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Featured stories in this issue...

We Can't Publish Rachel's News Without Your Help
  For 20 years Rachel's News has been helping you build a just and
  sustainable world. Now Rachel's needs your help.
Money To Burn
  The mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is considering selling city
  buildings -- including City Hall -- to raise cash to pay for a failed
  garbage incinerator.
The End of the Throwaway Society
  The throw-away society, which is damaging the planet and public
  health, has been encouraged by public policies that reward waste. A
  new policy called "extended producer responsibility" (EPR) could
  change the incentives and end the throw-away society.
Is It Time for A New Economics?
  Most environmental problems are rooted in our economic system,
  which requires growth for the sake of growth. But it doesn't have to
  be this way. Just as we no longer believe that the earth is flat,
  humans can learn that we all live together on a finite planet, which
  means perpetual growth is impossible.
Biofuels Seem Like the Answer To Oil. Are They?
  We want to believe we can replace fossil fuels with biofuels
  (ethanol and biodiesel from crops). But a burgeoning biofuels market
  in the U.S. is creating massive deforestation in the Third World.

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From: Rachel's Democracy & Health News #884, Dec. 7, 2006
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WE CAN'T PUBLISH RACHEL'S NEWS WITHOUT YOUR HELP

Dear Readers,

We appreciate your loyal readership since 1986. But we need your help
to keep Rachel's News free for those who cannot afford to donate. As
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We're celebrating our 20th Anniversary! Since 1986, Rachel's News has
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about dangerous and wasteful technologies like incinerators, nuclear
power, landfills, and the many chemical products that harm our health
and borrow from future generations. And we are one of a small handful
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From: Rachel's Democracy & Health News #884, Dec. 7, 2006
[Printer-friendly version]

MONEY TO BURN

By Peter Montague

To alleviate massive debt created by the city's garbage incinerator,
the mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania has proposed selling off the
city's Pubic Safety Building, headquarters for the city's police and
fire departments. Harrisburg is the state capital of Pennsylvania.

Harrisburg's mayor of 20 years, Stephen R. Reed, had initially
considered selling off City Hall itself, but settled for selling the
police-and-fire building instead. The city is flirting with bankruptcy
as the incinerator's debt burden grows.

The mayor says selling the Public Safety Building, then leasing it
back from its new owner, will raise $10.5 million in short-term cash.
The cost of this bit of creative financing would be borne by future
taxpayers.

Background

In June, 2003, Harrisburg's 31-year-old garbage incinerator shut down
because it could not meet air quality standards. But the city still
owed $104 million on the machine, which would have to be repaid at the
rate of $7 million per year through the year 2030.

Mayor Reed came up with the idea of borrowing another $125 million to
finance a facelift for the defunct machine. The refurbished
incinerator would be designed to burn 800 tons of garbage per day,
about 8 times as much as Harrisburg itself produces. The machine would
import garbage and sell steam and electricity to turn a profit. At
least that was the plan.

To feed the machine and reassure investors that they would get their
$125 million back with interest, Harrisburg signed contracts with
dozens of municipalities in Dauphin, Cumberland and Perry Counties
giving Harrisburg the exclusive right to burn their garbage. Such an
arrangement is called "flow control," and "flow control" was declared
illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994, but Harrisburg officials
insist their plan is legal and can survive any future lawsuits by
independent waste haulers seeking to compete with the Harrisburg
incinerator.

As soon as the city's incinerator plan was announced, citizen
opposition flared. But city officials fought back with a campaign of
frightening predictions. They foresaw major problems for taxpayers if
the $125 million loan were rejected. Dan Lispi, the Harrisburg
official in charge of the incinerator, said annual property taxes on a
$100,000 home would rise $500, waste disposal fees would skyrocket,
the city would become dependent on dwindling and uncertain landfill
space, and there would be "mass layoffs" of city workers.

On the other hand, city officials offered a rosy picture of the
refurbished incinerator's financial future, estimating that the plant
could earn as much as $23.6 million in its first full year of
operation in 2006 -- enough to pay its $9.9 million in annual
operating costs, handle the debt payments and begin building a cash
surplus.

