Biofuels Déjà Vu

Lured by dreams of “green” fuel, could we end up trampling biodiversity in the name of saving the planet?

Story by David Malakoff
Illustration by Randy Lyhus
April-June 2009

These days, Jason Clay walks around with an eerie sense of déjà vu. Over the past few years, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) anthropologist has become deeply entangled in the tortuous struggle to ensure that supposedly “green” biofuels—such as ethanol brewed from corn and biodiesel wrung from palm nuts—don’t decimate biodiversity in an attempt to save the planet. It’s been a dizzying and sometimes disorienting experience. For instance, Clay watched as biofuels, once hailed as the savior of the climate, became an environmental sinner almost overnight—blamed for everything from food riots to trashed tropical forests. “The backlash has been pretty ferocious—ethanol and biodiesel have lost a lot of their green image,” he says.

Now Clay is bracing for what could be an even more jarring roller-coaster ride. Some scientists, executives and political leaders—including President Barak Obama’s energy team—are touting a new breed of “cellulosic” biofuels. They argue that these second-generation fuels—created by breaking down cellulose, the molecule that gives trees and grasses their toughness—could deliver more help with less harm. Some even paint the picture of a future powered by waste sawdust, grass clippings and corn husks. And they are dreaming big: by 2022, the United States alone could brew more than 75 billion liters of cellulosic ethanol a year. Experts say that will require spending tens of billions of dollars on research and corporate subsidies and dedicating tens of millions of hectares of land to producing biomass, from hay bales to whole logs.

The dream of cellulosic ethanol, however, is causing nightmares for many ecologists. They fear that growing demand for cheap, ample supplies of cellulose will create powerful incentives to convert diverse, native grasslands into sterile “energy lawns” and to simply chop down vast swaths of wild forests. Even if these environmental costs are mitigated, it’s getting harder to identify the upside of cellulosic fuels—a recent MIT study suggests that, despite the hype, the new fuels may not reduce overall greenhouse-gas emissions. Which raises an unsettling question: can the pursuit of clean, “green” fuels lead to a true ecological solution, or is it just a detour from traditional conservation strategies that, although less futuristic, might be far more effective?

New research is crystallizing fears that cellulosic fuels might wreak havoc on the world’s landscapes. Forecasting what will happen if the fuels take off is a tricky enterprise because biofuels can have indirect effects that ripple around the globe. If a farmer in Europe, for instance, replaces the soybean crop she sells to China with an energy crop such as switchgrass, it could create an incentive for a farmer in South America to clear a new chunk of forest or grassland to replace the European soybeans. Similarly, a move to log a forest in Siberia for energy cellulose could put added pressure on Asian or African forests to produce plywood or lumber for the housing market.

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