Speaking of biofuels, why aren't we getting them right?

Unraveling (by one or two threads) the climate policy process

Hi all and a special welcome all the new subscribers from last week. If you like what you read, keep spreading the word!

Last week I talked about ways to do bioenergy better. Today, I felt it would make sense to follow up on that with a meditation on why we aren’t doing bioenergy better. The newsletter is split down the middle.

First section: ‘Why do we have policies that don’t make sense?’ Case in point: biofuels.

Second section: ‘Why don’t we have policies that do make sense?’ Case in point: carbon capture and storage.

In short, to all those of you who are wont to pull out their hair while exclaiming ‘Why aren’t our politicians rational human beings, like you and me?!’, this one’s for you.

The ‘A kingdom! A kingdom! My horse for a kingdom!’ moment. We’ve all been there.

1. Policies that don’t make sense

Biofuels. As we saw last week, there are a lot of downsides to growing them, but there are also definitely ways to mitigate these downsides (especially in terms of its social impacts). Yet, there is very little policy to encourage or legislate such mitigations. What gives?

Oliveira et al 2017 suggest the answer will come by following the money. In their review of biofuel policy in the USA, Brazil, and the EU, they argue that policy in the early years (pre 1990s) was primarily geared towards economic benefits for the agricultural sector, as well as energy security. If read a little cynically, bioenergy’s potential for “greenhouse gas reduction” was just something that got tacked onto interests of the pre-existing industry later on.

Those interests still make the policy. Take first generation biofuels for instance. They are far less sustainable than later generations (or not sustainable at all). The fact we keep growing them only makes sense if you account for the lobbying power of companies who want to maximize returns on their existing capital. In the meantime, biofuel props up the current automotive industrial practices. Because biofuels do not replace fossil fuels, but supplement it in blends, they allow business as more or less usual, while still meeting official sustainability targets.

Shell is quite proud about its second-generation biofuels in ethanol walhalla Brazil. From here.

The picture they paint is pretty bleak: that of an industry that is self-sustaining, in the absence of any real signs that biofuel is actually beneficial, neither in the environmental nor in its original socio-economic sense. Hence, they conclude:

Biofuel policies will only effectively facilitate more socially and environmentally sustainable energy production and agricultural practices when tied to land redistribution, customary rights protections, and stronger anti-trust, environmental, and labour protections […]. (773)

Still, this story of corporate and sovereign interest doesn’t explain how these policies actually come into being. We need a better understanding of the policy-making process – for that I turn to the EU.

Biofuel policies in the EU

For Palmer (2014), policy is all about knowledge and knowability. How do policy-makers get to know about a problem? How are they able turn it into viable policy – that is, into a object that can be measured and the policy that addresses it therefore evaluated?

From his interviews with EU policy-makers, it turns out that they learn about problems mostly through day-to-day meetings with various kinds of lobbyists. Public consultations that organize scientific debate are difficult to get right, and happen sporadically. Lacking other venues, scientists and activists therefore find it hard to burst the Brussels bubble. You could read these findings to show the mechanisms through which business and political interests get translated into biofuel policies. Critiques of these policies simply do not reach the necessary levels of amplification.

The Brussels Bubble is real! This cartoon comes from the Corporate Europe Observatory. They observe the Brussels Bubble.

Yet, it’s not as if downsides of biofuels – the changes in land-use that could threaten food security or biodiversity – aren’t known at all. However, biofuel impacts are highly local and thus require highly localized knowledge in order to take them into account. Furthermore, impacts like rural economic development or food security are more difficult to quantify. However, the quantification of rationales and outcomes is necessary to the craft of contemporary policy-making

As a consequence, the only externality that has found its way into policy-making – in the way of the accreditation criteria mentioned last week – has been GHG emissions, because it’s the easiest evaluation (or at least estimate) to make. It has readily available quantitative indicators and its model can be based on general, “placeless” calculations. Biodiversity and conservation, labour conditions, food and water security, while well-known, lack these qualities and cannot therefore be discussed, as in the GHG accounting paradigm. They lack political intelligibility.

2. Policies that do make sense

Our mirror-example is the case of carbon capture and storage. If you’d like to read a primer on the what it is and what it could do, click here or here. In brief: there’s the massive high-tech machinery that could suck carbon out of the air, but the ‘technology’ that I’ll be talking about here is BECCS: Bioenergy and carbon capture and storage. Basically, it’s letting nature do all the sucking and then making sure you don’t let it back out afterwards.

So here’s the thing about CSS. Virtually every ‘Pathway’ towards a max of 1.5-2 degrees warming include carbon storage and/or capture as one of the necessary tools. (See this earlier edition to learn more about these Pathways.) Those targets are otherwise either out of reach or it’ll be a whole heck of a lot more expensive to reach them. Basically, CSS would allow us to take back some of the damage we’ll do until roughly 2050.

