Fuzzy Math: Most Overlooked Biofuels Story #6

“The lesson for policymakers,” we quoted an Iowa State research team in “Chicken Little, Corn Little, Jatropha Little: Is the Sky Really Falling?“, “is that results from economic models depend heavily on assumptions, and because we are trying to predict long-run human behavior, there can be legitimate differences in these assumptions.”

Readers generally avoid indirect land use change as a topic, or articles that look critically at the underlying numbers in models of “carbon payback”. But they were a lot more interested in the topic by the time that many of the basic tenets of “carbon debt” had become “received wisdom” amongst environmental groups and were used as a hammer to unhinge support for the corn ethanol tax credit this summer.

In this February article, the Digest revealed that simply assuming a one percent increase in corn yields, per decade, reduced a projected carbon debt by 80 percent, and increasing yields by one percent per year (as they are currently increasing now), the carbon debt is virtually wiped out.