Don't suffer biofuels gladly

Tom Philpott writes at Grist:

Imagine you're a policy maker with the power to commit federal cash and rules to a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fossil-fuel use. You'd want to build in mechanisms to make sure your policies are working toward your goals and not having all sorts of negative unintended consequences ... right? Well, that's what a coalition of green NGOs -- Environmental Working Group, Friends of the Earth, Network for New Energy Choices, the Clean Air Task Force, and New York Public Interest Research Group -- are calling for with regard to the nation's biofuel policy. They charge that the U.S. biofuel program actually "exacerbates global warming" because of greenhouse gas emissions from nitrogen fertilizers and the conversion of grasslands and rainforest to cropland. Further, the mass production of monocropped fuel feedstocks like corn, soy, and palm degrades soils, increases water pollution, drives out biodiversity, and endangers the food security of vulnerable populations. In the process of creating these lamentable side effects, biofuels are offsetting a relatively small amount of conventional fuel use -- and are grabbing the lion's share of federal support for alternative energy. In short, biofuels have been an abject failure...