Biofuels Damage the Environment: Nitrous Oxide Trumps e cientists working on behalf of the International Council for Science (ICSU), a Paris-based federation of scientific associations from around the world, have issued a new report that says biofuels do more to create global warming than burning fossil fuels. The reason is that raising the plants to be turned into ethanol and biodiesel releases large volumes of nitrous oxide (N2O), which is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) as a greenhouse gas. Once again, trying to solve humanity's longterm energy and climate problems by hastily grasping at so called green solutions has resulted in the opposite of what eco-activists have claimed.
Biofuels have been promoted as a way of reducing the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Plants such as sugar cane, corn (maize), wheat and oilseed rape absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. In theory, burning fuels made from them should have no net effect on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and, therefore, should not contribute to global warming. In Europe, efforts have concentrated on the use of rape seed oil for biodiesel while America has focused its efforts on corn in the short term with a vague promise of a shift to non-food cellulose (wood) sources sometime in the future.
The ICSU report concludes that the production of biofuels has increased rather than reduced global warming. In particular, it supports the controversial findings published in 2007 by Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Dr Crutzen concluded that most analyses had underestimated the impact on global warming of N2O by a factor of three to five. The amount of this gas released by farming biofuel crops such as corn or rape offsets any advantage offered by reduced emissions of CO2.
It is bad enough that growing crops for fuel has