http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/business/global/questioning-europes-math-on-biofuels.html

September 25, 2011

Questioning Europe's Math on Biofuels

By JAMES KANTER

BRUSSELS — Much of the appeal of generating energy from plants was that they emit only as much carbon when burned in cars and power plants as they absorb while growing.

Lately, that appeal seems to be going up in smoke.

It turns out that the emissions from growing and processing some biofuels significantly diminish their benefits, when taking into account factors like the use of fertilizers manufactured with fossil fuels.

Concerns have also grown that large swaths of forest and grassland will be chopped down or burned to grow fuel crops — and to grow food that has been displaced by growing fuel crops elsewhere — thereby releasing additional stocks of carbon into the atmosphere.

Olivier De Schutter, the special rapporteur on the Right to Food for the United Nations, is among the experts who have said that pressure on farmland from demand for biofuels is a major factor in the food price spikes that have exacerbated hunger and social unrest in some of the poorest countries in the past three years.

Anti-poverty groups like ActionAid and Oxfam have warned that demand for biofuels led to land deals in Kenya, Senegal and Guatemala that displaced people, or left them without enough land to grow enough food to eat and make a living.

This month, an influential committee of 19 scientists and academics described yet another concern: that the authorities, including the European Union, had gotten their math wrong and were overestimating the potential for bioenergy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency said the Union had committed a “serious accounting error” by failing to measure how much additional carbon dioxide was absorbed by existing fields, forests and grasslands, compared with that absorbed by energy crops.

“The potential consequences of this bioenergy accounting error are immense,” the committee wrote.

The committee concluded that the Union was effectively “double-counting” some reductions in greenhouse gases, and it warned that current bioenergy policies “may even result in increased carbon emissions — thereby accelerating global warming.”

The opinion drew a chilly response from the European Commission, which oversees policies on renewable energy.

Marlene Holzner, a spokeswoman for Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger, said parts of the opinion were based on work that had been “rebutted by other institutions in the past.” She also suggested that the opinion failed to make a proper comparison of biofuels and gasoline or diesel.

Bioenergy has become one of the most fiercely contested issues in Brussels since the E.U. governments agreed three years ago that 20 percent of all energy, and 10 percent of transport fuels, should come from renewable sources by the end of the decade.

Bioenergy, including the burning of wood to produce electricity, would meet about half of the overall renewable energy target under national plans, while biofuels would provide the majority of renewable transport fuels.

Powerful interests are at stake, like those of rapeseed farmers and biodiesel producers in Germany and France and palm oil growers in Malaysia and Indonesia. Biofuels already supply about 4 percent of transport fuels in Europe, with sales worth about $17 billion annually.

There is a need to “protect the legitimate expectations for E.U. agriculture” and “avoid problems with the E.U.’s main trading partners,” according to minutes from a meeting in July at which a number of E.U. commissioners discussed biofuels.

The commissioners also discussed waiting as long as seven years before penalizing growers of the fuels with the greatest effects on food and land use changes, like the clearing of rain forests and the draining of peat land.

Officials from the E.U. climate department still are pushing for those measures to go into force within three years and for additional measures that would limit fuels based on some palm oil and soya beans to go into effect as soon as possible.

Even so, concerns are growing that the commission has been too quick to shrug off evidence that its policies encourage some harmful forms of bioenergy.

ClientEarth, a nonprofit law firm with offices in Brussels, has sued the European Commission three times since last year for access to information about the environmental effects of biofuels and the way the fuels are certified.

ClientEarth said it was waiting for the General Court, the E.U.’s second highest tribunal, to set hearing dates in two of the cases, and for the commission’s preliminary response in the third case.

Last week, environmental groups including BirdLife International, the European Environmental Bureau, Transport and Environment, Greenpeace and Wetlands International sent a letter to José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission, seeking assurances that his organization was “giving due consideration to science in its energy policy, after several instances in which the best available science was dismissed.”

The groups expressed particular concern that some of the findings by the 19 scientists and academics on bioenergy had been “rebutted, without cause.” Aides to Mr. Barroso said Friday that a response was being prepared.

Even some industries are growing frustrated, as Europe seeks more of its energy from plants.

The European Panel Federation, an industry group representing manufacturers of wood-based panels including subsidiaries of Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, applauded the findings by the 19 scientists and academics.

Ladislaus Döry, president of the federation, said demand for wood in the form of chips and sawdust from sawmills had skyrocketed because it was too easy for electricity utilities to count burning wood pellets as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Döry said that a number of European panel-makers had already gone out of business and that the E.U. authorities needed to change their rules on bioenergy.

The accounting error “is really serious,” he said.

“We are in the crazy situation that there are economic incentives in place to burn one of our most important raw materials to the detriment of environment and economy,” he said.