But residents who turned out for public hearings in August, 2003, said
they'd heard similar rosy projections before, when the original
incinerator was proposed. They pointed out that the original machine
had never worked reliably and that the city had repeatedly borrowed
more money to try to improve performance. "You'll never convince me,"
that refurbishing the old incinerator makes sense, said resident
Evelyn Warfield. She outlined the financial history of the original
incinerator and presented a petition opposing the new project.

Green Party member Frank Divonzo pointed out that debt on the old
incinerator, which was $41 million in 1993, had more than doubled to
$104 million by 2003 as officials struggled to keep the original
machine working.

But Harrisburg officials were adamant -- rebuilding the incinerator
was the city's only hope, they said. So they pressed on and arranged
to borrow $125 million for an $80 million facelift of the old machine,
plus $45 million in incidentals. Local lawyers, engineering
consultants, financial advisors, accountants, and bankers found the
plan rewarding.

Environmental Racism

The incinerator is located in south Harrisburg where 70% of residents
are black. The International Ministers Conference of Harrisburg filed
a last-minute appeal, saying the project was a clear case of
environmental racism. Both the Harrisburg Authority, which owns the
incinerator, and the state Department of Environmental Protection,
which approved the project, jumped on the ministers with both feet,
saying their appeal was both too late and without merit.

The hearing board quickly sided with city and state authorities,
ruling that the ministers had filed their appeal too late, and denying
any evidence of racism. The original incinerator was built when the
neighborhood was predominantly white, they said, and blacks moved in
later as whites moved out. The hearing board refused to acknowledge
the obvious -- that such a familiar pattern of land use is prima facie
evidence of white privilege, a familiar form of racism.[1] The mayor
said he knew the ministers would keep an eye on the incinerator to
prevent health problems from emerging, tacitly acknowledging what has
been obvious for years -- that state and local officials are not up to
the task of regulating such a machine.

Harrisburg's refurbished incinerator was supposed to begin burning
garbage January 2, 2006, but steel shortages (in Pennsylvania!) and
construction delays plagued the project. The Harrisburg Authority gave
the firm doing the work -- Barlow Projects Inc. -- a four-month
extension to complete the job, and it waived a penalty clause calling
for Barlow to pay the city $22,000 for each day the project was late.
City Council members have since acknowledged that this was "an
incredibly bad decision."

The refurbished machine never worked right from day one. John Luciew,
a reporter for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, wrote, "Even when the
incinerator's three burners were lighted, design flaws with the trash
and fuel feeds at one end and the ash handling at the other have
hampered operations to the point where just one or two furnaces are
firing at any time." In addition, the machine took more staff to run
than first thought, resulting in double shifts and abundant overtime.

By late November, the incinerator had earned $12.6 million less than
projected for 2006, and the city of Harrisburg was facing a budget
shortfall of $13.8 million. The city borrowed $7 million to pay some
of its bills. The mayor initially estimated that the incinerator was
responsible for $5 million of the shortfall, and that fixing the
design flaws in the machine would require an additional investment of
$5 to $10 million. By December 1 the mayor revealed that it would cost
$14 million to fix the incinerator's design flaws, including replacing
its ash-handling systems.

It was around this time that the mayor began thinking of selling city
hall to a private party, then leasing it back.

Of course, such a short-term fix would only make the long-term picture
worse. Harrisburg and its taxpayers -- not the Harrisburg Authority --
are now on the hook for about $220 million in incinerator-related
debt. That equates to payments of about $16 million each year for the
next 30 years. Essentially the refurbished incinerator will have to
work perfectly every day for the next 30 years to meet its financial
obligations. No incinerator in the world has ever achieved such a
flawless record of performance.

In desperation, Harrisburg is now considering turning over
management of the incinerator to the company that mis-designed it in
the first place, Barlow Projects Inc. Under the new plan, Barlow would
form a management subsidiary called Harrisburg Resource Recovery
Operation LLC that would manage and staff the facility for about $10.5
million annually. The Harrisburg Authority would still own the plant,
and the taxpayers of Harrisburg would still own the financial
liability.

The management contract would allow Barlow to secure financing for the
$14 million in improvements needed to fix the plant. Barlow, not the
authority, would pay for the upgrades.

But the deal would destroy the jobs of the 45 city employees who work
at the plant. Incinerator officials have said they will "talk to"
union officials before privatizing 45 unionized city jobs.

