At this point, it’s pretty well-established that the jury is still out on the good that biofuels do for the environment, but most of that debate is based on how the fuel gets produced. However, a new report published in Science magazine (as reported by NPR) states that, in reality, how we measure emissions from biofuels is what’s really damaging the environment.

See, what happens (to paraphrase the NPR story) is that when you burn corn-based ethanol in your bioful car, the government counts you as having emitted no carbon at all, because it figures that the corn itself offset that carbon when it was growing. We still on the same page? Good. Well, a group of scientists have found a logical error in this thought process. Says the story, by way of example:

“Even if you were to cut down the world’s forests and turn them into a parking lot, and take the wood and put it in a boiler — which obviously releases enormous amounts of carbon from the trees — that is treated as a pure way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” [Author Tim] Searchinger says. “And that’s obviously an error.”

So the fallacy, if adopted, gives an incentive to cut down trees to make more room for crops to turn into biofuels. Why? Well, because no one thinks about (1) the carbon emissions from merely burning down a forest, (2) the carbon savings lost from not having the forest, and (3) that if you burn biofuels, it may be that the corn plant, for example, hasn’t actually offset your emissions. Basically, “in an effort to avoid double-counting carbon emissions, the treaty negotiators ended up with a system that never counts them at all.” It becomes pretty apparent pretty fast that on this logic, biofuels aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

Oh, and when I said “if adopted,” I should have said, “now that it’s been adopted.” By European law and the Kyoto Protocol. As well as, of course, in the American climate change bill (though the Senate version does have some forest-protecting safeguards). So this is pretty big. Fortunately, the fix for this, conceptually speaking, is incredibly simple.

Nations simply need to count all carbon dioxide coming out of tailpipes and smokestacks, regardless of the source. Then, if the source of the biofuel is a destructive source, like deforestation, there would be no carbon emissions credit. But if it is from a good source, like plants grown on previously barren land, that would earn a carbon credit.

Will that happen? Well, who knows. Once something’s enshrined in law or treaty, there’s often a resistance to change it. Often, because someone’s already making money off it. However, now that awareness of this fallacy is out in the open, perhaps at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change an agreement that corrects the error can be reached. Though I can’t imagine how the American Farm Bureau would feel about that.

photo credit: Hammer51012’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons