A controversial new study, funded by the American Petroleum Institute, found that, over an eight-year period, cars fueled by corn ethanol would have caused more carbon pollution than using gasoline, reports Climate Central.
The study, by researchers at the University of Michigan Energy Institute, was published in the journal Climatic Change. The researchers used a new approach to measuring biofuel pollution which relied largely on “tail pipe pollution and crop growth linked to biofuels.”
This approach challenges the widely accepted approached endorsed by the EPA, called “life-cycle analysis,” which postulates that the pollution from biofuels is absorbed by growing crops. The Michigan study “found that energy crops were responsible for additional plant growth that absorbed just 37 percent of biofuel pollution from 2005 to 2013, leaving most of it in the atmosphere, where it traps heat,” says Climate Central.
“I’m bluntly telling the life-cycle analysis community, ‘Your method is inappropriate,’” said professor John DeCicco, who led the work. “I evaluated to what extent have we increased the rate at which the carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere?”
Climate Central says that studies of “the life-cycle impacts of growing corn and other crops to produce ethanol have generally concluded biofuels can create between 10 percent to 50 percent less carbon dioxide pollution than gasoline.” But it adds: “Such benefits are more conceptual than scientific, turning scientific debates at the EPA and elsewhere over how to calculate them into seemingly intractable policy quagmires.”
Daniel Schrag, a geology professor at Harvard who advises the EPA on bioenergy climate impacts, told Climate Central that there is no question that using biofuels benefits the environment, but that those benefits can take years to accrue. “What timescale should we look at?” Schrag said. “Some of the fundamental questions about timescale are not scientific questions. They are societal questions.”