Cynics point put that plan to privatize 45 city jobs has several
salutary effects from the point of view of both city officials and the
corporate sector:

(a) 45 union jobs will disappear, thus diminishing the bargaining
power of one of the only strong unions remaining in the U.S.,
government employees. At a time when Harrisburg will undoubtedly try
to squeeze its workers to pay for a long series of "incredibly bad
decisions" by management, it is probably essential -- from
management's perspective -- to weaken the union.

(b) Government workers cannot legally contribute to anyone's re-
election campaign, but private workers can be subtly coerced by their
employers into giving campaign contributions -- so the deal could
politicize a substantial pot of money that might now slosh around at
re-election time in Harrisburg;

(c) If Barlow fails to run the incinerator properly, the city, not
Barlow, will remain liable for the $220 million in debt that the
machine has racked up so far.

(d) If regulations on ultrafine particles, or mercury, or other
emissions from the incinerator are tightened at any time during the
next 30 years -- as seems inevitable -- additional retrofits and
additional debt will become necessary.

(d) The waste industry -- always politically alert and active -- no
doubt appreciates that the refurbished incinerator will create
powerful, ongoing incentives to prevent three large Pennsylvania
counties from adopting waste-reduction or recycling measures for the
next 30 years.

With $220 million in debt as a driver, all the incentives in
Harrisburg are now set to encourage the production of as much waste as
possible for the next three decades, to feed the machine.

==============

[1] Laura Pulido, "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege
and Urban Development in Southern California," Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, Vol. 90, No. 1 (2000), pgs.
12-40. [10 Mbyte PDF]

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From: The Networker, May 1, 2005
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PRODUCTS, WASTE, AND THE END OF THE THROWAWAY SOCIETY

By Helen Spiegelman and Bill Sheehan, Ph.D.**

A century ago, when Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) systems
were new, New York City garbage collectors picked up more than 1,200
pounds of waste per resident per year. But in 1905, three-quarters of
that waste was coal ashes. Fifteen percent was garbage. Only eight
percent was "rubbish" -- everything else from scrap paper to old
mattresses, the discards that are now called "product waste" (Morse
1908).

Today, the ashes are gone from household waste but local waste
managers are dealing with more than 1,600 pounds of waste per person
per year. "Product waste" is now three-quarters of what people throw
away. And despite huge public investments in recycling since the
1980s, most of that waste is still buried in landfills or burned.

MSWM systems were set up a century ago in the United States to protect
public health. They have become a perverse public subsidy for the
Throwaway Society. More and better waste management at public expense
has given unlimited license to proliferate discards. Today these
systems collect 3.4 pounds of product waste a day for each American
man, woman, and child -- twice as much as in 1960 and ten times as
much as 100 years ago. It is time to revamp the system so that it no
longer supports the throwaway habit.

The evolution of trash The MSWM system includes wastes from
residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial sources but not
industrial process wastes. As the term "municipal solid waste"
implies, local governments play a key role in delivering services,
planning, and regulation.

Crowding in industrial cities in the 19th Century gave rise to
repeated epidemics of contagious disease and created political support
for public investment in municipal sanitation, first to provide clean
water and sewerage and later, at the turn of the century, to collect
and dispose of refuse. Municipal refuse included not only household
waste but also massive quantities of feces from horses and other
animals. Pressure from citizen groups like the Ladies Health
Protective Association in New York City and the Municipal Order League
in Chicago compelled cities to replace or supplement the private "cart
men" who collected refuse with uniformed garbage collectors paid by
the city. By 1930, MSWM had been organized in most cities.

Since that early survey of garbage pickup in New York City, people
have continued to discard about the same amounts of food waste. A new
category, yard trimmings, has been added. Coal ash is now treated as
industrial waste, not household waste. The key change, however, has
been the ten-fold rise in product waste, from 92 to 1,242 pounds per
person per year. Containers and packaging now represent 32 percent of
all municipal solid waste. Non-durable goods (products used less than
three years) are 27 percent, and durable goods are 16 percent.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has been keeping statistics on
MSW since 1960, with the most recent update being for 2001 (EPA 2003).
During the last 40 years of the 20th Century, total municipal solid
waste grew from 88 million tons per year to 230 million tons, an
increase driven almost entirely by product wastes.

