Is GHG emissions reduction even important? A glance at the past:

It’s all well and good talking about the potential GHG emissions savings of biofuels compared to fossil fuels, but why is this important in the first place? Once again, I am questioning the validity of the topic of this blog; not to worry, biofuels and their potential to reduce anthropogenic environmental impacts are important and I will now show why.

Well, first of all, as most readers will know, anthropogenic GHG emissions have been found to be contributing significantly towards the recent climate change phenomenon of the Anthropocene epoch (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003). The vast increase in population since the period of the Industrial Revolution has meant severe implications for the environment, with 20% of global forests cleared in the last 100 years (Vitousek et al., 1997), which has decreased the ability of forests to uptake greenhouse gases. The period of the Industrial Revolution encompassed other major inventions, such as James Watts’ steam engine of 1784 which allowed people to travel, thereby increasing global greenhouse gas concentrations. Additionally, other activities, such as consumer goods production became industrialized, meant that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by over 30% and methane concentrations by over 100% in the last two centuries (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003). This happened at a rate of 10-100 times faster than that of the last 420,000 years (Falkowski et al., 2000), causing a rise in global temperatures of 0.6ºC in 100 years (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003). Although it seems to be impossible to convince 'hard-core' sceptics such as George Bush, I hope I have managed to convince at least some of you that humanity has contributed to the recent atmospheric GHG emissions increase and to climate change and that the discussion on biofuels is thus important as biofuels can potentially be a means of decreasing this impact.

Additionally, decreasing GHG emissions through biofuel production is likely to have other positive impacts, such as the potential significant reductions in pollution from road transport, for example, which can be viewed here.

To fully evaluate the benefit of biofuels, other environmental and the socio-economic issues of biofuels need to be examined first, which is what I am going to do next. However, this post doesn’t conclude my research into the GHG saving effect of biofuels. To be able to make a conclusion about this, we would need to account for the planet’s biofuel growing potential first, as this effect is proportional to how much biofuel can be grown sustainably. This can not be done without examining effects other than GHG emissions which may make biofuel cultivation ‘unsustainable’: i.e. the potential socio-economic and ecological impacts of biofuels.