Sounds like a wake up call.

This study sounds like soundbite FUD to bolster the last spasms of fossil-fuel use. Obviously, the devil is in the details. There are sustainable and carbon-neutral ways to make biofuels, and there are heinous ways to make them.

So what else is new? We need to do it right if we want the benefits. Duh.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6949861.stm gives more information.

The authors say that 2nd generation biofuels may be much more promising. These are based on lignocellulosic material, so you could have forests producing biofuel.

As with many new "green" technologies, they're not green at the moment, but Government (or EU) backing is useful to spur the science to make them green.

Californian wind turbines of the 70s weren't green, but they helped develop the technology. Likewise Germany's current subsidies for solar power are questionable in the short term, but long term help push the technology.

As Marcus said:

"This study sounds like soundbite FUD to bolster the last spasms of fossil-fuel use. Obviously, the devil is in the details. There are sustainable and carbon-neutral ways to make biofuels, and there are heinous ways to make them.

So what else is new? We need to do it right if we want the benefits. Duh."

Exactly. The most interesting thing here is that it made it into 'Science'.

No one ever suggests that one method of production be used to make biofuel. First generation ethanol will obviously be more "expensive" than second and third. What this report apparently believes is that a marginal increase in CO2 for a short period of time is worse than the millions of tons of toxic pollutants eliminated by transition from oil.

Much ado...

The rainforest burning is a one-off or surge that irons out over a longer time horizon. The authors use 30 years; why not 100 years? Some might not agree that hydrogen is an alternative. While the biofuel industry may not have grown as quickly without the target, as oil depletes even higher demand may arise naturally. Instead of the hydrogen pie-in-the-sky the authors should address the sunk cost of millions of cars and trucks and some other way that could replace EU farm subsidies.

What Butterball Turkey, Tyson chicken and all the other huge food processing companies can do to make biodiesel out of animal food waste is actually a viable approach.

The focus needs to be in making fuel out of things that would otherwise be thrown away.

None of this works at all if we don't significantly reduce consumption, getting every fortune 500 to sponsor a "one day work from home" via internet could pull huge numbers off the roadways.

Most significantly we need to take a leadership role in reducing energy usage; let's put a conservationist in the White House?

This is going to get quoted 10 times as much as the rebuttals for years. Same as the one study saying corn ethanol used 20% more energy than it produced. Never mind that there were plenty of reasonable qualms with the assumptions.

For instance...even worst case scenario, someone burns down a rainforrest to grow jatropha, palm oil or sugar cane; what's the time horizon? Wouldn't a decade or two of crops eventually make up for the initial massive Carbon release?

What about best-case scenario? Look at GreenFuel Technoogies using algae bioreactors to capture 80% of the CO2 in smokestack emissions. Look at the dairy someone else is building in Arizona that will capture the methane from the animal waste, then ferment the waste into ethanol, then feed the remaining waste to algae ponds for more biodiesel. Oh, by the way, they also produce milk, which they were going to do anyway.

Aspens, switchgrass, and miscanthus sequester carbon in their root structures, so they are actually carbon negative. A lot of them will be cultivated on marginal lands that would not release 9x as much carbon as the fuel produced.

All that having been said, what kinds of policy and market-based steps can be taken to minimize loss of rainforest in the pursuit of biofuels?

Yet another irrelevant study.

Biofuels do not grow in rainforests.

To be precise: sugarcane in Brazil grows 1000 miles South of the Amazon.

It's stunning to see such a credible journal as Science allowing such a weak study.

Sorghum: grows in the Sahel.
Jatropha: grows in the desert.
Pongamia: grows in the semi-arid tropics.
Sand Willow: grows in the desert in Mongolia.
Cassava: hates rainforests.
Groundnuts: grow in the Sahel.
Coconuts: grow on non-forest coast-lines.
Sweet potato: hates rainforests.
Corn: grows in Canada.
Rapeseed: grows in Canada.
Miscanthus: grows in non-forest tropics.
Arundo Donax: grows in grasslands (*is* grassland)

The list is endless. Not a word about these crops in the 'study'.

