"Getting Biofuels Right: The Biofuel vs. Food and Environment Dilemma"
Monday, February 25, 2008 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Concerns over rising oil prices and greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have caused biofuels to be touted as a solution to both our energy and climate change dilemmas. Current biofuels, however, offer
no real solution.
Corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel provide small energy gains, but both directly and indirectly release more greenhouse gas than fossil fuels. Moreover, any food-based biofuels made by converting
rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands release substantially more carbon dioxide than the annual greenhouse gas reductions that these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels.
In this lecture, ecologist David Tilman suggests solutions: Biofuels can be produced from perennials grown on agriculturally degraded lands without displacing food production or causing loss of
biodiversity through habitat destruction. Similarly, biofuels made from waste biomass, manure, corn stover, forest slash, or thinnings offer immediate and sustained advantages and net energy
gains.
G. David Tilman is Regents’ Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota, and Director of the university’s Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. His research
explores how managed and natural ecosystems can sustainably meet human needs for food, energy, and ecosystem services. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Tilman was the Founding Editor of the journal Ecological Issues. His many awards include the Ecological Society of America’s Cooper Award and its MacArthur
Award, the Botanical Society of America’s Centennial Award, the Princeton Environmental Prize, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He has written or edited five books and published more than 200
papers in peer-reviewed literature that made him the world’s most highly cited environmental scientist for 1990–2000 and for 1996–2006, according to the Institute for Scientific Information.