Reduce, reuse, recycle During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the public
began to see polluted, overflowing municipal landfills as a crisis.
The understanding also grew that the world's economies were using
natural resources at a rate that is unsustainable. Proponents of
sustainable development suggested that advanced economies such as
those of the United States and Canada would need to reduce per capita
material flows to one-tenth of modern levels to meet the needs of
future generations of the world living at our standards. Accordingly,
in 1989 the US EPA established the following hierarchy of "integrated
waste management" practices for municipalities:

Reduce wastes at the source (e.g. by backyard composting, product
reuse); Recover wastes (e.g. by recycling, municipal composting);
Dispose everything else in an environmentally sound way. Thousands of
local governments decommissioned local landfills and built new ones
that would better contain contaminants. Local governments also
invested public resources in recycling programs that would reduce the
flow of MSW to landfills and incinerators. How effective have these
programs been? The big success story has been composting and reuse of
yard trimmings. This started around 1988 and has risen steadily by an
average of 1.18 million tons per year since then. In 2000, 56.5
percent of all yard trimmings entering the MSWM system were being
recycled in some way rather than burned or sent to landfills.

After 20 years of municipal investment in recycling programs, however,
more than 70 percent of all municipal solid waste is still being
buried or burned rather than recovered. The disposal rate has
decreased gradually (it was 90 percent in 1980), but in the last
decade the decrease has been driven mainly by the recovery of yard
trimmings. Product waste recycling has leveled off at about 30 percent
of the product wastes that enter the system. Four-fifths of the
disposed waste goes to landfills, the rest to incinerators. Meanwhile,
we continue to generate and discard more and more products.

What municipal solid waste systems can't do

Why has recycling not kept up with the increase in product waste? Why
are such large quantities of both product and non-product waste
(especially food scraps) still ending up in landfills and
incinerators?

The answers to these questions lie in an inherent limitation of
current systems for handling product wastes. For these wastes, the
EPA's "integrated waste management" strategy is largely beyond the
control of the MSWM system. The system cannot reduce wastes at the
source and it cannot require products to be designed for recycling or
safe disposal.

Waste prevention lies entirely outside the boundaries of the MSWM
system. And outside the boundaries of the system, reducing waste at
the source brings little benefit. In 1999 EPA identified a number of
challenges facing waste recovery efforts, including the lack of market
demand for collected materials and product design that makes materials
difficult to recycle (US EPA 1999, p. 125 ff). There is no incentive
to buy recycled material, whereas waste managers must continue to
offer these materials for sale, even when oversupply drives prices
down. Product manufacturers derive no benefits from designing products
that are easy to recycle or safe to bury or burn, nor do they incur
any costs when their products cause environmental damage after
disposal.

If managing product wastes were an extension of the production and
consumption system, and the costs and benefits of waste management
accrued to producers, these problems would begin to find solutions.
Instead, MSWM has enabled the marketing of disposable convenience
products, whose convenience is provided by the MSWM system at public
expense. The provision of universal collection and disposal of product
wastes created conditions that made the Throwaway Society a natural
response to the laws of the market.

Giving up on sustainability The MSWM system was originally set up to
manage a waste stream made up of relatively homogeneous materials such
as ash and biowastes. It cannot mirror the exquisitely complex
marketing and distribution system that gets products to consumers in
the first place, so it cannot easily optimize the value of product
wastes. MSW managers tend to favor large-scale facilities for mixed
waste because they are easier to control and more predictable in cost
(Murray 1999).

The practice of managing mixed waste means that great quantities of
biodegradable materials, including unrecycled paper, yard trimmings,
and nearly all food scraps, are being discarded, mainly in landfills,
where they produce methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as
potent as carbon dioxide. Landfills are the largest human-made source
of methane in the United States. New studies suggest that landfill gas
collection systems may be far less efficient than previously thought,
and that proposed "bioreactor" landfills may actually exacerbate the
problem in the short term (Anderson 2005).

With product waste recovery stalled and the proportion of waste sent
to landfills and incinerators still at around 70 percent, MSWM
practitioners are turning to other schemes such as recovering thermal
energy from incinerators and gas from landfills. But recycling saves
far more energy than those technologies produce (Morris 2005). By
trying to recover energy from mixed waste, waste managers are
conceding defeat on the goals set in the 1980s to stem materials flows
and conserve resources.