Conservationists are rapidly making themselves irrelevant in the biofuels debate.

Why do we need to destroy forests to make biofuels? Can't we make biofuels for what available (agriculture waste, sewage, garbage, flue gas, etc) and grow forests at the same time?

@ Gio -

correct, but some nations do cut down virgin rainforest to make room for agricultural production - or have done so in the recent past. Indonesia is an example. Most, if not all, of the stored carbon is rapidly released into the atmosphere by fire.

To illustrate the argument, think of a forest as a carbon recycling machine. Plants die, decompose releasing CO2. The land they occupied is taken over by other plants that grow using the nutrients released, CO2 from the atmosphere, rain water and sunlight. When a forest is in dynamic equilibrium, i.e. its biomass is roughly constant, the vast majority of the carbon in its cycle is sequestered in the form of living vegetable matter. Left to their own devices, trees live for a very long time.

Of course, forest fires can and do occur naturally. The carbon that is suddenly released is re-sequestrated as the affected area recovers its tree cover, but that takes decades. However, if you start growing crops for food, animal feed or non-food agriculturals like biofuels on the cleared land, the affected area never gets a chance to recover its tree cover. Because crops are harvested one or more times a year, their carbon cycle is much shorter. That means each carbon atom spends a much smaller fraction of the cycle duration sequestered in living vegetable matter.

The net result is a net release of carbon into the atmosphere due to cycle acceleration. The research referenced above is a warning to policymakers: biofuels do not reduce CO2 emissions if forests have to be burnt down to clear the land. The warning does not apply to land that is already tropical savannah. It obviously also does not apply to the open ocean in tropical latitudes, it's just that no-one has figured out how to harvest the incident sunlight there just yet.

Another issue related to ramping up biofuel production to very large scaels is the impact this will have on surface albedo. Atmospheric GHG concentrations are not the only parameters affecting climate change.

Gio : Excellent piece of info.

After using 5 billion gallons of Ethanol, the gas prices are hovering around 2.70 and it hit a high of 3.23 ( all time record, even factoring the inflation ).

If that much Ethanol is not used, then the gas prices could go even higher.

BTW, Brazilians have already started the production of Cellulosic Ethanol from Waste.

In the future, all the waste (Agro, Food, Animals, etc) could be converted to some
type of Bio-fuel whether its Bio-gas.

Some oil company could have sponsored this type of study.

Since sun light is the basic source of most energies, it is difficult to justify so many multi-stage (mostly inefficient) processes to convert sun light into vehicle physical movement and other uses.

Sun light being so overly abondant (and long lasting) we could afford to use lower efficiency, lower cost, direct converters to transform it into plain electricity to feed our fully electrified transportation vehicles, homes, HVAC, lights, commerce, industries etc.

By doing so we could get rid of a lot of CO2 creating ICE machines, coal power generating plants, GHG, noise, Oil and Gaz imports, oil wars etc while liberating plenty of arab lands for the production of essential food for future generations.

Biofuels uses would be restricted to special applications such as airplanes, and could be produced in very limited quantities from existing unwanted wastes.

The final solution is all azimuth electrification using electricity form the Sun, Wind, Waves, Hydro, Geothermal and up-to-date Nuclear plants.

Let's not waste time and energy trying to prolong the life of old inefficient, polluting technologies such as ICE vehicles and creating more crop fed biofuels.

Rafael, I completely agree with you in this topic.
In Argentina we are seeing a speculative and crazy race for land that implies deforestation due to expectatives of higher prices of crops for biofuels.Bush in a recent visit to Brazil fed that expectatives.
Now our congress is treating a law that protects native forests, but it is in some sleeping-state.I expect our senators are not waiting their "fees".
Here, there are a lot of factories making biodiesel from soy with a low energy return rate (for every Kcal of biodiesel obtained you have to spend 0.7 Kcal), with canola (colza) rates are a little better but far from being sustainable.

Biofuels - emblematic of an insane society.

The only kind of biofuel that is ecologically sustainable is from biowaste that is destined to be thrown away. Otherwise, fuel crops will raise the price of food and will make this politically unpalatable.

A more sustainable alternative is to synthesize H2, CH4, or NH3 from solar energy directly without going thru the inefficient photosynthetic pathway via chlorophyll. There are still enough oil, gas and coal reserves left to allow us a gradual transition to totally synthetic fuels from renewable energy, IF we are committed to make the transition STARTING TODAY!

Or, use solar or wind electricity directly to recharge BEV or PHEV. But, unless you can recharge your BEV during the day while at work, you will still need backup chemical fuel source for electrical generation at night, except when the wind is blowing hard some nights, but there times when the wind is not blowing at all.

When I first read this report my reaction was much the same as most of you, outrage. However I've just read the same report in my local newspaper, big difference. My local newspaper leans a bit to the left and it included a little extra wordage; quotes from the authors and such. The changes to the text were small but the changes to the spin were huge.

Maybe instead of questioning the motivation of the authors we should question the motivation of the editors from Science?

I'm writing to Science to tell them they have lowered their standards beyond belief. This is a piece of propaganda for a conservationist. The "study" is totally flawed. The vast bulk of biofuels have no impact on forests.

Making it look as if there's only a choice between deforestation or conservation is intellectual bigotry.

I'm done with these conservationists.

I think many of you miss the point here. If the reason for using biofuels in the first place is to lower CO2 emissions, you are better off planting forest in those fields than crops. Simple as that - tearing down forests is not the prime issue here.

So its also obvious that if your main concern is peak oil or energy independance (which I assume is the case for most of you), you aren't going to be very happy with such a policy suggestion. Also, economically, a farmer isn't going to get much of an income from converting his fields to forest - unless carbon offset credits can be given (and perhaps this should be seriously considered). However that is besides the point since these considerations are not addressed in this report and the authors do not pretend to do so.

Marcus, you are wrong.

Mid- to high-latitude forests (i.e. all forests outside the humid tropics) are net carbon contributers.

But the conservationist doesn't mention this. That's why the entire 'study' is fake.

Here:

Study from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

Temperate forests may worsen global warming, tropical forests fight higher temperatures

A later study confirms this:
"Is deforestation the solution to climate change?"

Just published last week:
Decade-long experiment suggests limitations to carbon dioxide 'tree banking'

Plant a tree and save the planet? Let's think again.

The study is a fraudulent piece of propaganda by a conservationist who refuses to use science to back up his statements.

All biofuels, except for palm oil (the only deforestation crop), are *better* than planting trees when it comes to lowering carbon emissions. Converting grasslands into sugarcane is better; planting sorghum in the Sahel is better than planting acacia; growing corn in the U.S. is better than planting pines.

By the way, Marcus, I do agree with your other points: liquid biofuels were not invented to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Brazil's large biofuel program started in the 1970s, long before anyone had heard of climate change.

They were invented because:
-they are cheaper than oil
-they are renewable and their production can be carefully planned (not 'explored', no need for 'wildcats')
-because they bring jobs to millions
-because they bring energy security and cut reliance on imports

The fact that they substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions is just a lucky addition.

I recently read this- http://www.straight.com/article-104791/the-sin-of-air-travel -in one of our local rags.
It says a lot about 'reforestation.'
A must read IMHO.

I agree Gio that there seems to be some doubt about the net effect on temperature of temperate forests. However I still think several people missed the point with their responses to this article! BTW you seem to use the word conservationist as if it is derogitory in some way. What does conservationist mean to you? To me it simply means someone who would like to conserve biodiversity and wilderness. It doesn't necessarily mean someone who goes to any length to achieve this.

I guess what I am trying to say is that labelling the authors "conservationists" seems to me to be way of trying to tribalize people into waring factions over this issue. I don't think that approach is very accurate or constructive since surely there are those such as myself who hope biofuels will slow global warming and at the same time appreciate wilderness and biodiversity. It also seems to be a case of hijacking a rather moderate and general term to try and marginalize all those interested in wilderness and biodiveristy. Is that your aim?