GoodFuels

Bob Dinneen in Huffington Post

Renewable Fuels Association’s CEO Bob Dinneen in his latest Huffington Post blog:

“As with his cover story last year, with the even-handed headline “The Clean Energy Scam” Grunwald’s (TIME author Michael Grunwald) recent article relies on a theory propounded by a source whom he describes as “Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger.” As Grunwald writes, the thesis that producing ethanol has “indirect effects on land use: when an acre of land is used to grow fuel instead of food, an extra acre somewhere else is probably going to be converted into farmland to grow food.” Moreover, he continues, “that acre may well be an acre of wetland or forest that would otherwise store loads of carbon.”

While he is indeed housed at Princeton University, Searchinger is an attorney by training, not a scientist, an economist, or an agronomist. So his assessment of the likelihood that the increased production of biofuels in the United States will require the despoiling of forests and wetlands which will deposit carbon in the atmosphere and promote global warming is as worthy of respectful attention as the views of any other attorney with a interest in economics, agriculture, and the environment.

Indeed, the EPA examination — and Grunwald’s journalism and Searchinger’s thesis even more so — ignore the actual alternative to biofuels: petroleum products. By exploring the “indirect land-use change” that may be caused by producing biofuels but not the comparable consequences of any other industry, including producing and using petroleum products, these stories and studies offer little illumination for the debates that must be held and the decisions that must be made.”

Dinneen goes in even more detail about the mistruths Grunwald talks about in his article. Definitely worth a read.