Posted on May 17, 2010, Printed on May 25, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/146879/

After considering laughably titled solutions like the top hat (a containment dome), the junk shot (a pressurized blast of golf balls and shredded tires) and worse, British Petroleum has proven one thing above all else: When the fossil fool hits the fan, it simply has no plan.

The fact that BP was allowed to drill along the shores of the United States in spite of its unwillingness to plan and prepare for accidents is only stunning to those haven’t been paying attention to the feverish pace of deregulation since the rapacious Reagan conservatives took global culture by blitzkrieg. It certainly isn’t surprising to anyone who has been paying even slight attention to BP, which boasts a decorated resume of spills and screw-ups.

According to recent revelations, a blowout preventer that could have halted the Deepwater Horizon clustergush failed a crucial pressure test hours before the April 20 explosion, and was never tested by the government engineer who approved BP’s drilling operation. Those kinds of safety lapses are standard operating procedure, an oil industry whistleblower told the Huffington Post, saying he routinely witnessed 100 such shortcuts on BP rigs and others throughout 18 years of service in the sector. The fallback plan, a relief well, won’t be finished until after the summer, by which there will be little reason left to live in New Orleans. Great. 

But if you’ve been railing for decades against the fossil fuel sector for everything from deliberately removing safeguards that could have prevented what will likely end up being the worst U.S. oil disaster in history to its lethal emissions that could, in the extreme, end up warming planet Earth to the point that human habitation is an impossibility, well, this is all old, sad news. 

Cold Oil Turkey 

“While this is a horrible disaster, it occurs to me that Americans cannot accept the fact that getting oil out of the earth is dirty, difficult, hazardous work, with great risks for society,” said James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere. “We don’t want to know about it, as long as we can drive comfortably to the strip mall, enjoy NPR and an iced beverage. When something happens to prick our bubble of unreality, we’re indignant.” 

The counter-argument to Kunstler’s hard-eged realism — which is thankfully gaining steam every day the Deepwater Horizon disaster gushes hundreds of thousands, if not a million, gallons of crude into the Gulf — is that further regulation and safety enforcement could put at least a partial stop to the fossil foolishness. Which means legally proving that BP, Halliburton and Transocean deliberately obviated what safety requirements existed so that the United States can conduct criminal proceedings which could then levy heftier damages than $75 million cap on liability under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which itself was hastily enacted by Congress under President George H.W. Bush shortly after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

It also means exacting deeper regulation on the nation’s compromised Minerals Management Service, which the Department of the Interior is considering splitting into two separate agencies. From taking drugs and having sex with energy company reps to being exempted from delivering detailed environmental analyses, the MMS is a controversy-soaked frat house. And its parent agency at Interior is the same hot mess. It’s obvious that, when it comes to America’s oil regime, the lunatics are drilling the asylum into the bedrock. So it’s probably no surprise that neither agency returned several calls for comment. 

But add it up and it’s one hell of a cleanup for a country with an unceasing appetite for hyperconsumption but little stomach for hard work. Which is why the blame-game theory, while it makes for good theater and hopefully better punitive damages, is still a red herring distracting us from the environmental disaster’s prime suspect: All of us.

“BP, Haliburton and Transocean will all be financially punished for this, and they, along with other oil companies, will say, ‘Screw you, America, we’re moving our operations to Angola,’” added Kunstler. “All of this shucking and jiving over blame is a Chinese fire drill concealing the fact that we are all complicit in this disaster, and refuse to even consider changing our underlying behavior.” 

But this is what most junkies do, when the drugs start to wear off and run out: Keep tapping that vein. A new Associated Press/GfK poll on the spill released in mid-May supports that madness. While 42 percent of respondents felt that the Obama administration is properly prosecuting the spill, even more, 50 percent to be exact, are cool with further coastal drilling for oil and gas. In spite of all that has happened, they’d rather drill for what’s left of our domestic oil supply than prepare, plan and proselytize for our inevitable post-oil future. Itinerant laziness is the true culprit in this spill. BP, MMS and other alphabet nightmares are monsters of our own consumptive creation. 

“In the most general terms, I think the answer to drilling problems is better regulation and taxes to fund cleanup efforts,” explained Mother Jones and Washington Monthly journalist Kevin Drum, who like Kunstler is a peak oil theorist. “Because the plain fact is that drilling is going to happen one way or another, as long as we’re addicted to oil. And the answer to that is unrelated to drilling at all.” 

When it comes to killing addiction, the first stage is always acknowledging one. Optimistic estimations of peak oil theory explain that global supply will start dwindling in 2020, a clear-sighted metaphor if there ever was one. Even without factoring in the always reliable underestimation that leads to disasters like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, that’s only a decade to get our heads and engines together. In other words, a light-speed snapshot of time compared to the insane workload. 

“The administration needs to take this opportunity to explain the multiple hidden costs to our addiction to fossil fuels,” argued Center for American Progress climate analyst Joseph Romm, the author of Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. “As we’re finding out with Goldman Sachs, you just can’t let the industry regulate itself. But ultimately we have to get off the addiction. If the administration doesn’t help us do that, it will be an incomprehensible missed opportunity.” 

“We need a serious carbon tax and serious climate legislation to reduce our reliance,” said Drum. “I care a lot more about that than I do about the specific issues related to oil rig safety.” 

Infinite Step Recovery 

The prospects for such serious campaigns against carbon are practically dead in the water, just like the collateral damage washing up in Louisiana and elsewhere in the Gulf. The current climate legislation drafted by senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman is a capitulation to the fossil fuel industry, offering concessions like increased offshore drilling and a doubtlessly unregulated cap-and-trade derivatives market in exchange for greenhouse gas limits. This mind-numbing arrogance and collusion between the energy sector and rich nations is precisely what led to the failure of last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen, according to ex-World Bank economist Sir Nicholas Stern, who crunched the numbers in 2006 and decided that doing nothing about global warming would end up costing the world around $5 trillion dollars and rising.

