Growing Crops for Fuel

Yesterday I wrote that growing crops for fuels was contributing to the world food crisis, and quoted Lester Brown's warnings on the subject. It turns out that yesterday he had written an opinion piece (with Jonathan Lewis) on the dangers of biofuels in the Washington Post:

Most troubling, though, is that the higher food prices caused in large part by food-to-fuel mandates create incentives for global deforestation, including in the Amazon basin. As Time magazine reported this month, huge swaths of forest are being cleared for agricultural development. The result is devastating: We lose an ecological treasure and critical habitat for endangered species, as well as the world's largest "carbon sink." And when the forests are cleared and the land plowed for farming, the carbon that had been sequestered in the plants and soil is released. Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger has modeled this impact and reports in Science magazine that the net impact of the food-to-fuel push will be an increase in global carbon emissions -- and thus a catalyst for climate change.
Meanwhile, the mandates are not reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Last year, the United States burned about a quarter of its national corn supply as fuel -- and this led to only a 1 percent reduction in the country's oil consumption.

The good news is that people are coming to understand the consequences of biofuels, which is why public support for ethanol subsidies has dropped over the last two years.