ACESA spells rainforest destruction

Aug 22nd, 2009 in ACESA Flaws, Featured Articles

The House cap-and-trade bill allows rampant rainforest destruction to continue – and the Senate cap-and-trade bill will likely be modeled after the House version.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA) recently passed by the House seeks to roll back major biofuels studies of the last several years. ACESA would block the EPA from using “indirect land use change” as a factor in developing the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) for biofuels.

But indirect land use change caused by biofuels is forcing rainforest destruction in the Amazon, Southeast Asia and Africa. And it is triggering global hunger and starvation.

If you use farmland in North America to grow biofuels, you’re forcing a farmer somewhere else to clear-cut forest to grow food crops. You’ve effectively cut down a rain forest.

— David Tilman, lead author of the “Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt” study published in SCIENCE, February, 2008. Quote is from the March 14, 2008 issue of Newsweek.

We looked at all of the current biofuels that are being made around the world and asked if they were causing native ecosystems to be turned into land that would be used to grow the crop. Essentially, all of them are doing that.

—Tilman, ibid. http://www.newsweek.com/id/110636

Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food crop–based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a “biofuel carbon debt” by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1152747

The second major biofuels study published in February, 2008 came from Princeton and is titled “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change”.

To produce biofuels, farmers can directly plow up more forests or grassland which releases to the atmosphere much of the carbon previously stored in plants and soil through decomposition or fire… Alternatively, farmers can divert existing crops or croplands into biofuels, which causes similar emissions indirectly. The diversion triggers higher crop prices, and farmers around the world respond by clearing more forest and grassland to replace crops for feed or food.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1152747v1.pdf

The February 8, 2008 New York Times awarded these studies this headline: “BIOFUELS DEEMED A GREENHOUSE THREAT”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Let’s not forget the devastating health and social impacts caused by biofuels forcing indirect land use change. In 2007, U.N. Rapporteur for Food, Jean Ziegler, called these biofuels a “crime against humanity” because they rob land from food production and force millions of humans to confront food shortages, hunger and starvation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7065061.stm

This widespread reduction in acreage dedicated to human food production has created global food shortages, raising the prices of food staples beyond the reach of huge numbers of people in poor countries.

Largely because of indirect land use change forced by biofuels, food riots in 2008 broke out in Egypt, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Haiti. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops were deployed to avoid seizing of food from the fields and from warehouses. In China, exports of rice were frozen because of runs on domestic supplies sparked by soaring prices.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=26289&Cr=food&Cr1=prices

The World Bank study of April, 2008 confirmed that 75% of spiraling global food costs can be attributed to indirect land use change forced by biofuels. This report was so damning and therefore controversial, it was suppressed for several months before being leaked to the press in July, 2008. This controversy and suppression shows how Industrial World governments want to quash accurate information about the devastation being wreaked by biofuels-forced indirect land use change.

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/risingfoodprices_backgroundnote_apr08.pdf

http://bl134w.blu134.mail.live.com/mail/InboxLight.aspx?FolderID=46836c97-957f-40b9-b44f-eefdf2ac1a1f&InboxSortAscending=False&InboxSortBy=Date&n=417479225

The EPA must have unfettered authority to regulate biofuels using best-available science including the effects of indirect land use change.

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