But BECCS is languishing in the policy toolbox. That doesn’t make any sense: why aren’t we actively preparing for this, if it is so crucial?

For starters, there are even more uncertainties regarding BECCS. We don’t know how much of its theoretical potential we can realize, how much it will cost us and what externalities it will produce. (For details, see Fridahl 90f.) (Please note that the same problems with land-use change that plague biofuels affect BECCS. In addition, some are afraid its siren calls may lure us from efforts to make energy systems actually sustainable. I kinda misled you with title of this section.)

Uncertainties appear to be holding back the people deciding on it. In a massive survey of UNFCCC delegates, Fridahl 2017 detected a clear pattern: those who can see the potential (technical or economic) tend to favour it more. Environmental NGOs are least inclined to accept the solution. Business representatives and especially state actors more so, especially in regions of the world where the necessary “flex crops” could do well. (96f.)

It’s important to note the survey is a cumulative one that was started in 2009. Things are shifting fast now and we are constantly re-evaluating our options. The IPCC, whose forecasting work presses upon us with increasing force, plays an important role in this. In this case however, its role is rather ironic.

The IPCC’s neutral inclusion of BECCS

Beck and Mahoney (2018) show how come BECCS came to occupy such an important place in the Pathways in the first place. It’s a brief intellectual history of the IPCC that is worth reading in its entirety. The key to that history has been the Panel’s effort to remain ‘policy-relevant but not prescriptive’. Out of that desire, it included the 1.5 degrees scenario (even though most in the scientific community had already abandoned that scenario) and for the same reason it included the technology that could make it possible: BECCS (even though it was highly speculative at the time). In doing so, in this act of neutrality, it has made this best-case future “thinkable” – and thus giving it a place in our policy toolbox.

The rather unlikely best-case scenario, “2.6” in green. From here.

If we want to reflect on what these different studies says about the nature and process of policy-making, we can clearly see the truth in the truism that knowledge is power. Policy-making is to a great extent about what can be made knowable – and especially what can be measured – and therefore be acted upon. Knowable objects make for actions that can be evaluated, which legitimizes policy propositions. Now, BECSS has been made thinkable, but it still lacks in the knowability department. That may be one reason it’s languishing. Regardless, the power of knowledge is still limited. It’s weighed against the interests of those who need to execute policy (agro-businesses, for example), and it’s dependent on those who formulate it – i.e. on who can get it into the rooms where it happens.

I got something new cooking for the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

Sources

Beck, Silke, and Martin Mahony. 2018. "The politics of anticipation: the IPCC and the negative emissions technologies experience". Global Sustainability. 1. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2018.7 (Open Access)

Fridahl, Mathias. 2017. "Socio-political prioritization of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage". Energy Policy. 104: 89-99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.01.050

Oliveira, Gustavo de L.T., Ben McKay, and Christina Plank. 2017. "How biofuel policies backfire: Misguided goals, inefficient mechanisms, and political-ecological blind spots". Energy Policy. 108: 765-775. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.03.036

Palmer, James R. 2014. "Biofuels and the Politics of Land-Use Change: Tracing the Interactions of Discourse and Place in European Policy Making". Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 46 (2): 337-352. https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fa4684

If you’d like to read more

These Big Name scholars take to Nature’s forum to argue we need to engage with carbon capture storage now, so we have chance of doing it “in the public interest” (Bellamy) and through a democratic process (Van Vuuren et al.).

Bellamy, Rob. 2018. "Incentivize negative emissions responsibly". Nature Energy. 3 (7): 532-534. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0156-6

Van Vuuren D.P., Hof A.F., Van Sluisveld M.A.E., Van Vuuren D.P., Hof A.F., Van Sluisveld M.A.E., and Riahi K. 2017. "Open discussion of negative emissions is urgently needed". Nature Energy. 2 (12): 902-904. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-017-0055-2

If you want to read some good news, these authors conclude

“that despite a deep critique of the sustainability of biofuels amongst civil society and academia, EU regulation allows for production systems that reflect a European-and climate change mitigation-centred view on biofuel ‘sustainability’”

- in Sweden.

Harnesk, David, Sara Brogaard, and Philip Peck. 2017. "Regulating a global value chain with the European Union's sustainability criteria - experiences from the Swedish liquid transport biofuel sector". Journal of Cleaner Production. 153: 580-591. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.09.039

If you do not have the appropriate credentials to cross the paywall to these articles, maybe you can check out https://sci-hub.tw (just copy past in the doi number), or if you are uncomfortable with that, send me a message and I’ll lend you a copy.