Deborah

I may be wrong but your post seems to give the AFF a pass.

The AFF is an industry group that, among other things, provides free material to teachers that advances the forest industry agenda, which is not necessarily pro forest. The dairy industry does the same as well as other industry groups. As a teacher, I’m well aware of the tactic. The driving force of these groups is profit not education.

Their list of sponsors is the give away. Years ago these were the same groups who were advocating the practice of clear cutting to “improve” the forest. They are also now the same groups who advocate prescribed burns.

In other words, they’re getting taxpayer money to burn.

I have decades of observing one of the sponsors, the Illinois Dept. of Natural Resources Division of Forestry, burn a large area of forest acreage on state land near my home. The damage done is a testament to the lie that prescribed burns are necessary to improve the forest.

Please, in what little remains of the eleventh hour of our planet, refrain from such obfuscation and misinformation around turning our forests into ethanol as a good thing. The explicit message is “food versus fuel” is all we have to be concerned with. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Most people can rightfully intuit forests have functions that go beyond corporate profiteering from ethanol blends. That the taxpayer is subsidizing 51 cents a gallon for ethanol production is reprehensible in itself.

While we can understand Earth and Sky’s deep appreciation for its corporate funders such as the American Forest Foundation, Shell, Monsanto, BP and others deeply invested in the biomass industry, there’s two decades of science to draw from to give us serious pause. From that science we can grasp the foolishness of thinking biomass is going to solve our problem of fossil fuel dependence creating catastrophic climate change. Reducing forests to ethanol greatly worsens the mass extinction going on, and accelerates ocean acidification and global climate change.

Biomass removal destroys structure and function of forest ecosystems and massive species declines are already our fate. The harm resulting from carbon released by forest biomass removal far exceeds any purported “efficiencies” your report blithely claims. Forests have functioned as carbon sinks, carbon reservoirs, essential plant and animal habitat, regulators of weather, and are necessary to sustaining watershed functions to name a few other benefits besides corporate commodities.

Tad Patzek, UC Berkley, College of Engineering, Charles A. S. Hall, State University of New York, College of Environmental Science & Forestry and David Pimentel, Prof emeritus Cornell and perhaps some others have done very credible and detailed analysis of Biofuel cycles and have conclusively shown that no Biofuel cycles can ever be net energy positive. It’s in the Thermodynamics. Beyond that, it is necessary that such biomass remain on the forest floor to maintain the “health” of the soil necessary to sustain the forest. Neither industrial “mining” of the forest overgrowth, forest floor or cropland can ever be net energy positive. If Patzeg is correct, and I have every reason to understand that he is correct, then it follows that Janaki Alavalapati who was interviewed on the Earth & Sky program must be dead wrong in his claim of the sustainability of harvesting Biomass from the forest floor.

But it is Patzek’s paper Thermodynamics of the Corn-Ethanol Biofuel Cycle which provides an excellent treatise on what is possible and not possible and what the terms Sustainable and Renewable actually mean. This is covered very nicely in Section II, Sustainability & Renewability and in several sections in the appendices of this paper. This paper does presuppose a good working knowledge of Thermodynamics that is beyond the level of introductory college physics, i.e. the Fist and Second laws of Thermodynamics. But much more important is that Patzek’s “message” goes well beyond the issues surrounding Biofuels. He tells us (how to determine) what is possible and not possible.

There is far too much “gee wiz” “engineering” and “advocating” from the “uninformed” going on everywhere, especially from special interests, in regard to the Energy Question. It’s the whole System which must be understood. Everything is interconnected. But it is ultimately the continuous flow of “free energy” which enables anything to happen and the only indefinitely sustainable flow of “free energy” ultimately comes from the incident radiation from the sun. Some of that, a very small amount, was stored in fossil fuels over millions of years in the past. Some other “free energy”, a larger amount, is held in the the deposits of the U235 isotope and that could last for, perhaps, several thousands of years with fast breeder reactor technology. Atomic fusion might some day be possible and that would provide an effectively inexhaustible supply of “free energy”. So when we use the term Sustainable we really need to ask “sustainable for how long”. Radiation from the sun, which also drives the wind. ocean waves and etc, is an effectively inexhaustible but it is a very dilute inflow of “free energy” which, necessarily, requires concentration to be useful and that necessarily presents very significant and complex technological problems.

Best regards, John King