.JPG "Earthen Spirituality")
Living within a living, loving planet
Posts tagged biofuels
Destroying Habitat to Feed Machines
Apr 29th
“But there are some cons to consider. When biofuels first started to become competitive, there was concern that they were competing with food growers for agricultural land — an issue that’s become more salient as concern heightens over the planet’s rapidly growing population and the future of global food security. As a result, producers are increasingly focusing on fuel sources that can be grown on land that’s unsuitable for food crops.”
Life in and around the Earth’s surface is not all about humans. It is bad enough that humans have eaten out most of our environment and are now destroying Earth’s organic structure but to exploit the few remaining places where other lifeforms can exist and plough them up to feed machines is insane.
Large-scale production of bioenergy from forest biomass is neither sustainable nor GHG neutral
Apr 12th
New research from last week 14/2012
Posted on 11 April 2012 by Ari Jokimäki
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new_research_14_2012.html
Large-scale bioenergy from additional harvest of forest biomass is neither sustainable nor greenhouse gas neutral – Schulze et al. (2012)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-1707.2012.01169.x/abstract
Abstract: “Owing to the peculiarities of forest net primary production humans would appropriate ca. 60% of the global increment of woody biomass if forest biomass were to produce 20% of current global primary energy supply. We argue that such an increase in biomass harvest would result in younger forests, lower biomass pools, depleted soil nutrient stocks and a loss of other ecosystem functions.
The proposed strategy is likely to miss its main objective, i.e. to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, because it would result in a reduction of biomass pools that may take decades to centuries to be paid back by fossil fuel substitution, if paid back at all.
Eventually, depleted soil fertility will make the production unsustainable and require fertilization, which in turn increases GHG emissions due to N2O emissions.
Hence, large-scale production of bioenergy from forest biomass is neither sustainable nor GHG neutral.”
Citation: Ernst-Detlef Schulze, Christian Körner, Beverly E. Law, Helmut Haberl, Sebastiaan Luyssaert, GCB Bioenergy, DOI: 10.1111/j.1757-1707.2012.01169.x.
This carbon neutral claim has always sounded suspect. Chopping forest causes a loss of water distribution that limits the ability to sustain new growth. The result points to more desertification. Climate change deniers like to reference millions of years ago when the planet sustained far more CO2 in the air.
We must not forget the climatic conditions which preceded this situation. We cannot expect an increase of CO2 now to develop into anything like what happened millions of years ago. Anyway, unless our thinking changes, water supplies left available will be used to sustain humans and not trees.