The prospects for this year’s retreat in Cancun similarly suck. The Obama administration’s special climate envoy Todd Stern admitted in May that the United States will probably have no climate bill in place by the time it gets to Mexico. Factor in robust public support for further coastal drilling in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and it becomes clear that the political will to change our energy game is weak.  

But the political capital to be reaped by anger over the spill is strong. On May 13, senators Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Dianne Feinstein, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell and Jeff Merkley introduced legislation to ban offshore oil drilling along the West Coast. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger withdrew support for a drilling operation off the coast of Santa Barbara. On the other side of the country, Florida representative Corrine Brown has proposed similar legislation, while governor Charlie Crist has suggested a possible constitutional amendment mandating the same. 

Yet the Obama administration is openly supporting not an outright ban on offshore drilling, but Kerry and Leiberman’s weak-kneed concessions. Their bill does include provisions that allow states to ban operations within 75 miles of their coastlines, as well as a sweetener that allows them to siphon off larger revenue from those operations. But they should already have that anyway. And the Deepwater Horizon clustergush occurred over 40 miles offshore; Kerry and Lieberman’s bill would have bought the Gulf coast a few extra days before it was soaked in oil. Plus, fisheries and other natural environments utterly necessary to the economic and civic health of the entire country aren’t strictly on the coastline; some are miles offshore, closer to the rigs than you or I. 

Take a look at what the Department of the Interior calls “President Obama’s comprehensive energy plan for the country,” and it’s clear that we’re in for much more, not less, offshore drilling. The color-coded graphics tell it all: Exploration and production plans to cruise northeastward up from the Western and Central Gulf of Mexico to its Eastern region and up into the South and mid-Atlantic. Same goes for the comparatively oily Alaskan region. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Shell Oil starts  drilling in Alaska’s cold Chuchki and Beaufort seas starting in July. 

“The Arctic region is, in nearly every respect, the exact opposite of the temperate conditions of the Gulf of Mexico,” said WWF president and CEO Carter Roberts. “Technology simply does not exist to clean up a spill in Arctic waters. And, unlike the Gulf with its robust response apparatus close at hand, the Coast Guard lacks the capacity to adequately respond to a spill in the Arctic.” 

While the West Coast is currently off-limits, the Interior reminds, especially given the new legislation from Boxer and company, it’s just a matter of diminishing supply until we start tapping that vein. If not for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we might already have. But with public support and White House support fully behind further offshore drilling, and the paranoid specters of foreign terrorism rearing their fear-inducing heads up in Times Square and Arizona, it’s probably going to be a long time before the United States does anything substantial about the Deepwater Horizon incident, much less greater oil exploration or even climate change.  

But one thing is most likely certain: We won’t be ready as a nation to mandate change until the peak oil gong rings in 2020, or earlier. And by then, it could be too late. 

“Big Oil has obviously funded major disinformation campaigns to mislead the public about the threat of global warming, and the worst-case scenarios for a spill,” Romm said. “But at some point, the painful reality of warming will be so clear that we will be desperate and start to do things differently. But what we need to do first and foremost is pass a climate and clean-energy bill. That is our top priority: Get off the unsafe dirty fuels of the 20th century and get on the safe fuels of the 21st century like wind and solar, which never run out.”

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

23 May, 2010
Culturechange.org

As the U.S. continues the incredibly wasteful misallocation of resources known as car production and everything that goes with it, the externalized costs in terms of global warming, oil spills, and human isolation as consumers, only mount.

Who is in charge of this mad policy of ecocide? We all are, but we did elect a president named Barack Obama. He was supposed to be the answer to the blatantly destructive and incompetent George W. Bush. But Lo and Behold, Obama’s allegiance proved to be the status quo. Got recession? More cars! Oil spill a la Chernobyl in the U.S. Gulf? Keep on producing cars and using oil!

So, having fooled ourselves again with an election, ignoring the warning by The Who in their landmark song Won’t Get Fooled Again (1970), we look to the driver of our vehicle to see that he is a nut case with his accelerator pedal pushed to the floor. Global peak in oil supply? Pedal to the metal! What’s that above him? A helicopter gunship mowing down people on the other side of the world, in the name of democracy and freedom.

Obama’s calm, intelligent face, our multiracial darling Obama, is on the whole a maniacal puppet. And he’s wearing a mask, whether he knows it or not. Who or what is underneath?

Some who look beyond elections say the problem is essentially one of corporatism: that Obama is just another representative of the corporate elite, as were the Bushes, McCain and the Clintons. True, but is U.S. culture salvageable by targeting corporate rule?

The lateness of the hour tells us the answer is No. Although the modern large corporation is the most virulent form of exploitation of people and the Earth, and needs to be abolished, U.S. culture has gone way too far in its alienation, oppression and general distortion of human values to be cured or transformed by even a major reform.

What, then, are the implications for a nation and people who don’t even have a hope today of getting out from under the car (that’s pinning them down on the bloody, oily pavement)? Ideally, even Tea Party activists realize that significant change or relief from economic and social pressures does not come from another election or series of elections.

What, then — revolution? Is that the real goal of anyone wishing for fundamental change? What would this revolution entail? Would it be political, cultural, or both?

A series of goals or wishes by enough people amounts to a social movement or a coup. It has happened before, and the threat of this feels real to those who find the U.S. to still be somewhat benign. To them, the possibility of a worse form of government and loss of our already diminished freedoms looms large enough that one’s priority becomes that of somehow maintaining the status quo, while hoping for positive developments such as clean energy, an end to oil wars, and a roll-back of the Patriot Act.

