When it comes to the discharges that cause global warming, biofuels are more damaging than gasoline.
According to a new study from the University of Michigan, biofuels industry which has been highly encouraged and expanded for over a decade by the federal government may be created on a false supposition.
One might think that plants should be a carbon-neutral source of fuel. They absorb carbon dioxide while they develop so when they’re turned into fuel and consumed to produce power, carbon dioxide travels back into the atmosphere.
Well, the study’s lead author, John DeCicco, who is a research professor at UM’s Energy Institute believes that when it comes to the discharges that cause global warming, biofuels are more damaging than gasoline.
The study, based on U.S. Department of Agriculture crop production data, reveals that during the years when U.S. biofuel production quickly ramped up, the enhanced carbon dioxide uptake by the crops was only sufficient to offset 37 percent of the CO2 emissions due to biofuel combustion.
Researchers assume that growing biofuel use has been linked to a net increase — rather than a net reduction, as many have declared — in the carbon dioxide emissions that generate global warming.
Moreover, the grounds of policies used to encourage biofuels for reasons of climate have now been shown to be scientifically inaccurate.
The novelty of these data is that they come straight from America’s croplands and are now confirming the worst concerns about the harm that biofuels do to the planet.
When witnessing the big picture, one could observe that not enough carbon is being withdrawn from the atmosphere to adjust what’s coming out of the tailpipe.
In response to policies, such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, the use of biofuels to replace petroleum has increased over the last decade.
Consumption of liquid biofuels, principally corn ethanol, and biodiesel has raised only in the United States from 4.2 billion gallons in 2005 to 14.6 billion gallons in 2013.
The environmental justification rests on the theory that biofuels, as renewable options to fossil fuels, are inherently carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide delivered when they are burned was procured from CO2 that the organic corn or soybean plants extracted from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
DeCicco and his colleagues examined real-world information on crop production, vehicle emissions, and fossil fuel production without assuming that biofuels are carbon neutral.
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