I've written about the growing evidence that biofuels are becoming increasingly recognized as a menace to the environment, not the boon they were once thought to be. In Are Biofuels A Bummer? in February, I reported on a couple of recent studies showing how pressure on land use from biofuel production was creating the deleterious effect of increasing GHG emissions.
Yesterday, in Grains Gone Wild, the extraordinary economist and "NY Times" columnist Paul Krugman wrote that "…it turns out that even seemingly "good' biofuel policies, like Brazil's use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation." Krugman's analysis tracks that of the researchers I cited in February. "We also need a pushback against biofuels, which turn out to have been a terrible mistake," says Krugman, echoing what I heard Jeffrey Sachs say recently: EU and US biofuels policies are "misguided." There's an eloquent letter from ten top scientists to policymakers in Washington that is a cry to change course.