However, the time for political change to re-chart the course of a nation is past. Collapse and disintegration have been assured, due in large part to dependence on cheap oil. When the dust settles there will be a proliferation of local cultures. Meanwhile, the extreme state of a society hard wired to consume its way to eco-hell is unchangeable.

This is a blind culture that cannot see its own true roots. Who came to North America to conquer and set up a foreign culture, and what was the prime objective? Sky-god fearing, private-property obsessed, master-slave opportunists: the antithesis of the indigenous nature-revering, communal, more egalitarian, diverse cultures that had found the key to surviving and thriving for a thousand generations.

This does not imply there was nothing good in the newcomers or in their exploits (Jefferson, Tom Paine, or their successors in great thought such as Thoreau and Muir). Indeed, the courageous new Americans loved their small farms, the amazing scenery, and the soul of the land that spawned perhaps the greatest new forms of music the world has ever seen.

How can the goodness of U.S. Americans and the land they inhabit (and have changed irrevocably) be safeguarded and turned into a force for positive change at a time of runaway destruction at the hands of ecocidal, greedy corporations and their tools in political power?

There is no political answer, but there is a cultural-change answer.

By abandoning a way of living that denies our true needs for healthy nature and human closeness, taking steps to conserve the land, air and water, we cannot help but find ourselves cutting the umbilical cord to the terminally ill host. What would we be losing? For one thing, car dependency: we can’t afford it anyway, financially or ecologically. We would then be looking to our neighbors and family for solutions to daily living, losing the isolation of total reliance on shopping and technology.

Organizing household and neighborhood composting, gardening and home repairs are more first steps toward restoring real community and socioeconomic resilience.

Human potential is unlimited. Those who believe deep change is not possible in the foreseeable future, while it is our only choice if we are to turn back the worst of petrocollapse that has clearly been unleashed, will be shocked by the upheaval to come in their own lives and throughout the modern world.

Such a revolution, with eventual political outcomes of a more local-based and nature-respecting basis than the conventional top-down growth-maximizing sort, is within us now, waiting to spread and flower.

National Post

The “Peak Oil” concept — that the world’s petroleum-production rate will soon reach its maximum and commence an inevitable decline, with negative economic consequences — has been around in scientifically articulated form at least since 1998; long enough to see it confirmed in significant ways.

The rate of discovery of new oilfields has been falling since 1964. The biggest find in recent years is Tupi, in Brazilian waters, which is claimed to hold five-to-eight billion barrels of oil; but that’s only enough to slake the world’s thirst for 60 to 90 days. Most producing nations are past their domestic peaks and are experiencing slowing output, despite every effort to maintain flow rates.

Skeptics point out that total world oil reserves continue to grow. But this may not be a reliable indication of where we stand: Often, in nations that have seen a peak and subsequent decline in production, domestic reserves continued to rise right up to, or even past, the date of peak production. Why? Oil companies replace reserves of high-quality, cheaply-produced oil with reserves of low-quality, slow-, or expensive-to-produce oil or tar sands.

Rates of output decline in older, giant oilfields have proven to be more trustworthy indicators of long-term trends. (For instance, they’ve enabled successful peaking forecasts for the United States, the North Sea and other regions). For the world, the average decline rate from existing fields has been calculated by the International Energy Agency at 4.5% per year. The world needs to develop the equivalent of a Saudi Arabia’s worth of oil production capacity every four years to offset such declines. This is quite a burden for the industry, which must now look for oil in ultra-deep water, in polar regions, or in politically fractured nations, since all the easy-to-find, easy-to-extract oil already has been located and much of it pumped.

So far, the record year for world crude production was 2005, and the record month was July 2008. Tellingly, the leveling-off of extraction rates between 2005 and 2008 occurred in the context of rising oil prices; indeed, in July 2008, the price spiked 50% higher than the previous inflation-adjusted record, set in the 1970s. Yet as both oil demand and prices rose, production barely budged in response.

While many commentators believe the jury is still out on Peak Oil, the list of petroleum analysts who say world oil production has already peaked, or will do so in the next five years, lengthens almost daily, and includes CEOs and other well-placed leaders within the oil industry.

The argument that oil production could theoretically continue to grow past 2015 is mainly put forward by organizations such as Cambridge Energy Research Associates and Saudi Aramco, which explain away evidence of dwindling discoveries, depleting oilfields and stagnating total production by claiming that it is demand for oil that has peaked, not supply — a claim that hinges on the observation that oil prices are high enough to discourage potential buyers. But high prices for a commodity usually signify scarcity, so the “peak demand” argument doesn’t hold water.

Peak Oil has significant implications for our economy. In response to the 2008 price spike, the global airline industry nose-dived and auto companies suffered. Worldwide shipping slowed drastically and hasn’t recovered. Demand for oil plummeted in late 2008, and so did the price — temporarily. But today’s price is again high, almost to the point of nipping economic recovery.

What should we do about Peak Oil? Start with what the U.K. Industry Task Force on Peak Oil (which included Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines) has done: Acknowledge the reality of supply limits. Then study the vulnerabilities of transport and food systems to high and volatile oil prices, and start making those systems more resilient and less oil-dependent.

But do it fast. Adaptation will take decades, and we are starting very late.

Originally published March 19, 2010 on National Post

The challenge of feeding billions of people as fuel supplies fall is staggering. And yet leaders’ heads remain stuck in the sand

I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into free fall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Alan Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise, if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistle-blowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I’ve been bellyaching about the British government’s refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I’m beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.

