Climate of unintended consequences – NYT

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
http://ift.tt/1WIzElD

Bret Stephens at The New York Times delves into the erroneous ‘climate-friendly’ image of biofuels, and questions the claimed success of renewables in general. Not new criticisms, but new for the NYT at least.

A few extracts from the piece:
“Converting biomass feedstocks to biofuels is an environmentally friendly process. So is using biofuels for transportation. When we use bioethanol instead of gasoline, we help reduce atmospheric CO2.”

These confident assurances come from “Biofuels: A Solution for Climate Change,” a paper published in 1999 by the Clinton administration’s Department of Energy. Feels a little dated in its scientific assumptions, doesn’t it?

. . .
It seemed so obvious. Flex-fuel engines, which mix gasoline and ethanol, were advertised as the motors of the future. Brazil, with one of the most developed markets for biofuel production and consumption, was touted as a country of the future.

Dramatic advances in biofuels tech, we were told, were just around the corner. And biofuels would help us gain energy independence and hence greater security from terrorism.

Wrong on pretty much every count.
. . .
Turning to renewables he writes:
There’s also been some acknowledgment that Germany’s Energiewende — the uber-ambitious “energy turn” embarked upon by Angela Merkel in 2010 — has been less than a model for others. The country is producing record levels of energy from wind and solar power, but emissions are almost exactly what they were in 2009.

Meanwhile, German households pay nearly the highest electricity bills in Europe, all for what amounts to an illusion of ecological virtue.

The author concludes:
We need to make policy choices based less on moral self-regard and more on attention to real-world results.
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Full article: Climate of Unintended Consequences – The New York Times