Will a phony carbon footprint crush the biofuels industry?

AgricultureOnline
Dan Looker
Successful Farming magazine Business Editor
4/17/2009, 3:41 PM CDT

Biofuel supporters are worried that the EPA is going to use convoluted logic to make ethanol and biodiesel look worse than petroleum when it updates the 2007 Energy Bill's Renewable Fuel Standard this year. The snag is a theory that every U.S. corn or soybean acre devoted to ethanol or biodiesel means an acre of tropical rainforest is being cut down somewhere to offset it and grow food. Deforestation puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Under the law, biofuels have to show that they reduce greenhouse gases compared to petroleum-based fuels. Biodiesel has to be 50% better than diesel fuel, says Ray Gaesser, a Corning, Iowa, farmer who is a vice president of the American Soybean Association.

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