Make producers responsible

Extending producers' responsibility for managing products when
consumers are done with them is a promising alternative to the current
system of handling product wastes. Known as Extended Producer
Responsibility (EPR), this policy approach requires producers (brand-
owners) to manage their products at the end of their lives through an
infrastructure financed by producers and provided as a service to
consumers. To be sure, consumers ultimately pay for improved
environmental performance, but including end-of-life management costs
in product prices is what drives innovation toward sustainable
products and services.

The precursor to EPR was the refillable container system developed a
century ago by the beverage industry. Ironically, this system is all
but extinct now in North America because of two public policies. One
was public investment in the national highway system, which made it
more economical to ship one-way from distant production facilities
than to operate local bottling plants. The other was the MSWM system,
which took care of the empties.

EPR has a small foothold in the US, where 11 states have established
take-back programs for beverage containers. Maine adopted legislation
in 2004 requiring manufacturers to finance the recycling of computers
and TVs collected by municipalities.

Canada has gone much further. Since 199l EPR has become established
policy in Canada for many products (Sheehan and Spiegelman 2005).
Ontario and Quebec are introducing a form of EPR that relies on MSWM
to recover product waste for recycling, with partial reimbursement by
industry. Other provinces are allowing producers to form their own
product return and recycling systems, while government sets standards
and ensures compliance. Comparing the two approaches will provide
guidance for future policy.

We believe government policy at all levels should expedite a
transition to separate, complementary EPR and MSWM systems.

MSWM should focus on environmentally sound management of food wastes
and yard clippings generated in communities. Government policy should
direct the MSWM system to provide separate collection and treatment of
organic materials and encourage research and development in this area.
Landfill regulations in North America should set a date for a sharp
reduction in landfilled biowastes, as the European Union did in a 1999
directive. Municipal biowaste management programs should ensure that
certain kinds of non-recyclable fiber products (such as waxed
cardboard, food-soiled paper products, sanitary products, and other
low-grade paper products) are safe for biodegradation. These products
must also pay their way through the system.

Product wastes should increasingly be managed through infrastructure
provided and funded by producers as part of the production and
consumption system. Governments at all levels can send clear policy
signals that EPR is the direction of the future. They can issue policy
resolutions and white papers; ban disposal of products that can be
recycled; require EPR systems for a continually increasing range of
products, and then keep EPR products out of the waste system; and they
can impose disposal surcharges.

The MSWM system begun a century ago has contributed to the
unsustainable growth of material flows in advanced industrial
economies. It is not designed for effective management of product
wastes. EPR is a promising alternative, but the MSWM system must be
adapted to support it. MSWM must gradually withdraw its service for
product wastes and expand treatment of source-separated organics. This
will, in turn, support sustainable production and consumption and
protect public health.

REFERENCES

Anderson, P. 2005. Critical Review of EPA Model to Estimate Landfills'
Responsibility for Greenhouse Gases. Center for a Competitive Waste
Industry, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, in press.

Morris, J. 2005. "Comparative LCAs for curbside recycling versus
either landfilling or incineration with energy recovery,"
International Journal of Life Cycle Analysis, in press.

Morse, W.F. 1908. "The Collection and Disposal of Municipal Waste."
The Municipal Journal and Engineer, New York, NY, USA.

Murray, R. 1999. Creating Wealth from Waste. Demos, London, UK.

Sheehan, B., and Spiegelman, H. 2005. "Extended Producer
Responsibility Policies in the United States and Canada: History and
Status." In D. Scheer & F. Rubik, editors, Governance and
Sustainability: The Case of Integrated Product Policy, Greenleaf
Publishing/UK, in press. Available at http://www.productpol
icy.org/assets/EPR-US-Canada-01-2005.pdf

US EPA. 2003. Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2001 Facts
and Figures. US Environmental Protection Agency. Available at http
://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/msw99.htm

This article is adapted from the Issue Brief, Unintended Consequences:
Municipal Solid Waste Management and the Throwaway Society, (Athens,
GA: Product Policy Institute, March 2005). Available at
www.productpolicy.org/resources/

The Product Policy Institute is an independent nonprofit research
and communications organization focusing on the link between
production and consumption, on the one hand, and waste generation and
disposal on the other, in order to promote public policies that
encourage more sustainable practices.

