GREENHOUSE AFFECT

Trendy climate-change policies like ethanol and other biofuels are actually worse for the environment than fossil fuels, according to two studies published in Science, a peer-reviewed journal. The first study, by ecologists at Princeton University and the Woods Hole Research Center, break new ground by exposing a kind of mega-accounting error:

• About 2.7 times more carbon is stored in terrestrial soils and plant material than in the atmosphere, and this carbon is released when these areas are cleared. Compounding problems is the loss of "carbon sinks" that absorb atmospheric CO2 in the bargain.
• When the hidden costs of conversion are included, greenhouse-gas emissions from corn ethanol over the next 30 years will be twice as high as from regular gasoline.

In the long term, it will take 167 years before the reduction in carbon emissions from using ethanol "pays back" the carbon released by land-use change.

[167 years - I believe we're all supposed to be drowned by then]

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