Wall Street Journal
Global plans to tackle climate change, from the Kyoto Protocol to the recently-passed Waxman-Markey bill, have a fatal flaw: They essentially encourage large-scale deforestation, which pretty much undermines the whole idea of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions in the first place.
That's the argument from a new paper published in Science today, written by Princeton University's Tim Searchinger and others. The upshot? Clearing out forests to use the wood for bioenergy clearly has an environmental cost, but that's simply not accounted for in any of the prevailing climate-change programs. Kyoto, the European cap-and-trade plan, and the House climate bill all treat bioenergy as carbon-neutral; nobody counts the effect of disappearing forests.
"Literally, in theory, if you chopped up the Amazon, turned it into a parking lot, and burned the wood in a power plant, that would be treated as a carbon-emissions reduction strategy," DrMr. Searchinger told us.
...The problem is that Kyoto, the European cap-and-trade program, and the proposed U.S. legislation don't include all countries-like those where the forests are getting cut down in the first place. So those greenhouse-gas emissions are slipping through the cracks.
Worse, by treating bioenergy as completely green, current legislation offers a perverse incentive. "This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass, which may cause large differences in net emissions. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon...economics favor large-scale land conversion for bioenergy regardless of the actual net emissions," notes the Science paper.
Please read full by Keith Johnson at WSJ