**Helen Spiegelman is President of the Product Policy Institute. She
can be reached at hspie@telus.net. Bill Sheehan is Director of the
Product Policy Institute (Athens, Georgia). He can be reached at
bill@productpolicy.org or www.productpolicy.org.

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From: Resource Insights, Dec. 3, 2006
[Printer-friendly version]

COPERNICUS, DARWIN AND THE CURE FOR AUTISTIC ECONOMICS

By Kurt Cobb

Autistic children can spend much of their time in a world of
elaborate fantasy, emotionally detached from real people and objects.
Unfortunately, it is not much of a leap to substitute the words "most
economists" for "autistic children" in the previous sentence. So
apparent has this become that there is a burgeoning movement to
establish what is now called a "post-autistic economics" to meet the
challenges of describing the real social and physical world we live
in.

This wouldn't matter much were it not for the inordinate say that
economists have in shaping public policy of all kinds and at all
levels. Those of the post-autistic persuasion say that establishment
economists have become a priestly class of sorts that enforces its
neoclassical view on any and all who would dissent. It does this by
keeping them off college faculties and out of key policy positions.

But as the biosphere presses its limits upon us in the areas of
energy, climate, water, soil and pollution, the neoclassical economic
view that human ingenuity will allow the species to ignore every other
species on the planet and grow the world economy indefinitely has
become life threatening, even civilization threatening.

The cure for this view was suggested by a dear friend. It is a
surprisingly simple move, and one with an impressive pedigree. The
Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to work out how
the Earth revolved around the Sun. He thus began a journey for
humankind that removed it from the center of the universe and placed
it, to borrow the words of environmental education giant, David Orr,
"on a small planet attached to an insignificant star in a backwater
galaxy."

What Copernicus had done for astronomy, Charles Darwin did for
biology. After Darwin humans would no longer be set apart from the
animal kingdom. Henceforth, they would be only one of its many
inhabitants, buffeted by the same laws of mutation and natural
selection as the ape and every other living creature.
Anthropocentrism in biology was finished.

It is now time -- long past time -- for a Copernican/Darwinian
revolution in economics in which humans cease to be seen as the
privileged species, homo economicus -- at the center of everything and
exempt from the limits of the biosphere. Instead, humans need to be
placed within the same systems that nourish every plant and animal on
Earth. In this case, however, there is a twist. Far from having to
realize how insignificant and unexceptional we are, we must come to
understand that we have evolved into a different species which
William Catton Jr. has dubbed "homo colossus," a man-tool hybrid
capable of destroying the very habitat that sustains us and so many
other creatures.

The simple fact is that the economy cannot become bigger than the
biosphere. (There are, of course, some believers in Star Trek-style
fantasies who envision us exploiting and living on other planets. To
such people may I suggest that they get started on this project right
away since we are running out of time to turn things around here on
Earth). Humans already consume at least 40 percent of the
photosynthetic product of the Earth each year and, that's an estimate
from 1986 when the population was 5.5 billion. Now it is 6.5 billion.
And it's projected to be close to 9 billion by 2050. Could we
increase our share of the world's photosynthetic product to 60 percent
as the 2050 projection implies and still survive? Would we wipe out
species upon whom we depend, but of which we currently know nothing?
Even if we could transition away from finite fossil fuels, would
finding a theoretical, but as yet unknown, unlimited and pollutionless
energy source really solve our problems? Or would it simply cause us
to bump up against other limits?

When you undergo the Copernican/Darwinian revolution in economics, you
cannot avoid such questions. The physical world and its limits must be
accounted for. To that end some researchers are proposing a
comprehensive biophysical economics. One outline of an approach to
such a problem can be found in an article entitled "The Need to
Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics."

The field of study now known as ecological economics has been
working on the problem in a piecemeal fashion for a long time. But
even though a comprehensive biophysical economics may never be
possible -- since it would require understanding everything about the
natural world -- we must attempt the feat for two reasons: 1) to
expose the dire peril in which neoclassical economics has placed us
and 2) to suggest ways to build an economy that can operate
indefinitely on the Earth and not one that only functions until it
destroys the Earth's capacity to sustain us.

The French writer Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand is reputed to have
said, "Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them." It is
to this problem that economists must now turn themselves.

