Climate of unintended consequences

The botched biofuels effort shows the need for basing policies on real results

“Converting biomass feedstocks to biofuels is an environmentally friendly process. So is using biofuels for transportation. When we use bioethanol instead of gasoline, we help reduce atmospheric CO2.”

These confident assurances come from “Biofuels: A Solution for Climate Change,” a paper published in 1999 by the Clinton administration’s Department of Energy. Feels a little dated in its scientific assumptions, doesn’t it?

I raise the subject of biofuels since the subject of science — what we know as opposed to what we think we know about it — has been on my mind in recent days. I’ve been accused of obscurantism, closet climate denialism and willful misdirection — all for the crime of insufficiently attesting to the dangers of a warming trend I do not deny.

I plead guilty to trying to maintain some historical perspective.

So let’s talk about ethanol and other biofuels, a subject some climate-change activists might prefer to forget. In 2007, George W. Bush used his State of the Union speech to call for huge increases in the production of renewable and alternative fuels such as ethanol. Democrats were firmly on board, and President Barack Obama pursued a largely similar course in his first years in office.

It seemed so obvious. Flex-fuel engines, which mix gasoline and ethanol, were advertised as the motors of the future. Brazil, with one of the most developed markets for biofuel production and consumption, was touted as a country of the future. Dramatic advances in biofuels tech, we were told, were just around the corner. And biofuels would help us gain energy independence and hence greater security from terrorism.

Wrong on pretty much every count.

Since 2007, ethanol production has more than doubled. Yet motor gasoline consumption is at an alltime high. The United States does have appreciably greater energy security, but that’s thanks mostly to fracking, not ethanol. And greenhouse emissions are down, but not much on account of biofuels. For that, we can thank some combination of the long recession, the switch from coal to gas and the turn to wind and solar energy.

But perhaps none of this would have mattered much if biofuels had simply been a bit less successful than promised. In fact, they were actively harmful.

In Brazil, the ethanol industry was built on an underbelly of hundreds of thousands of workers laboring as “ethanol slaves.” Using corn for fuel rather than food caused a worldwide spike in food prices with grievous effects on the world’s poorest. Scientists figured out that, far from being clean burning, cars that run on ethanol emit vast quantities of acetaldehyde, which reacts with sunlight to form ozone, a constituent of smog.

And there was this: “By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change,” Timothy Searchinger of Princeton and other researchers reported in 2008, “we found that cornbased ethanol, instead of producing a 20 percent savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.”

In other words, the three central claims made in the Department of Energy paper quoted at the top of this column were misleading or wrong. Factually wrong. Wrong for the environment. Wrong for taxpayers. Wrong for the allocation of government funding and scientific research. Wrong for our energy mix. Wrong politically: Whatever else we conclude about ethanol, the one thing that won’t soon go away soon is the biofuel lobby in Washington.

And wrong for the reputation of climate science.

In recent years, some climate activists — Al Gore notably among them — have owned up to their biofuels mistake. More recently, we’ve seen some acknowledgment of other errors, having more to do with policy than science.

Thus, today there’s a keener appreciation that cap-and-trade regimes such as Europe’s ambitious Emissions Trading System have been costly failures, with one study suggesting the ETS had “limited benefits and embarrassing consequences” in terms of emissions — at an estimated cost to consumers of some $280 billion.

There’s also been some acknowledgment that Germany’s Energiewende — the uber-ambitious “energy turn” embarked upon by Angela Merkel in 2010 — has been less than a model for others. The country is producing record levels of energy from wind and solar power, but emissions are almost exactly what they were in 2009. Meanwhile, German households pay nearly the highest electricity bills in Europe, all for what amounts to an illusion of ecological virtue.

Still, what acknowledgment there’s been has generally been belated, grudging and rarely self-reflective. What’s missing is an understanding of the harm that can be done when do-something impulses and eco-cure boosterism become turbocharged by government power and subsidized business.

I’m not for a second suggesting that we shouldn’t continue to pursue and increase fundamental research and investment in clean tech, at least if we can do it without having the government pick winners and losers. A majority of Americans favor exactly that, on a bipartisan basis. There’s room for agreement, or at least productive disagreement — and compromise.

The lessons are legion but, more often than not, unlearned. We need to make policy choices based less on moral self-regard and more on attention to real-world results.

Bret Stephens is a columnist for The New York Times (Twitter @BretStephensNYT).