A GLOBAL PERSEPECTIVE ON BIOFUEL
Please click on the titles below for
each speaker's presentation.
“Renewable Energy Options for the
Emerging Economy:
Advances, Opportunities, and Obstacles”- unavailable
Dan Kammen, UC Berkeley
Daniel M. Kammen is the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy
at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds appointments
in the Energy and Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy,
and the Department of Nuclear Engineering. Kammen is the founding
director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory
(RAEL). Kammen is also the Co-Director of the Berkeley Institute
of the Environment (http://bie.berkeley.edu). Kammen received his
undergraduate (Cornell A., B. ’84) and graduate (Harvard M. A. ’86,
Ph.D. ’88) training in physics. After postdoctoral work at Caltech and
Harvard, Kammen was Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and
Environmental Policy at Princeton University in the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs from 1993 to 1998. He
then moved to UC Berkeley. Through RAEL
(http://rael.berkeley.edu) Kammen works with faculty colleagues,
postdoctoral fellows, and roughly 20 doctoral students on a wide range
of science, engineering, economics, and policy projects related to
energy science, engineering, and the environment. The focus of
Kammen’s work is on the science and policy of clean, renewable energy
systems, energy efficiency, the role of energy in national energy
policy, international climate debates, and the use and impacts of
energy sources and technologies on development, particularly in Africa
and Latin America.
“Factoring Land Use Change into the
Greenhouse Gas Effects of Biofuels”- unavailable
Tim Searchinger, The German Marshall Fund of the United States
Although most studies have
estimated that biofuels can reduce global warming, they generally
include the caveat that if biofuel production triggers conversion of
forest or grassland, the result could be different. Concern about
that problem has grown with the observation that European biofuel
mandates appeared to trigger deforestation and peat fires in Southeast
Asia. Calculations that do not include land use change take an
atmospheric credit for the carbon removed from the atmosphere by
growing feedstocks that implicitly assumes land is brought into
existence to grow the biofuels. Because the land already exists,
has typically removed carbon for decades and will often continue to
remove carbon, biofuel calculations must focus on the net impact on
land-based carbon of using land for biofuels. Using the GREET
model, analysis by CARD at Iowa State, and data on ecosystem types
converted to cropland in the 1990’s, we have calculated emissions from
land use change for corn-based ethanol as land around the world is
pressed into crop production to replace diverted corn. Our
analysis indicates that corn-based ethanol will trigger large initial
increases in greenhouse gasses that are only paid back over
decades. Similar land use change emissions will occur whenever
good U.S. or European cropland is used for biofuels. The talk
will discuss implications for sustainability criteria and the value of
focusing on biofuels from waste products, from biomass grown on low
productivity soils, as well as on biofuels that subsistence farmers can
produce to avoid deforestation.
Timothy D. Searchinger is a Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall
Fund, a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson
School, and a Senior Fellow of the Law and Environmental Policy
Institute at Georgetown Law School. For 17 years, he worked as a
senior attorney at the national advocacy group, the Environmental
Defense Fund, where he directed its work on agricultural policy and
wetlands and founded the Center for Conservation Incentives. He
is a graduate, summa cum laude, of Amherst College and holds a J.D.
from Yale Law School where he was Senior Editor of the Yale Law
Journal. Prior to working for Environmental Defense, he served as
a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of
Appeals and as Deputy General Counsel to Governor Robert P. Casey of
Pennsylvania. He is the author of many articles, and reports on
agricultural programs, wetland protection, and flood policy. He
first proposed the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, which has
restored more than a million acres of stream buffers and wetlands to
protect water quality. He received a National Wetlands Protection
Award in 1992 from the Environmental Protection Agency and the
Environmental Law Institute for a book on the potential impacts of
changing the criteria for wetlands. Searchinger has authored
numerous briefs in the Supreme Court in a broad range of cases.
“Biofuel
in Brazil: Past and Present”
Jose Roberto Moreira, Brazilian Reference Center on Biomass
José Roberto Moreira is a Professor of Physics at the Instituto
de Física and also Professor of Energy at the Instituto de
Eletrotécnica e Energia, at the Universidade de São
Paulo, Brazil. He received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1971 from the
Instituto de Física da Universidade de São Paulo.
Professor Moreira’s research interests are in the areas of Nuclear
Physics, Atomic Physics, Energy Conservation, Energy Planning, and
Energy and Environment. He has authored 220 papers in these
areas, including 21 newspaper articles between 1976 and 2006, and has
presented over 140 lectures and speeches in Brazil and several other
countries between 1975 and 2006. Professor Moreira’s selected
professional activities include Convening Lead Author for the UN-IPCC
reports, Chairman of the Board of Centro Nacional de Referência
de Biomassa (CENBIO), Consultant for the Secretariat of Environment,
State of São Paulo, and Vice President of the Brazilian
Association of Energy Savings Companies (ABESCO) from 1998 to 2002.