DALE: Sound policy needs sound science

The Washington Times
Bruce Dale
Wednesday, November 26, 2008

As the Environmental Protection Agency fulfills its requirement to determine how direct and indirect land use change is impacted by crops produced to make biofuels, it needs to assure that good science is used to create good policy.

It would be easy - and wrong - to rely on a much-publicized study that connects U.S. corn ethanol production to greenhouse gas release via indirect land use change. Indirect land use change refers to bringing new lands into agricultural production, and thereby creating a "carbon debt," because of market forces.

This study, first publicized in ScienceExpress online in February 2008 and widely quoted in a Time magazine cover story in March, cast a pall over all biofuels and has chilled investment in advanced non-grain-based biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol. My evaluation is that the study meets neither the standards for scientific significance nor life cycle analysis as required in the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007.

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