“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.”

“We’re all looking at the numbers in an entirely new way,” says the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Nathanael Greene, whose optimistic “Growing Energy” report in 2004 helped galvanize support for biofuels among green groups.

Yep, Time Magazine has jumped on the anti-ethanol bandwagon. In “Clean Energy Scam,” Times reporter Michael Grunwald inveighs against ethanolism on both ecological and humanitarian grounds. 

“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,” Time observes. “But,” the article continues:

… 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.

As visitors to this site know, the burning and clearing of rainforest to make room for bio-fuel plantations, the massive fossil energy inputs required to plant, harvest, process, and deliver bio-fuels, and the nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizers used to grow corn, make bio-fuels a bigger net contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum-based gasoline.

Time also denounces the “Clean Energy Scam” for denying food to hungry people:

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.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, vast tracts of rainforest are being clear to grow palm oil. In Brazil, rainforest is being cleared also, but through a subtler chain of causes:

In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it’s subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It’s the remorseless economics of commodities markets. “The price of soybeans goes up,” laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, “and the forest comes down.”

Why did anyone think that biofuel mandates and subsidies would reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Unlike gasoline, energy crops, like corn, not only emit CO2 when combusted but also suck CO2 out of the air when grown. However, Time explains, “There was just one flaw in the calculation”:

the studies all credited fuel crops for sequestering carbon, but no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation of Indonesia has shown that’s not the case. It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels. A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to “pay back” the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil; clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years.