The Indirect Land Use Change controversy continued to roil as two papers were released critical of the calculations reached by a team led by Tim Searchinger in the seminal Princeton study that ignited the “food vs fuel” controversy last January. One paper Dr. John Mathews of Macquarie University, was published in Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining and viewable here >, while another is published here , concluding in part: “The Searchinger et al. paper is framed in extremely negative terms that depict all biofuel production taking place in the USA and all derived from corn…The study then deliberately ignores possible trade effects, such as a proportion of this ethanol spike being met by imports from countries such as Brazil. It even ignores the Congressional cap that was placed on US first-generation corn-based ethanol, which was levied at 15 billion gallons (i.e., half the spike used by Searchinger et al.).” Meanwhile, the hearings in California on the proposed Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which by including an indirect land-use change in its biofuels emissions calculations has focused attention in ILUCs, is now in a comment phase, and comments can be viewed here . Commentators include the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (which has also critiqued ILUCs), plus support for ILUC from Friends of the Earth. Other prominent commentators to date include Brooke Coleman of the New Fuels Alliance, Shell Oil, the Nebraska Corn Board, Environment California, a group of scientists led by Lawrence Berkeley scientist Blake Simmons, and the Oregon Environment Council.
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Indirect Land Use Change controversy swirls: two Searchinger critiques published; California LCFS comments from New Fuels Alliance, Friends of the Earth, Shell Oil among many others