The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to “approach a plateau” towards the end of this period, but there’s no hint of the graver warning that the IEA’s chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: “We still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau … I think time is not on our side here.” Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, “even today’s number is much higher than can be justified, and the International Energy Agency knows this”.

The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world’s new and undiscovered oilfields would have to be developed at a rate “never before seen in history”. As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that “the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now”.

Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the US were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn’t seem very likely.

Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift when the fields are depleted. So the assumption in the IEA’s new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen “to around one half by 2030″ looks unsafe. The UK Energy Research Centre’s review finds that, just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020″. Unconventional oil won’t save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only 5m barrels a day by 2030.

As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems that don’t need much labour or energy.

There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out.

The challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.

Republished from the Guardian Online.

I don’t know when global oil supplies will start to decline. I do know that another resource has already peaked and gone into freefall: the credibility of the body that’s meant to assess them. Last week two whistleblowers from the International Energy Agency alleged that it has deliberately upgraded its estimate of the world’s oil supplies in order not to frighten the markets. Three days later, a paper published by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden showed that the IEA’s forecasts must be wrong, because it assumes a rate of extraction that appears to be impossible. The agency’s assessment of the state of global oil supplies is beginning to look as reliable as Mr Greenspan’s blandishments about the health of the financial markets.

If the whistleblowers are right, we should be stockpiling ammunition. If we are taken by surprise; if we have failed to replace oil before the supply peaks then crashes, the global economy is stuffed. But nothing the whistleblowers said has scared me as much as the conversation I had last week with a Pembrokeshire farmer.

Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester onto nearby fields. He’s replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%.

According to farm scientists at Cornell University, cultivating one hectare of maize in the United States requires 40 litres of petrol and 75 litres of diesel. The amazing productivity of modern farm labour has been purchased at the cost of a dependency on oil. Unless farmers can change the way it’s grown, a permanent oil shock would price food out of the mouths of many of the world’s people. Any responsible government would be asking urgent questions about how long we have got.

Instead, most of them delegate this job to the International Energy Agency. I’ve been bellyaching about the British government’s refusal to make contingency plans for the possibility that oil might peak by 2020 for the past two years, and I’m beginning to feel like a madman with a sandwich board. Perhaps I am, but how lucky do you feel? The new World Energy Outlook published by the IEA last week expects the global demand for oil to rise from 85m barrels a day in 2008 to 105m in 2030. Oil production will rise to 103m barrels, it says, and biofuels will make up the shortfall. If we want the oil, it will materialise.

The agency does caution that conventional oil is likely to “approach a plateau” towards the end of this period, but there’s no hint of the graver warning that the IEA’s chief economist issued when I interviewed him last year: “we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau … I think time is not on our side here.” Almost every year the agency has been forced to downgrade its forecast for the daily supply of oil in 2030: from 123m barrels in 2004, to 120m in 2005, 116m in 2007, 106m in 2008 and 103m this year. But according to one of the whistleblowers, “even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.”

The Uppsala report, published in the journal Energy Policy, anticipates that maximum global production of all kinds of oil in 2030 will be 76m barrels per day. Analysing the IEA’s figures, it finds that to meet its forecasts for supply, the world’s new and undiscovered oil fields would have to be developed at a rate “never before seen in history.” As many of them are in politically or physically difficult places, and as capital is short, this looks impossible. Assessing existing fields, the likely rate of discovery and the use of new techniques for extraction, the researchers find that “the peak of world oil production is probably occurring now.”

Are they right? Who knows? Last month the UK Energy Research Centre published a massive review of all the available evidence on global oil supplies. It found that the date of peak oil will be determined not by the total size of the global resource but by the rate at which it can be exploited. New discoveries would have to be implausibly large to make a significant difference: even if a field the size of all the oil reserves ever struck in the USA were miraculously discovered, it would delay the date of peaking by only four years. As global discoveries peaked in the 1960s, a find like this doesn’t seem very likely.

Regional oil supplies have peaked when about one third of the total resource has been extracted: this is because the rate of production falls as the remaining oil becomes harder to shift. So the assumption in the IEA’s new report, that oil production will hold steady when the global resource has fallen “to around one-half by 2030″ looks unsafe. The UKERC review finds that just to keep oil supply at present levels, “more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 … At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging.” There is, it says “a significant risk of a peak in conventional oil production before 2020.” Unconventional oil won’t save us: even a crash programme to develop the Canadian tar sands could deliver only 5m barrels a day by 2030.

As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems, which don’t need much labour or energy. There are no obvious barriers to the mass production of electric tractors and combine harvesters: the weight of the batteries and an electric vehicle’s low-end torque are both advantages for tractors. A switch to forest gardening and other forms of permaculture is trickier, especially for producing grain; but such is the scale of the creeping emergency that we can’t afford to rule anything out.

The challenge of feeding 7 or 8 billion people while oil supplies are falling is stupefying. It’ll be even greater if governments keep pretending that it isn’t going to happen.

George Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared in the Guardian.

Autumn is a time of abundance – mushrooms, hazelnuts, red and orange carrots, potatoes, beets, parsnips, fennel bulbs, apples, squashes, pears, kale, leeks – and eating fresh, local, seasonal food is easy and appealing. Converting to a diet that is predominantly local may appear daunting, however. Who really wants to eliminate the avocados, citrus fruit and chocolate that come to us from sunny climates?

Yet when we explore the origins of our food, we may learn that our choices involve considerable use of fossil fuels through transportation and we may wish to use our dollars on food that is produced closer to home. The push to “eat local” has far less impact on the environment compared with eating lower on the food chain.

