Feb 8, 2008 08:18 AM in Energy & Sustainability | Post a comment

Ethanol worse than gasoline -- Oil companies now officially "green"?

We already knew that corn ethanol is, at best, only a little better, emissions-wise, than plain old gasoline. Now a study in Science indicates that biofuels are even worse, in terms of the net CO2 they're going to pump into the atmosphere, than the gasoline we're already putting into our cars. Mostly because of land-use changes.

"Prior analyses made an accounting error," says one study's lead author, Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University. "There is a huge imbalance between the carbon lost by plowing up a hectare [2.47 acres] of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels."

-- Biofuels Are Bad for Feeding People and Combating Climate Change | Scientific American Which raises the question -- if biofuels are a nightmare and universal adoption of electric vehicles is decades away, doesn't that make plain old petrochemicals the greenest "alternative" fuel out there?

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Powering a Green Planet: Sustainable Energy, Made InteractiveThe Web-only article below is a special rich-media presentation of the feature, "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030", which appears in the November 2009 issue of Scientific American. It was created by FlypMedia.com. Use the arrow in the lower corner to navigate