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From: Grist, Dec. 5, 2006
[Printer-friendly version]

WHAT ABOUT THE LAND?

A look at the impacts of biofuels production, in the U.S. and the
world

By Julia Olmstead

Great news! We can finally scratch "driving less" off our list of ways
to curb global warming and reduce our dependence on foreign oil!
Biofuels will soon not only replace much of our petroleum, but improve
soil fertility and save the American farmer as well!

Sound too good to be true? Well, yes. But you could be excused for
buying the hype.

Ethanol and biodiesel are being promoted as cures for our energy and
environmental woes not just by flacks for corporations like Archer
Daniels Midland, BP, and DuPont, but by many eco-minded activists and
some prominent environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense
Council as well.

As intuitive as it may seem that fuel from plants would be more benign
than petroleum-based fuels, the ecological impacts of biofuel
production are more complicated, and wider-reaching, than an
environmentalist might first imagine.

For years, some critics have claimed that corn-based ethanol has a
negative "net energy balance" -- that is, that ethanol requires more
energy to produce than it delivers as fuel. But as biofuel production
efficiencies have improved, critics have turned their focus to broader
sustainability issues.

"Even if corn and soy biodiesel have positive energy balances, that's
not enough," says Andy Heggenstaller, a graduate student at Iowa State
University researching biofuel crop production. "Large-scale
production of corn and soybeans has negative ecological consequences.
If biofuels are based on systems that exacerbate soil erosion and
water contamination, they're ultimately not sustainable."

Stalk in Trade

Corn is one of the planet's most energy-intensive crops. Industrial
corn production requires huge quantities of synthetic nitrogen
fertilizers (derived primarily from natural gas) and petroleum-based
pesticides like atrazine, a known endocrine disrupter. Soybeans need
less nitrogen, but farmers douse bean fields with other nutrients and
with chemicals like Roundup to keep them pest-free.

The effects of corn and soybean production in the Midwest include
massive topsoil erosion, pollution of surface and groundwater with
pesticides, and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi
River to deplete oxygen from a portion of the Gulf of Mexico called
the dead zone that has, in the last few years, been the size of New
Jersey.

As ethanol use pushes corn prices higher, farmers are increasingly
abandoning the traditional corn-soybean rotation to what's known in
farm country as corn-on-corn. High prices have encouraged farmers to
plant corn year after year, an intensification that boosts fertilizer
and pesticide requirements.

Water use has also become a concern as corn production expands into
drier areas like Kansas, where the crop requires irrigation. The
ethanol boom has sent water demands skyrocketing, putting pressure on
already suffering sources like the Ogallala aquifer.

And according to a recent report by the World Resources Institute,
stepped-up corn ethanol production means not only increases in soil
erosion and water pollution, but increases in greenhouse-gas
emissions. "If your objective is reducing greenhouse-gas emissions,
you need to be aware of what's happening in the agricultural sector,"
says Liz Marshall, coauthor of the WRI study.

Ethanol proponents say the fuel emits up to 13 percent fewer
greenhouse gases than gasoline. But an increase in emissions on the
farm could cancel out benefits from emission decreases at the
tailpipe.

A Kinder, Gentler Crop?

These environmental concerns have led researchers like Heggenstaller
to join a wave of interest in a new generation of biofuels, the much-
hyped but yet-to-be-seen-on-the-market cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic
differs from grain ethanol in that the fuel comes from the fiber in
the plant, rather than the starches in the grain. Any type of plant
material can be a source of cellulose, and even cow manure could be
processed into fuel.

Fans of cellulosic ethanol are interested in perennial grasses like
prairie native switchgrass and towering miscanthus, which require much
lower quantities of fertilizers and pesticides than corn and eliminate
the need to plow fields annually, a major cause of soil erosion. They
say these crops could produce much greater quantities of biomass than
corn, and on lands less suitable for crop production.

Indeed, if biofuels are going to make a substantial dent in meeting
our fuel needs, processors will need to look beyond corn. If all the
corn currently grown in the U.S. were turned into ethanol, it would
replace only 15 percent of our annual gasoline demand. (By way of
comparison, we could eliminate 15 percent of our gasoline demand by
increasing average fuel efficiency of U.S. cars by just four miles per
gallon -- an attainable goal using on-the-shelf technology.)

