With the evolving “green” movement in the United States and in the world economy, comes a new set of cause-and-effect considerations.  While the idea of “going green” and the widespread use of biofuels and ethanol sounds great in theory, there are many factors that must be considered.  Just because one aspect of a process produces less hydrocarbons than it did previously does not mean that the net effect of the entire process will result in fewer greenhouse gases.  This is especially true where the green movement relates to the timber industry.

Producing cellulostic (plant-based) biofuels has many unarguable advantages, with one of the most enticing being the idea of freeing the United States from dependence upon foreign oil.  However, in order to truly evaluate the full impact of such a movement, as many factors as possible must be considered. One of the critical impacts of a growing demand for biofuels, especially those that are plant-based, is the effect that such a demand will have on the existing land usage in a country and even on a worldwide scale.

According to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the “amount of land that could be dedicated to energy biomass is limited, as most of the suitable land is, in use for agriculture, human settlement, covered by forests, or locked up in protected areas (FAO, 2003). Therefore, energy biomass plantations may compete with the existing agricultural land uses and/or may lead to the use of the remaining natural landscape that should be kept under conservation.”

As the competition for agricultural usage begins to encroach onto forested land (timber), the obvious result is deforestation.  The net effect is quite often an INCREASE in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease in greenhouse gases. There are studies that show that harvesting forest resources to produce biofuel results in 25 to 30% of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year (1.6 billion tones).  If the deforested land is then replanted with row crops rather than tree stands, the added long-term cumulative result is even worse because there are then less trees to convert carbon dioxide the oxygen through photosynthesis.

While the ultimate result of the effectiveness of various aspects of the green movement, and the production and use of biofuels in particular, are still under evaluation and may be for many years to come, one thing is for certain.  Whatever means are employed should be well thought out with an open mind that is free from pre-determined conclusions.  An effective movement toward “going green” will be composed of a variety of ideas, actions, and innovative methods, but must be tempered with common sense looking at the whole picture from a cause-and-effect perspective.  We must push for processes that result in overall greenhouse reductions and freedom from fossil fuel bases energy rather than simply jumping onto any bandwagons simply because it sounds good or may be politically expedient to do so.