At the same time, some fans of eating within a certain radius have not done their homework regarding the production of specific foods. Others are simply marketing groups that fail to tell us the whole story behind the feeding of animals used for meat or milk production.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh did a comprehensive study of the carbon footprint of food. The study was published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal and won the annual award for “Best Paper on Environmental Policy.” Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews discovered that, by eliminating meat just one day per week per year, you would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the same amount as if you reduced your driving by 1,000 miles. Going vegan is the equivalent of driving 8,000 miles less per year.

A central fact that some advocates of eating locally do not grasp is that eating chicken, beef or other animals involves the use of grains and beans that were transported hundreds and thousands of miles (even when they are partly grass-fed). While the cow may have been raised, and even slaughtered, close to where you live, its fodder was transported great distances, using plenty of fossil fuels or other types of energy. And as we know, it takes many pounds of the protein from grains and beans to produce a pound of beef protein.

So if you think that eating local animals or farmed fish is a vote for the environment, think again. Your better choice is to eat locally baked whole grain bread and a steaming bowl of lentil or pea soup, comprised of several ingredients from the Prairies.

Tofu manufactured on Powell Street in Vancouver or in Sooke, BC, involves far fewer transported soybeans than the equivalent weight of meat from a locally raised cow. Furthermore, beyond the feed, cows from the range near Kamloops, BC, may be trucked to feedlots in Alberta to be fattened and killed, with the carcasses later trucked back to BC supermarkets. And can wild fish that swam hundreds of kilometres be considered local when caught within 100 miles? The story can be complex and uncovering the truth may require expert detective work.

Here are a few possibilities to bring you closer to the origins of your food:

• Explore farmers’ markets.
• Seek out community-supported agriculture (e.g. www.ladybugorganics.com).
• Take a weekend country drive to discover farm gate sales.
• Start a backyard or balcony garden; plant herbs on the windowsill.
• Grow garlic, kale, mustard greens, turnips, cabbage, spinach and Swiss chard outdoors well into winter. A hotbox or greenhouse allows plants to flourish in colder weather.
• Walk around your neighbourhood to find community gardens.
• Choose local produce at supermarkets and request that they buy locally.
• Buy seasonal foods in bulk and preserve or freeze.

Reference

www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2009/winter/wheres-the-beef.shtml

Vesanto Melina is a registered dietitian and author of a number of nutrition classics, including Becoming Vegetarian, Becoming Vegan, Raising Vegetarian Children and the Food Allergy Survival Guide. To book a personal consultation with Vesanto in Langley, call 604-882-6782. www.nutrispeak.com

Reposted from Common Ground.

“Converting set-asides to corn-ethanol production is an inefficient and expensive greenhouse gas mitigation policy that should not be encouraged until ethanol-production technologies improve,” the study’s authors reported in the March edition of the research journal Ecological Applications.

Nevertheless, farmers and producers are already receiving federal subsidies to grow more corn for ethanol under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

“One of our take-home messages is that conservation programs are currently a cheaper and more efficient greenhouse gas policy for taxpayers than corn-ethanol production,” said biologist Robert Jackson, the Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, who led the study.

Making ethanol from corn reduces atmospheric releases of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide because the CO2 emitted when the ethanol burns is “canceled out” by the carbon dioxide taken in by the next crop of growing plants, which use it in photosynthesis. That means equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere and “fixed” into plant tissues.

But the study notes that some CO2 not counterbalanced by plant carbon uptake gets released when corn is grown and processed for ethanol. Furthermore, ethanol contains only about 70 percent of gasoline’s energy.

“So we actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions only 20 percent when we substitute one liter of ethanol for one liter of gasoline,” said Gervasio Piñeiro, the study’s first author, who is a Buenos Aires, Argentina-based scientist and postdoctoral research associate in Jackson’s Duke laboratory.

Also, by the researchers’ accounting, the carbon benefits of using ethanol only begin to show up years after corn growing begins. “Depending on prior land use” they wrote in their report, “our analysis shows that carbon releases from the soil after planting corn for ethanol may in some cases completely offset carbon gains attributed to biofuel generation for at least 50 years.”

The report said that “cellulosic” species — such as switchgrass — are a better option for curbing emissions than corn because they don’t require annual replowing and planting. In contrast, a single planting of cellulosic species will continue growing and producing for years while trapping more carbon in the soil.

“Until cellulosic ethanol production is feasible, or corn-ethanol technology improves, corn-ethanol subsidies are a poor investment economically and environmentally,” Jackson added.

However, the report noted that a cost-effective technology to convert cellulosics to ethanol may be years away. So the Duke team contrasted today’s production practices for corn-based ethanol with what will be possible after the year 2023 for cellulosic-based ethanol.

By analyzing 142 different soil studies, the researchers found that conventional corn farming can remove 30 to 50 percent of the carbon stored in the soil. In contrast, cellulosic ethanol production entails mowing plants as they grow — often on land that is already in conservation reserve. That, their analysis found, can ultimately increase soil carbon levels between 30 to 50 percent instead of reducing them.

“It’s like hay baling,” Piñeiro said. “You plant it once and it stays there for 20 years. And it takes much less energy and carbon dioxide emissions to produce that than to produce corn.”

As part of its analysis, the Duke team calculated how corn-for-ethanol and cellulosic-for-ethanol production — both now and in the future — would compare with agricultural set-asides. Those comparisons were expressed in economic terms with a standard financial accounting tool called “net present value.”

For now, setting aside acreage and letting it return to native vegetation was rated the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, outweighing the results of corn-ethanol production over the first 48 years. However, “once commercially available, cellulosic ethanol produced in set-aside grasslands should provide the most efficient tool for greenhouse gas reduction of any scenario we examined,” the report added.

The worst strategy for reducing carbon dioxide emissions is to plant corn-for-ethanol on land that was previously designated as set aside — a practice included in current federal efforts to ramp up biofuel production, the study found. “You will lose a lot of soil carbon, which will escape into the atmosphere as CO2,” said Piñeiro.

