BIOFUEL LAWS HAVE FATAL FLAW

NPR - Scientists writing in the current issue of Science magazine point out a huge error in existing biofuel laws that could actually make climate change worse. They say these rules inadvertently encourage deforestation, which in turn contributes to global warming.

If you burn ethanol from corn in your car, the government doesn't count the carbon dioxide that comes out of the tailpipe as an actual carbon emission. That's because they figure the corn plant originally took that carbon dioxide out of the air, so you're just putting it back.

But 13 prominent scientists writing in Science says that's bad logic when it comes to many types of biofuels. Author Tim Searchinger of Princeton University offers an extreme example to make the point.

"Even if you were to cut down the world's forests and turn them into a parking lot, and take the wood and put it in a boiler - which obviously releases enormous amounts of carbon from the trees - that is treated as a pure way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions," Searchinger says. "And that's obviously an error."

And that error isn't trivial. It's now enshrined in European law as well as the Kyoto climate treaty.

"The problem is that when the world agreed to a treaty that limited the amount of carbon that goes up the smokestack, they didn't agree to limit the amount of carbon released by cutting down trees," he says.

Searchinger explains that in an effort to avoid double-counting carbon emissions, the treaty negotiators ended up with a system that never counts them at all.

And he says the climate bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year makes basically the same error, though at the moment, the Senate bill does have forest safeguards in place.

As a result of this accounting error, countries trying to reduce their carbon emissions actually have an incentive to cut down forests and burn them up or replant the area with biofuel crops. In fact, Searchinger says power plants in Northern Europe are starting to chip up wood and burn it for energy in the name of reducing emissions.