October 22nd, 2009
Can anybody here play this game?
This was the famous question once asked by clever author Jimmy Breslin of the pathetic New York Mets when they were a start-up. You know the answer when you ask it about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Corps of Engineers in New Orleans or those Masters of the Universe and their financial creations that collapsed. Now you gotta ask the same question about some of the folks trying to manage global action on global warming. Can anybody here play this game?
Today comes word from a study published today in “Science” that advanced biofuels are a move in the wrong direction, that they will add to global carbon emissions and that all this is blamed on the current Kyoto Protocol. Some polite news organizations are calling it an “accounting glitch”. Sorta like those glitches that caused all those quickly-defaulted mortgages, you mean?
The study claims cellulosic biofuels will actually increase carbon emissions when compared with continued use of gasoline over the next twenty years. That despite the billions of dollars for research and development, and the loads of political capital being expended on cellulosic biofuels, those made from wood or grass or other non-edible plants. The report goes on to say that the Kyoto Protocol and its encouragement of cellulosic biofuel could easily lead to even wider deforestation and spiralling upward of carbon emissions. Seems the Masters of the Atmosphere who put together the UN’s emission calculation system did not imagine cutting forests down to make ethanol, obviously an attractive business plan in many parts of the globe. Ooops.
And they did not “account” for the CO2 released when the resulting biofuel is burned. They decreed cut forests would count only as “land use emissions” and then did not include land use emissions in the calculations for overall global CO2 emissions from energy use. So if you chop down trees, plant sugar cane and make ethanol, you go zero bad marks for carbon emissions according to the current system. Sorta like the tax loopholes so popular in the U.S. or our millions of jobless folks who are not considered “unemployed.” It’s happening but we choose not to count it. So the global warming calculators were not calculating reality. Can anybody here play this game?
HERE’S LINK TO THE REPORT IN SCIENCE, AUTHORED BY EIGHT YANKS AND AN AUSTRIAN.
A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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