GoodFuels

Time Flunks Ethanol Fact Test

The same guy who brought us “The Clean Energy Myth” cover story in Time magazine last year has a similarly biased story in this week’s issue filled with inaccuracies and down-right falsehoods.

I hope that “Stress-Testing Biofuels: How the Game Was Rigged” by Michael Grunwald is supposed to be commentary, rather than actual reporting, since it clearly features the writer’s anti-ethanol bias and opinions.

Grunwald cites “Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger” as his primary resource for the evils of ethanol, the same environmental lawyer and author who was the basis of last year’s cover story, despite the fact that his theory of international land use change has been refuted by actual scientists. Grunwald writes as if Searchinger’s “work” is proven fact:

Yet the real problem with farm fuels, as Searchinger and others have shown, is in the 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. And that acre may well be an acre of wetland or forest that would otherwise store loads of carbon. So farm fuels become a lose-lose deal: exacerbating the deforestation that already creates one fifth of the world’s carbon emissions, and driving up global food prices.

More than 100 scientists and researchers disputed this assertion in a letter to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier this year, saying the science of indirect land use is “in its nascent stage, is controversial in much of the scientific community, and is only being enforced against biofuels.”

Regarding deforestation, the letter from the scientists noted that “most primary forest deforestation is currently occurring in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia as a direct result of logging, cattle ranching and subsistence farming. Adding an iLUC penalty to biofuels will hold the sector accountable to decision-making far outside of its control (i.e. for decisions related to the supply chains of other products), and is unlikely to have any effect on protecting forests or mitigating GHG emissions as a result of land management practices.”

In blaming biofuels for driving up global food prices, Grunwald links to a February 2008 Time photo essay which paints a dire, heart-rendering picture of starving people around the world. The implication is that ethanol is responsible for children rummaging though garbage for food in Somalia. This goes beyond irresponsible reporting into downright lying, especially considering a recent Congressional Budget Office report found that ethanol was responsible for just 10 percent of last year’s increase in domestic food prices while oil prices were responsible for 36 percent. In addition, the U.S. exported a record amount of corn last year even with higher ethanol production, which belies the notion that because we are making food into fuel we are depriving the world of needed sustenance.

Renewable Fuels Association president Bob Dinneen has written a letter to Time magazine “objecting to the unbalanced and factually inaccurate reporting/editorializing on biofuels by Michael Grunwald” and attempting to set the record straight. We’ll see if it gets published.