Of late, there has been a lot of excitement in India over the ‘bio fuels’, or ‘green fuels’, products obtained from sorghum, sugarcane, corn (maize), oilseeds and, lately jatropha, as a viable substitute to the fast depleting fossil fuel reserves. The conventional reasoning has been two.
First, the dangers of global warming attributed primarily to the accumulation of carbon dioxide caused due to the combustion of fossil fuels in the fuel tanks of automobiles. The other is the escalating bill of the imported energy (fossil fuels) as India’s reserves in comparison to its internal needs, are only meagre. As the ‘bio fuel bandwagon’ got going, concern was building up on another front, and that is far more worrying, which is agriculture. Fertile land, which once was put to grain crops, was being shifted to grow these bio fuel crops. In the United States, corn, which has been the staple for centuries, is being increasingly used to extract ethanol as automobile fuel. This led to the escalation of grain prices and those on the Asian, African and Latin American continents, especially the poor, felt the pinch.
Though many people consider bio fuels a promising way of reducing the amount of surplus carbon dioxide that is being pumped into the atmosphere — primarily through automobile combustion — it is increasingly being questioned whether this is a sensible way of combating global warming. The theory is that plants such as corn, sugarcane, oil seeds like rape (from which bio diesel is produced in Europe), and wheat take up carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, and so burning fuels made from them should have no net effect on the amount of that gas in the atmosphere. Bio fuels, therefore, should not contribute to global warming. And that is ‘conventional wisdom’. But, is that the real case?
Just as governments, either in the United States or Europe, or in India, as it is beginning to happen, have committed themselves to greater use of bio fuels, questions are being asked about its true scientific wisdom. The latest comes from a report produced by a team of scientists working on behalf of the International Council for Science (ICSU), a Paris-based federation of scientific associations from around the world.
The ICSU report concludes that, so far, the production of bio fuels has aggravated rather than ameliorated global warming. In particular, it supports and validates some controversial findings published in 2007 by Paul Crutzen of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. He concluded that most analyses underestimated the importance to global warming of a gas called nitrous oxide by a factor between three and five. The amount of this gas released by farming bio fuel crops such as corn and rape seed probably negates by itself any advantage offered by reduction in the emissions of carbon dioxide. Although nitrous oxide is not found in the earth’s atmosphere, it is a far more potent green house gas (GHG) contributing to global warming than carbon dioxide, and it hangs around in the atmosphere far longer than the former does. The upshot of this finding is that, over the course of a century, the ability of nitrous oxide to warm the planet is almost 300 times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
Since 1960, the amount of chemical fertilizers used by farmers in India has increased almost six-fold and not all that nitrogen ends up in boosting the yield of the crop to which it is put. In fact, maize, to which nitrogen-based fertilizers is applied in plenty, is a ‘nitrogen leaky’ plant, meaning a substantial amount of the nitrogen applied to it can be lost in running water, which in effect, makes the crop one of the most hazardous in contributing to global nitrous oxide emissions.
The underlying message is that unlike what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-sponsored body of experts, which came under limelight two years ago for the Peace Nobel that it was decorated with, says about the ill effects of carbon dioxide as the main culprit in global warming, the role of nitrous oxide is vastly underestimated. Also, the case of the bio fuels shows that without proper consideration of all green house gases, not just carbon dioxide, it is too easy to rush headlong into expensive methods of mitigation, that actually make things worse. India will have to seriously take note of this to rein in its uncalled for euphoria over the ‘bio fuel bandwagon’, lest we end up as bio fools.
(The author is an agricultural scientist. E-mail: mavila_p@yahoo.com)
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