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The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Center for Global Change at Duke University and by the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnologíca of Argentina.

Other researchers in the study included Brian Murray, the director for economic analysis at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a Nicholas School research professor; Justin Baker, a researcher with Murray and Jackson; and Esteban Jobbagy, a professor at the University of San Luis in Argentina who received his Ph.D. at Duke.

Reprinted from Duke University.

Farmers across the tropics might raze forests to plant biofuel crops, according to new research by Holly Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

“If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances will be good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks,” she warned.

Policies favoring biofuel crop production may inadvertently contribute to, not slow, the process of climate change, Gibbs said. Such an environmental disaster could be “just around the corner without more thoughtful energy policies that consider potential ripple effects on tropical forests,” she added.

Gibbs’ predictions are based on her new study, in which she analyzed detailed satellite images collected between 1980 and 2000. The study is the first to do such a detailed characterization of the pathways of agricultural expansion throughout the entire tropical region. Gibbs hopes that this new knowledge will contribute to making prudent decisions about future biofuel policies and subsidies.

Gibbs will present her findings in Chicago on Saturday, Feb. 14, during a symposium that begins at 1:30 p.m. CT at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The symposium is titled “Biofuels, Tropical Deforestation, and Climate Policy: Key Challenges and Opportunities.” She will participate in a press conference at 12 p.m. CT on the same day.

With climates ideal for growing biofuel crops and an abundance of arable land, tropical countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia have already responded to growing demand for food, feed and fuel from crops such sugarcane, soy and oil palm by increasing their production, Gibbs said.

For example, the area of cropland dedicated to soybean production in Brazil has increased at a rate of nearly 15 percent per year since 1990, and Indonesia’s oil palm production tripled during the 1990′s and then doubled again from 2000 to 2007, said Gibbs.

These increases are due in part to soaring global demand for food and feed. However, scientists have reason to suspect that biofuels also are playing a significant role in recent cropland expansion. “Biofuels have caused alarm because of how quickly production has been growing: Global ethanol production increased by four times and biodiesel by 10 times between 2000 and 2007,” Gibbs said. “Moreover, agricultural subsidies in Indonesia and in the United States are providing added incentives to increase production of these crops.”

“The crops that are most prized as current-generation biofuels, such as oil palm and sugarcane, also are those crops most suited to tropical countries,” she added.

Land expansion controversy

Before Gibbs’ study, few had focused on the question of the origin of new croplands-a question that has been a source of heated debate among scientists and policymakers alike over the past few years.

“Biofuel producers typically indicate that they are establishing new soy fields or oil palm plantations on degraded or already cleared lands,” Gibbs said, “while environmental groups and some scientists point to Amazonian rainforests or Southeast Asian peat swamps as the land sources.”

Gibbs was one of the first to approach the question by quantifying the types of land-pristine forest, disturbed forest, woody savannas, grasslands, plantations or agricultural land-that are being cleared to make space for the new cropland.

“If biofuels are grown in place of forests, we’re actually going to end up emitting a huge amount of carbon. When trees are cut down to make room for new farmland, they are usually burned, sending their stored carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That creates what’s called a carbon debt,” Gibbs said. “This is because the carbon lost from deforestation is much greater than the carbon saved from using the current-generation biofuels.”

Indeed, tropical forests are the world’s most efficient storehouses for carbon, harboring more than 340 billion tons, according to Gibbs’ research. This is equivalent to more than 40 years worth of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Gibbs’ previous findings asserted that the carbon debt incurred from cutting down a tropical forest could take several centuries or even millennia to repay through carbon savings produced from the resultant biofuels.

On the other hand, planting biofuel croplands on degraded land-land that has been previously cultivated but is now providing very low productivity due to salinity, soil erosion, nutrient leaching, etc.-could have an overall positive environmental impact, Gibbs said.

“In a sense that would be restoring the land to a higher potential to provide environmental services for people,” she added.

Both Brazil and Indonesia contain significant areas of degraded land-in Brazil, the total area may be as large as California-that could be replanted with crops, thereby decreasing the burden on forested land. “But this is challenging without new policies or economic incentives to encourage establishing crops on these lands,” Gibbs said.

This is because farmers who convert degraded land to cropland must shoulder the costs of fertilizer and learn improved soil management practices to make the lands productive, whereas farmers who clear forested land often avoid these burdens.

“Government subsidies, environmental certification schemes or carbon markets could provide incentives to grow crops on degraded rather than forest lands,” Gibbs said.

However, in some cases, allowing the degraded land to be returned to its natural, forested state might be the wisest use of the land, absorbing more carbon and providing ecological services such as flood mitigation, rainwater recycling and habitat for endangered species, Gibbs said.

“There are tradeoffs in all these decisions that need to be made on a case-by-case basis,” she said. “We need to keep in mind that more cropland will be needed to meet the global demands for food, feed and fuel, so the best options will likely vary by circumstance.”

Analyzing changing lands

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) maintains a database of detailed satellite images taken over the last 20 years through the Global Forest Resources Assessment, an initiative that dates back to 1946. The FAO releases a new global assessment every 10 years.

Working closely with the FAO, Gibbs analyzed satellite data for more than 100 randomly selected sites across the tropics. By comparing satellite images taken of each specific site in 1980, 1990 and 2000, Gibbs was able to clearly see whether croplands were expanding, and if so, what they were replacing.

She examined more than 600 satellite images from the FAO and other organizations, and noticed a clear trend: “What we found was that indeed forests were the primary source for new croplands as they expanded across the tropics during the 1980s and 1990s. So cropland expansion, whether it’s for fuel, feed or food, has undoubtedly led to more deforestation, and evidence is mounting that this trend will continue.”

