with last year's bloom the third largest in history.

It could be much worse. That's one of the implications of a new study published Wednesday in Nature that tracks the ability of streams and rivers to absorb nitrogen runoff before it pollutes the seas. A team of 31 scientists led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee studied 72 streams in eight regions across the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and found that only about a quarter of the nitrogen that spills into rivers makes it to open water, with most of the rest managed by bacteria that live in the waterways. In a process called denitrification, the microbes convert nitrates in the water into nitrogen gas, which is released into the atmosphere. It's an excellent example of a biological service: one of the many free processes performed for us by our environment, without which life as we know it might not be possible. (Think how expensive it would be if we had to pay to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of nitrogen from our waterways every year.) "These streams are the first line of defense," says Patrick Mulholland, an aquatic ecologist at Oak Ridge and the lead author of the study.

That line of defense, however, is weakening. Mulholland and his collaborators found that the filtering ability of streams couldn't keep pace with the flow of nitrogen pollution. So, as runoff from fertilizer increased, the natural denitrification system slowed, and more nitrogen survived untouched to the open ocean — worsening the dead zones. That's cause for concern as American farmers plant increasing amounts of corn, a crop that requires heavy fertilizer, to meet the growing global demand for grain and to supply America's corn-hungry ethanol makers. According to a separate study published by University of British Columbia and University of Wisconsin researchers this week in the Proceedings of the National Journal of Sciences, ethanol is directly linked to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. If farmers produced enough corn to meet the congressional goal of producing 15 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, nitrogen runoff into the Gulf would increase by 10% to 19%, the study's authors reported, and shrinking the dead zone would be "practically impossible."

Mulholland backs that conclusion. Our inland waterways can barely handle the nitrogen fertilizer we're already using in order to grow record yields of corn and other crops. Truly ramping up biofuel production — unless it can be done in a way that uses much less fertilizer, perhaps with experimental techniques that harness plant waste matter instead of food crops — might overwhelm that system. "We have to be very careful about biofuels in terms of what kind of crops we grow and where we grow them," says Mulholland. "The great expansion of corn could be a real problem." It would be a poor tradeoff if we killed the seas to fuel our cars.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1721693,00.html

[Hektor]

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.... Nou ja, maar miskien weet die ou wat dit geskryf het nie dat 'n soy bean plantasie ook uit plante bestaan en "enormous amounts of carbon" stoor. Die mestizos in Brasilie het in elk geval al klaar groot hoeveelhede oerwoud afgebrand En daardie woestyn kan maar gerus vir biofuels gebruik word.


Laat my raai wie nou teen die hele ding skop. Is dit nie dalk die oliemaatskapye wat bang is vir kompetisie?

[Rooi Jan]

Hektor, soos ek die ding verstaan produseer 'n reenwoud baie meer suurstof as 'n landery vol mielies of sojabone. 'n Woud is daar 24*7*365.25 en nie net 'n deel van die jaar nie.

Saam met die reenwoud verdwyn daar ook spesies van plante en diere.

Die punt is dat biobrandstof nie die maklike oplossing is waarna dit aanvanklik gelyk het nie.

[JEFourie]

Rooi Jan, jy het 'n punt beet. Die oerwoud se volume is ook groter as die oppervlakte van 'n landery. Oerwoud bome en plante groei baie hoër as soja of mielies, het meer blare dan per vierkante meter wat meer gaswisseling tot gevolg gaan hê.

Ek wil net 'n vraag vra, jammer ek het nie juis hierdie bio-brandstof storie gevolg tot dusver. In een van die artikels word genoem dat Brasilië slegs bio-brandstof het. Ek neem dus aan dat motorvoertuie wat tans op ongeloodte petrol ry, ook met bio-brandstof kan ry? Of is daar 'n aanpassing op die motor wat eers gedoen moet word?