Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Biofuels Revisited

A little over 18 months ago I posted a critique of President Bush's State of the Union message and its emphasis on increased use of biofuels, particularly ethanol. Unfortunately, the posting lumped ethanol with biofuels made from wood. This was incorrect, as commentator sverdalov reminded me:

Please do not insult those working on the development of wood to biofuels (ethanol is the presidents favorite, not theirs) or their choosen feedstock. Wood is a renewable resource when managed properly as the US forest products industry has learned to do. High yields (measures in tons/acre/year) can be achieved with a great deal of success. Also, the use of wood does help with global warming, as the net CO2 to atmosphere is 0, as the trees will regrow, recapturing the CO2. Further, since non-fuel products are likely, some of the carbon captured would be in the form of products (such as plastics) to be sold to the consumer. This would aid in decreasing CO2 in the atmosphere.

I stand corrected on the use of wood for biofuels. The larger point, made in this and other postings, is that biofuels will not spare us from the need to become less dependent on the private automobile and improve our public transit. Private cars are the least efficient way to move people, no matter how they are fueled. We have to do better at providing alternatives.

I am grateful to sverdalov for this correction.

Afterword, July 28, 2008: Commentator Marshall Massey reminds me that trees are a precious resource and not to be used lightly to create products like biofuels which, at bottom, only facilitate inefficient transportation like the private car. He is correct. If this contradicts what I said earlier in this posting, so be it. I believe, with Emerson, that the search for perfect consistency is "the hobgoblin of little minds" and can often impede the search for truth.

In my reading, sverdalov was defending wood-based biofuels and criticizing me for lumping them with corn-based ethanol. His critique was correct to that extent, and I still accept it. The larger question is whether we should be expending effort and money on biofuels at all. sverdalov's original comment did not directly address this policy question. I agree that wood-based biofuels are different from and less harmful than biofuels based on food crops.

On the larger question of substituting biofuels for gasoline, I was not explicit enough. Our problem is not how to fuel our cars; it is how to use them less, or not at all, and still retain that freedom of movement which is one of the hallmarks of a free society. A change in the fuel mix does not and cannot address that problem. Creator Spirit, come.

(See the related article, Requiem for the Car Industry, for one possible scenario on the fate of the private car.)


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Friend Robert,

Is wood a "renewable resource", or is it the dead flesh of trees?

The trees of locally-evolved species are what make healthy forest ecosystems, rich in a huge variety of plant and animal species, possible — and not only possible, but healthy and stable. They are the keystone species in many of the most important natural terrestrial ecosystems on the planet, from the Congo rainforest to boreal Canada. Without such ecosystems, we would have a global ecological collapse, for tree farms simply cannot handle all the challenges and fulfill all the functions that naturally evolved forest ecosystems manage to do without straining (such as adapting to climatic variations, and resisting new diseases).

Moreover, trees are living beings, coequal with ourselves in the divine economy of life on planet earth. They define a place, and fill it with their presence, no less than a human being does. They inform the dialectic of ecology far more than human beings do, since they provide habitat for uncountable species with which they are co-dependent, from birds to beetles to nematodes to epiphytes and fungi, whereas humans provide habitat for relatively few. They stabilize the climate, mitigating the build-up of greenhouse gases, cooling the surface of the lands they cover, adding to the local rainfall, and checking erosion. They are outstanding citizens of ecosystems, where humans are not, and they model the good citizenship that God wants us all to practice. And in their unselfish giving and nonresistance to evil they also model the Way of the Cross better than almost any human being since Francis of Assisi.

What Friend has not stood within a naturally-evolved forest and felt the Presence there, in ways that a clear-cutting would diminish? What Friend would say the same of standing within a naturally-evolved crowd of humans, as for example on a random street corner in midtown Manhattan?

No known method of "using wood for biofuels" on any large scale will preserve these ecological and spiritual accomplishments. Rather, such methods will replace the rich natural forest ecosystems with sterile tree plantations. I have walked through such plantations, and I believe God abhors them.

And to diminish these ecological and spiritual works of trees, by treating them as simply a "renewable resource", suitable for mass cultivation ("tree farming") and cutting down and burning and nothing more, and so growing them in "plantations" rather than respecting the way they grow now, horrifies me in the same way that Jonathan Swift's essay A Modest Proposal would have horrified me if it had actually been intended seriously.

With all due respect, dear friend, I personally do not believe "using wood for biofuels" to meet the needs of autos in Los Angeles and Atlanta is the way to go.

With all good wishes,
Marshall