By Al Weed

The open debate about how we should respond to our own spoliation of the atmosphere is a good sign in the fight against global warming. We are no longer arguing about who caused what, but now, and more urgently, how we can reverse the carbon tide.

Biofuels are powerful tools that will wean us from petroleum and usher in a greener future for generations to come. Some say there are no meaningful alternatives to fossil energy as every substitute seems to be loaded with problems.

Yet it is ethanol which takes the brunt of media vitriol.

Week after week, the perils of corn-based ethanol are explained by journalists who say they are doing their job to help us all understand the challenges we face in confronting climate change. Today, however, researchers, some public officials, and even farmers, all understand that corn will not be the base for the long-term production of renewable fuels.

The role of other crops is often ignored in the effort to demonstrate the futility of a biofuel future based on corn. The potential for warm-season, native perennial grasses (among which switchgrass is but one variety) is the focus of many who believe that we can find an environmentally sound renewable fuel on the world’s farms

One currently popular “debunking” of biofuels is a Time magazine article by Michael Grunwald, “The Clean Energy Scam.” With titles like this, what is the average person to think?

Consider the so-called “facts” that keep popping up in this genre of article. It is widely asserted that there is a shortage of arable land, and if the United States seeks to produce 36 billion gallons of ethanol a year by 2020 (President Bush’s stated goal), much of the world will go hungry.

If, instead, we seek to make that goal from cellulosic ethanol at the reasonably foreseeable production rates of 10 tons of warm-season grasses to the acre, and 100 gallons to the ton, we would use only the 35 million acres of idle land in the nation’s conservation reserve (the land we pay farmers not to plant). No food production would be displaced.

The biofuel skeptics note that corn ethanol produces only 25 percent more usable energy than its production consumes. Yet University of Nebraska studies show that an energy premium of 500 percent is possible from cellulosic crops. The ethanol refineries now in place will be needed to process these water-saving and carbon-sequestering grasses.

The reality that Grunwald and others ignore is that we are indeed a global economy. The rise in oil prices from both demand in India and China, as well as the leveling off of supply due to “peak oil,” will inevitably lead to markets seeking alternatives.

Some recent writers, Grunwald included, suggest that we’d be better off just burning gasoline and farming for food. Yet increased Third World prosperity (a good thing, to be sure), and the consequent demand for more protein, are putting more pressure on crop land for food than for biofuels. In fact, no one can really be sure which is the greater culprit.

Great progress is being made in yields of environmentally sound grasses. A Washington State University research project has increased switchgrass yields on test fields to from five to 30 tons per acre. Research into butanol, a carbon-based alcohol that can be made from the same feedstocks as ethanol, is promising. Butanol is more efficient than ethanol, can be transported in gasoline pipelines and can be produced with a much higher energy premium. Butanol can be burned at 100 percent in all gasoline engines without any modifications and will reduce air pollution from hydrocarbons by 95 percent.

On the global scale, a commitment to renewable energy will create jobs and new prosperity in every rural community. Cleaner energy will improve worldwide health and productivity. Farmers will have cash to invest in modern technology and increase yields of both food and fuel crops.

Key to this global effort is preserving arable land for its most effective carbon-reducing uses and limiting population pressure on that finite resource. In Virginia alone, we are losing 45,000 acres of farmland to new permanent residential and commercial uses each year. That amount of land could produce the equivalent of 115 million gallons of gasoline. That is about three percent of Virginia’s annual gasoline consumption — every year.

As this debate goes forward, it is vital that all the facts are laid out and that we remain confident that climate change can be arrested. If the public sees only the negative and gives up caring, then the price of global warming will not be paid by this generation in its SUVs and air-conditioned McMansions, but by our children and their children who will face the costs of life-changed dramatically by global warming.

Weed is the chairman of Public Policy Virginia, a Charlottesville-based non-profit working to empower citizens at the local level to engage their communities in responding to the challenge of climate change.