For example, Gibbs’ data show that between 1980 and 2000, more than half of new cropland came from intact rainforests and another 30 percent from disturbed forests, “This is contrary to what some biofuel proponents have suggested is occurring today,” she said.

“This is a major concern for the global environment,” Gibbs said. “As we look toward biofuels to help reduce climate change we must consider the rainforests and savannas that may lie in the pathway of expanding biofuel cropland.”

The FAO is in the process of collecting and interpreting the data for the current decade. “This will be important to provide more recent information about expansion of croplands occurring in the midst of the biofuels boom,” Gibbs said.

Although Gibbs recognizes that biofuels have certain drawbacks, including those documented in her study, she is not opposed to their regulated use. “I think that biofuels may have a critical place in our future energy plan,” she said. “But the way that we’re currently going about producing biofuels could have a lot of unintended consequences.”

“The new administration should carefully consider the full consequences of any energy plan to make sure we protect the carbon stored in rainforests as well as reduce our fossil fuel emissions,” she said.

Reprinted from Stanford University.

Forecast growth in 2008 cereal production could ease tight global supply.

The cereal import bill of the world’s poorest countries is forecast to rise by 56 percent in 2007/2008. This comes after a significant increase of 37 percent in 2006/2007, FAO said today.

For low-income food-deficit countries in Africa, the cereal bill is projected to increase by 74 percent, according to the UN agency’s latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report. The increase is due to the sharp rise in international cereal prices, freight rates and oil prices.

International cereal prices have continued to rise sharply over the past two months, reflecting steady demand and depleted world reserves, the report said. Prices of rice increased the most following the imposition of new export restrictions by major exporting countries. By the end of March prices of wheat and rice were about double their levels of a year earlier, while those of maize were more than one-third higher, according to the report.

FAO has launched an Initiative on Soaring Food Prices (ISFP), offering technical and policy assistance to poor countries affected by high food prices in order help farmers boost production in the coming agricultural seasons. Farmers can achieve higher yields and increase production areas if they have access to inputs such as improved seeds, organic and inorganic fertilizer and water. Field activities are starting in Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. FAO will also help governments prepare actions and strategies to increase agricultural production. In collaboration with the World Food Programme, IFAD and other partners, FAO will enlarge its food market information system to pull together and analyze various data sources at local, national and international levels and to disseminate this information. FAO has allocated US$17 million for these activities.

Domestic food prices spur social unrest

Prices of bread, rice, maize products, milk, oil, soybeans and others basic foods have increased sharply in recent months in a number of developing countries, despite policy measures — including export restrictions, subsidies, tariff reductions and price controls — taken by governments of both cereal importing and exporting countries to limit the impact of international prices on domestic food markets.

Food riots have been reported in Egypt, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Haiti in the past month. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to avoid seizing of food from the fields and from warehouses.

“Food price inflation hits the poor hardest, as the share of food in their total expenditures is much higher than that of wealthier populations,” said Henri Josserand of FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning system. “Food represents about 10-20 percent of consumer spending in industrialized nations, but as much as 60-80 percent in developing countries, many of which are net-food-importers.”

2008 forecast: production up

According to FAO’s first forecast world cereal production in 2008 is to increase by 2.6 percent to a record 2 164 million tonnes. The bulk of the increase is expected in wheat, following significant expansion in plantings in major producing countries.

“Should the expected growth in 2008 production materialize, the current tight global cereal supply situation could ease in the new 2008/09 season,” the report said.

But much will depend on the weather, FAO cautioned, recalling that at this time last year prospects for cereal production in 2007 were far better than the eventual outcome. Unfavourable climatic conditions devastated crops in Australia and reduced harvests in many other countries, particularly in Europe.

“Favourable climatic conditions will be even more critical in the new season because world cereal reserves are depleted,” the report said.

According to FAO’s forecast, world cereal stocks are expected to fall to a 25-year-low of 405 million tonnes in 2007/08, down 21 million tonnes, or 5 percent, from their already reduced level of the previous year.

“Any major shortfalls resulting from unfavourable weather, particularly in exporting countries, would prolong the current tight market situation; contribute to more price rallies and exacerbate the economic hardship already facing many countries,” the report said.

FAO urges all donors and International Financing Institutions to increase their assistance or consider reprogramming part of their ongoing aid in countries negatively affected by high food prices. A tentative estimation of the additional funding required by the governments to implement country projects and programmes for dealing with soaring food prices ranges between US$ 1,2 and 1,7 billion. The release of these funds can provide important support for poor farmers, including access to inputs and assets, to enhance the food supply response in the next agricultural seasons.

Worldwide, 37 countries are currently facing food crises, according to the report. Click here for the complete list of countries in need of external assistance.

Reprinted from FAO.

In the first study of its kind, Donner and Chris Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin quantify the effect of biofuel production on the problem of nutrient pollution in a waterway. Their findings will appear in the March 10 edition of the Proceedings of the National Journal of Sciences.

The researchers looked at the estimated land and fertilizer required to meet proposed corn-based ethanol production goals. Recently, the U.S. Senate announced its energy policy aims of generating 36 billion gallons annually of ethanol by the year 2022, of which 15 billion gallons can be produced from corn starch. The corn-ethanol goal represents more than three times than triple the production in 2006.

“This rush to expand corn production is a disaster for the Gulf of Mexico,” says Donner, an assistant professor in the Dept. of Geography. “The U.S. energy policy will make it virtually impossible to solve the problem of the Dead Zone.”

Nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural fertilizer have been found to promote excess growth of algae in water bodies – a problem that’s common across North America and in many areas of the world.

