| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fred Stone" |
| Date: |
20 Jan 2008 08:54:43 PM |
| Object: |
Ooops |
http://www.globalisation.eu/blog/governance/we-do-need-international-
action-on-climate-change,-don%27t-we?-200801181289/
http://tinyurl.com/2nt9h3
It's one of the great mantras of our time, that we absolutely need to
have international cooperation to deal with both the causes and effects
of climate change. From Kyoto and Bali to the European Union's insistence
that only it, as a multi-national body, possibly has the ability to deal
with such a multi-national problem.
And of course there is a great truth here: given that CO2 emissions are
international in their effects, one country alone really can't do very
much to deal with the problem. (Please note that we're assuming that the
IPCC is indeed correct here.)
However, we also have the age old problem that when bureaucrats and
politicians begin to try and pick winners, the policies or technologies
that are chosen to deal with such problems, well, let us be reasonable
and say that they don't have a very good track record. Indeed, there is a
strong current in economics which says that the incentives they face mean
that they will almost always choose the wrong ones, a good outcome being
purely a matter of blind luck.
So it seems to be with the insistence, in both the US and the EU, that
biofuels should play a large part in reducing emissions. Recent days have
found the EU Environment Commissioner having to, well, recant:
After admitting that no one thought about the environmental or the
economic implications of turning specific cropsinto biofuels, the EU has
decided to think again about the use of those fuels.
And:
"We have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels and
also the social problems are bigger than we thought they were. So we have
to move very carefully," Stavros Dimas told the BBC on Monday, Jan. 14.
And:
His climb-down came as the Royal Society cautioned in a report that
the production of biofuel - energy sources made from plant material -
could be more polluting than traditional fossil fuels.
That Royal Society report is here:
To maintain high rates of annual production, arable crops are
generally fertilised at rates of up to 350kg/ha/yr of nitrogen. If new
land is brought into cultivation for biofuels, as seems necessary to meet
policy requirements, after the first year or two sustained production
will require regular fertiliser applications, which in turn will lead to
an increase in emissions of N2O. The IPCC estimates that 1% of added
nitrogen is returned to the atmosphere through activities that result in
the mineralisation of soil organic matter (IPCC 2006). However, a recent
paper by Crutzen et al (2007), which considers N2O release from rivers,
estuaries and coastal zones, animal husbandry and the atmospheric
deposition of ammonia and NOx, highlights that it is more likely that the
amount of nitrogen returned to the atmosphere as N2O is in the range
3–5%. Using this larger range of N2O emissions could significantly reduce
the currently assumed GHG emission gains from replacing conventional
fossils fuels with biofuels such as biodiesel from rapeseed and
bioethanol from maize.
That is, to put it mildly, extremely alarming. That rise in N2O emissions
(the RS is as always very gentle in its phrasing) means not that biofuels
will reduce emissions less than previously thought, but that they will
increase them, to greater than the levels using fossil fuels
originally...
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan
are the problem to begin with.
C. Hitchens
.
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