Time magazine is calling “clean energy” a scam. The latest issue reports that acres of Amazon rain forest are being razed, bulldozed, and burned to grow crops for biofuels, and that many Amazonian forests are emitting massive amounts of carbon as a result.
From Time:
The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It’s been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it’s released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation.
John Carter, a “Texas cowboy,” told Time, "You can’t protect it. There’s too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."
The deforestation of precious lands isn’t isolated to the Amazon; it’s a widespread problem affecting forests and natural habitats throughout the world.
Time reports:
Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world’s top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it’s running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it’s subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It’s the remorseless economics of commodities markets. "The price of soybeans goes up," laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, "and the forest comes down."
According to Time:
…Several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous.
See also: Ethanol Production is Spreading the Dead Zone
Photos via flickr by phpfunk & apintog.
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