Due to soybeans' relatively low oil yield, soy biodiesel production in
the U.S. has already been written off as marginal by most researchers.
So many academic and industry leaders are intensely optimistic about
the transition to cellulosic sources.

"There's no doubt cellulosic ethanol can supply our energy needs,"
says Emily Heaton, manager of Energy Crop Product Development at
Ceres, Inc., a California-based plant biotechnology company that's
working to develop high-yield biomass crops. She agrees with
projections from the U.S. Department of Energy that say fuel from
perennial grasses could replace more than a third of our petroleum
needs by 2030. "We'll be producing more than a billion tons of biomass
a year in an environmentally sustainable way," Heaton says.

But even the advent of cellulosic ethanol -- which is not expected to
come on line for at least several more years -- could mean more corn,
according to Charles Brummer, a professor of plant breeding at the
University of Georgia who works with switchgrass and other perennial
biomass plants. Corn stalks and other residues from the corn harvest
could be used to make cellulosic ethanol just as readily as
switchgrass.

"Farmers will produce what makes money," Brummer says. "As long as
farm programs support corn production, we're not going to see them
growing much of anything else."

Meanwhile, in the Rest of the World

The hype over biofuels in the U.S. and Europe has had wide-ranging
effects perhaps not envisioned by the environmental advocates who
promote their use. Throughout tropical countries like Indonesia,
Malaysia, Brazil, and Colombia, rainforests and grasslands are being
cleared for soybean and oil-palm plantations to make biodiesel, a
product that is then marketed halfway across the world as a "green"
fuel.

In Southeast Asia, and increasingly in the Amazon, plantations of the
African oil palm have become wildly lucrative. After monocropping the
palms on recently cleared rainforest land, growers press the palm
fruit and kernel for oil that can be used in both food and industrial
applications, including -- and increasingly -- as biodiesel.

The palm oil industry is booming: global exports increased more than
50 percent from 1999 to 2004. To meet the growing demand, producers in
Malaysia and Indonesia have ramped up production by clearing thousands
of square miles of rainforest for new plantations.

In Indonesia, rainforest loss for oil palms has contributed to the
endangerment of 140 species of land animals, while in Malaysia animals
like the Sumatran tiger and Bornean orangutan have been pushed to the
brink of extinction. Fish kills have become common in waterways
surrounding plantations and palm-oil mills, as soil erosion from the
cleared land and mill effluents have left waterways clogged with
sediment and unviable.

The boom hasn't been limited to Southeast Asia. In one of the most
disturbing examples of the biofuel hype's hidden effects, right-wing
paramilitary groups in Colombia -- a country mired in a four-decade-
old civil war -- have in recent years begun planting oil palm
plantations over wide swaths of the territory they control. These
areas of tropical forest, which lie in the northwestern coastal region
known as the Choco and rank among the planet's key storehouses of
biodiversity, have been almost entirely expropriated through violence,
including massacres of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities that
have forced those populations out of the region.

Farther south, another biodiversity hotspot is being rapidly cleared
to plant a biodiesel crop. Nearly 80 percent of Brazil's Cerrado
region -- a woodland savanna mix -- has been cleared for agricultural
production, mostly for soybeans, according to a Conservation
International report.

Despite being home to thousands of endemic plant and animal species,
the Cerrado has been promoted as "the last agricultural frontier" by
green-revolution hero and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug. Low
land and labor costs and high yield potential have sent investors from
as far away as Iowa scrambling to buy up these Brazilian grasslands,
frequently in collaboration with U.S. agribusinesses like Archer
Daniels Midland, whose first Brazilian biodiesel production facility
is currently in the works.

Tad Patzek, a professor in UC-Berkeley's Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering who's known primarily as a critic of corn
ethanol, says what's happening in tropical ecosystems is much more
serious than the biofuel situation in the U.S. "We've already
destroyed the prairie, and the topsoil in the Midwest is going, going,
gone," Patzek says. "But the expensive noise we're making here is
being translated there into the total obliteration of the most
precious ecosystems on earth."

- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -

Julia Olmstead is a graduate student in plant breeding and sustainable
agriculture at Iowa State University and a graduate fellow with the
Land Institute in Salina, Kan., and a freelance writer on agricultural
and environmental issues.

Copyright 2006. Grist Magazine, Inc.

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