Back Forty: The fatal flaw in the EU’s climate plan

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By Bridget Huber

The European Union is currently negotiating the details of a plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by2030. But a recent commentary in the journal Nature argues that the plan, called Fit for 55, would actually sacrifice carbon storage and biodiversity, because it relies on bioenergy from wood and crops.

By increasing its use of bioenergy, the EU would increase its”land carbon footprint,” that is, the land — both in the EU and abroad — used to produce the wood and crops that it consumes. Using land to produce bioenergy means it can’t be used for food or to restore habitat, explains Timothy Searchinger, a co-author of the paper who’s asenior research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment and a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute.

This question of tradeoffs isn’t just pertinent to the EU. The world is facing the interlinked crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, which must be addressed together to avoid unintended consequences or counterproductive efforts. And, as the European example shows, a narrow focus on domestic emissions and land use can be misleading without accounting for their effects on other parts of the world. This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Give us a quick background on Fit for 55.

The plan has a series of different laws designed to reduce energy emissions — it would require member countries to increase their renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and require shipping and aviation to use fewer fossil fuels. It would require preservation and even some increases in carbon storage withinEurope. It’s very comprehensive, and in many ways, impressive, but it has this one serious limitation, which is its treatment of biofuels.

Let’s talk about that.

Ultimately, there’s only so much land in the world, right? And so pretty much all climate strategies require that you more or less immediately stop deforestation and clearing new habitats. And most actually require that you reduce the size of your agricultural lands. But it’s very hard to do that because we have these additional demands for food.
 
Unless Europe reduces its footprint, there is no clear pathway to solving climate change. Europe uses about one hectare of land abroad for every three hectares of cropland in Europe [to meet its food and wood needs]. And the Fit for 55 plan would dramatically increase Europe’s footprint. The EU’s own modeling predicts that it would convert a fifth of its cropland to energy crops, that there’d be a fourfold increase in imported wood and an overall doubling of bioenergy, which would more than double the amount of land used. It needs to go in the opposite direction.  
 
In the current plan, you wouldn’t have land to restore forests in Europe. And you’d outsource more of your food and wood supply, which means more people cutting down trees elsewhere — the southern U.S., Canada, Eastern Europe and Russia.

This seems like such an obvious contradiction.

Some people have the mistaken idea that burning plants for bioenergy is carbon neutral. They think that because plants absorb carbon from the air when they’re growing, that burning them just recycles the carbon that they had sequestered — that it doesn’t add carbon to the air. It’s a compelling idea. But it takes land to grow plants, land that can be used to grow food or restored as habitat. 
 
When you call biomass carbon neutral, you’re ignoring the opportunity costs of that land. This is a fundamental accounting error.

Which undermines biodiversity and climate goals.

In the EU’s own plan you see these bizarre contradictions. One of their goals, from a biodiversity standpoint, is to preserve semi-natural grasslands. These grasslands support a lot of plant diversity and butterflies and other insects and birds. But the EU’s own models for bioenergy production project that they’re going to get rid of half of them — the law tells them to plow them up and turn them into energy crops. And if they don’t plow them up, then they’d have to buy the biomass somewhere else, which means outsourcing even more land use.

What sort of parallels are there with our use of biofuels here in the U.S.?

It’s roughly the same. In the U.S. we have a huge amount of agricultural land relative to our population, and it’s got huge value and is needed to help feed the world. At this point, we’re basically taking the entire state of Iowa out of food production to grow crops for biofuels. That has very harsh consequences for the world. And the reason we’re not burning that much wood for energy, although we do some, is only because we haven’t had laws forcing people to reduce their carbon emissions. But there’s an annual fight over a congressional rider that designates burning wood as carbon neutral. So it’s very much an active issue here, too.

So the answer is using renewable energy, like wind and solar, not wood or other plants.

Burning trees for bioenergy is a really bad idea. It’s a very inefficient form of energy. Even before you use it as fuel you lose about half of the tree — decomposing bark, some of the wood. And it takes a long time for trees to regrow. Land that can produce plants is very valuable. We need it for food. We need it for forest. It’s incredibly inefficient at producing energy. If you compare a hectare of land used for solar cells vs. a hectare of land growing crops for biofuels, the land in solar will produce 100 times more usable energy than biofuels.

You’ve argued that Europe shouldn’t outsource its food production, overall, since yields are much higher there than elsewhere in the world.

Exactly. But the EU is doing the opposite. And it can be hard to think about it because they’re importing and exporting different things. Importing soybeans and coffee but exporting pork and wheat. You have to combine all of this, and say, are you a net moocher or a contributor? And Europe is a net user of other people’s land. Europe is in a position to reduce land use requirements and we need it to do its share, because if it doesn’t, other countries have to do even more. And many are in less of a position to do this — other countries are still increasing in population and are starting to eat more than just a small amount of milk and meat. Europe has already reached peak meat. It’s already had its period of population growth.

In the paper, you lay out a more sustainable path forward for the EU.

If Europe continued to increase yields and reduced its per-capita meat and milk consumption by about 17 percent, it could free up 30 percent of its agricultural land. You’d have 30 million hectares that you could do something with. Grow food, or sequester carbon by rewetting the peatlands that are currently being farmed and that emit huge amounts of carbon. And you could improve habitat, because basically 30 to 70 percent of Europe’s species categories are categorized as rare to endangered. But to do any of this, you need to reduce your footprint. So there are all these good alternative uses for land that are being sacrificed for biofuels.