THE CAR OF THE FUTURE - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 140

h is is ot en contrasted with ethanol made from sugarcane. In the
wake of the i rst energy crisis of the 1970s, Brazil was stung even more
than the United States. In response, it launched a massive program to
convert sugarcane into fuel, something that turns out to be unusually
easy to do. h at was good for Brazil because it kept costs down: sugar-
cane ethanol is widely regarded as the most cost-ef ective biofuel. But
it also meant conversion didn't take much energy, which meant the net
greenhouse gas emissions were unusually low.
h ere is, however, still one more potential problem with biofuels,
and skeptics have latched onto it with zeal. If you want to grow crops
for biofuels, you need land, and to get it you usually need to do one
of two things. You can clear land that's already covered with plants or
trees but not being used for agriculture. Since whatever you're clear-
ing was storing carbon before you cut it down, you've just caused
massive greenhouse gas emissions. Brazil was long accused of cut ing
down ancient rainforests to cultivate ethanol. To the extent this was
true (in many cases it actually wasn't), the climate benei ts of biofuels
vanished. 101
h e United States, of course, isn't home to any ancient rainforests:
it already cut down the bulk of its old forests a couple hundred years
ago. 102 So American biofuels producers take the second path: they plant
their crops on land that would otherwise have been used to grow food.
In 2008, though, a bombshell paper in the prestigious journal Science
sounded an alarm: the practice was set ing of a chain reaction that was
almost as bad as chopping down centuries-old trees. 103
h e story the scientists told was simple. People need to eat. When
one person takes land out of food production and uses it to make fuel,
someone else needs to clear another swath of land to produce the now-
missing food. Odds are that a bunch of the newly cleared territory is
coming at the expense of really old trees and other territory that stores
lots of carbon. When the researchers ran the numbers, the results were
staggering. h e title of their paper said it all: “Use of U.S. Croplands for
Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases h rough Emissions from Land-
Use Change.” h e details were just as troubling. Corn-based ethanol,
they concluded, “increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.”