land use

Biofuels are touted as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, but they come with their own set of problems. One of the biggest concerns lies in the displacement of food crops like corn, which can raise food prices and have other indirect effects around the world on land use and agriculture.

A new production method could begin to alleviate that problem while solving another: It turns trash into biofuel.

Brazil is the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, responsible for about 5 percent of current global GHG emissions.

Maybe this isn’t shocking. It’s a huge country. Its south is speckled with major population centers, and it has a southern industrial belt. Yet most of its emissions don’t come from its cities or its factories. At least not directly. They come from its land.

Trees? Made of carbon. Good soil holds a lot of carbon. Plants draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

It’s well-known that the trick to reducing net carbon emissions relies on not emitting so much of the stuff and finding a way to get it back where it belongs.

That’s where the land comes in. Thirty percent of greenhouse gases come from “the land-use sector.” The land holds thrice the amount of carbon polluting the atmosphere. So let’s talk farming. Let’s talk trees. And let’s talk land degradation.

That’s the argumentative thread running through the Worldwatch Institute’s newest report, Mitigating Climate Change through Food and Land Use, by Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit.

The first step is simply realizing the magnitude of agricultural or forestry-based contribution to emissions and, potentially, to absorption. Amidst the talk of carbon-scrubbers, Gehry-esque solar plants plunked down in deserts, tidal turbines, hybrid cars, and maglev trains, land is often sidetracked.

Oddly.