In some cases, decomposition of algae consumes much of the oxygen in the water. Fertilizer applied to cornfields in the central U.S. – including states such as Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin – is the primary source of nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi River system, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico.

Each summer, the export of nitrogen creates a large “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, a region of oxygen-deprived waters that are unable to support aquatic life. In recent years, it has reached over 20,000 km2 in size, which is equivalent to the area of New Jersey.

Donner and Kucharik’s findings suggest that if the U.S. were to meet its proposed ethanol production goals, nitrogen loading by the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico would increase by 10-19 per cent.

To arrive at this figure, Donner and Kucharik combined the agricultural land use scenarios with models of terrestrial and aquatic nitrogen cycling.

“The nitrogen levels in the Mississippi will be more than twice the recommendation for the Gulf,” says Donner. “It will overwhelm all the suggested mitigation options.”

The results of the study call into question the assumption that enough land exists to fulfill current feed crop demand and expand corn and other crop production for ethanol.

The study concludes that increasing ethanol production from U.S. croplands without endangering water quality and aquatic ecosystems will require a substantial reduction in meat consumption.

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Reprinted from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

WASHINGTON – Heightened concern about oil dependence is generating growing support for alternative transportation fuels, but some would emit significantly more global warming pollution than gasoline or diesel, according to a report issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

Transportation is responsible for two-thirds of the nation’s oil consumption and nearly 40 percent of U.S. global warming pollution on a life cycle basis. To dramatically cut emissions from this sector, a comprehensive solution must include improved vehicle fuel efficiency, smart growth policies that reduce vehicle miles traveled, and clean fuel alternatives.

 ”We need to wean ourselves off oil, but we should replace it with the cleanest alternatives possible,” said Patrician Monahan, author of the report and deputy director of UCS’s Clean Vehicles Program. “Let’s not trade one bad habit for another.”

 Liquid coal, for example, can release 80 percent more global warming pollution than gasoline, the report found. Corn ethanol, conversely, could be either more polluting or less than gasoline, depending on how the corn is grown and the ethanol is produced. On average, corn ethanol can reduce emissions about 20 percent, though there is uncertainty due to differing land use practices. The cleanest alternative, cellulosic ethanol from grasses or wood chips, could reduce emissions by more than 85 percent.

 ”Biofuels have a Jekyll and Hyde reputation depending on what study you read and what assumptions you make,” Monahan said. “But liquid coal is a loser no matter how you look at it. We need to set standards so farmers know the right way to produce cleaner fuels.” She also cautioned that we must ensure that biofuels and other alternative fuels do not threaten the environment or limit food production.

 The report evaluated two scenarios for alternative fuels, one carbon-intensive-meaning that it would produce significantly more global warming pollution than burning gasoline — and the other low-carbon-meaning that it would produce significantly less. The analysis assumed that alternative fuels will replace 37 billion gallons of gasoline, about 20 percent of the fuel UCS projects Americans will consume in 2030.

 In both scenarios, conventional biofuels would meet 25 percent of the demand for alternative fuels. In the carbon-intensive scenario, the remaining demand would be met by liquid coal. The carbon-intensive scenario would increase emissions by 233 million metric tons-equivalent to adding about 34 million cars to the road, the number of new cars and light trucks currently sold nationally over a two-year period. By contrast, the low-carbon scenario relies on advanced biofuels to meet 75 percent of the demand. That would cut global warming pollution by 244 million metric tons, akin to taking 35 million of today’s cars off the road. The report called for a national low-carbon fuel standard that accounts for alternative fuels’ global warming emissions over their entire life cycle-from till to tailpipe-and requires them to emit less pollution than today’s petroleum-based fuels.

 At the tailpipe, gasoline, liquid coal and biofuels release about the same amount of global warming pollution. But there are dramatic differences in the amount of pollution emitted by extracting a raw feedstock and refining it into a finished fuel. Biofuels can have an advantage over liquid coal and gasoline because plants capture carbon dioxide, the most common global warming gas, as they grow. But producing biofuels will generate emissions, which at the farm will vary depending on tilling practices, fertilizer use, previous land use, and the fossil fuels used to power farm equipment. At the ethanol plant, emissions will depend on the efficiency of the manufacturing process and the fuel used to power the facility. All of these factors must be considered in a full life cycle analysis.

 Life cycle analysis for alternative fuels could help farmers and the biofuels industry, according to Gregg Heide of the Iowa Farmers Union. “Farmers want to help get the country off of oil,” the corn and soybean farmer said. “Give us some guidelines, tell us where to cut pollution, and we can do it. The coal lobby is active everywhere, even here in Iowa. It would be counterproductive if dirty fuels like liquid coal started muscling out biofuels in the alternative fuels market.”

 Congress is now considering an energy bill that includes a renewable fuel standard giving the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to develop life cycle analysis guidelines. To date, the federal government has been promoting both cleaner and dirtier fuels. For instance, Congress has approved funding for research into next-generation ultra-clean biofuels, but it also is subsidizing research into liquid coal processing technology.

 ”Government policies and high oil prices have whetted our growing appetite for all alternative fuels, good and bad alike,” said Eli Hopson, Washington representative for Clean Vehicles at UCS. “With the wrong policy, liquid coal could displace cleaner alternatives. Biofuels can be a staple of our low carbon fuel diet, but only if policies are in place that ‘count carbs’ and ‘make carbs count.’ ”

 At least one state is addressing the problem. In January, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an executive order calling for establishing a state low-carbon fuel standard. The California Air Resources Board is currently developing regulations that would require manufacturers of transportation fuel sold in the state to reduce per gallon emissions of global warming pollution by at least 10 percent. Arizona, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington State are considering similar policies.

The complete report can be found here.

This article is comprised of material from The Union of Concerned Scientists.