PERSONALITIES PLUGGED IN: Sustainable Economics

The biofuels revolution raises the prospect that California could run its peaking power plants on grease and other fuels derived from plants, as well as its cars and trucks. “You want fries with that?” Peaker power plants in Humboldt and San Jose already run on biodiesel, according to the California Energy Commission Energy Commission. “We’re not nibbling around the edges in terms of our policy,” said Stephen Kaffka, who became director of the California Biomass Collaborative July 1. “We’re really talking about the core reason we have prosperity--our energy use.” That’s why Kaffka sees the issue of how to analyze and define sustainability as the main conundrum for state policy makers as they weigh the future role for bioenergy. Sustainability involves much more than simply cutting greenhouse gases. It covers a variety of things, from economic prosperity to maintaining soil fertility here and around the world. Kaffka maintains that setting an overly restrictive definition of sustainability could interfere with the state’s ability to reduce greenhouse gases and fossil fuel use and harm the economy. The question of how to create a sustainable energy future has state regulators, utility executives, and other energy industry players wrestling with a wide range of questions. The key one is how biofuels may change farming and land-use both at home and abroad. One of the places they are looking for answers is the California Biomass Collaborative, which is poised to be an important forum for technical and scientific research that contributes to energy and climate change policies. Kaffka comes to the job at the collaborative with a background at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension at Davis as a researcher and advisor to farmers. An agronomist by training, he has studied how to make the state’s agricultural sector more productive and sustainable. He has focused on areas that have increasing relevance to developing bioenergy, including sugar beets and how to potentially grow feedstock crops for cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel in the salty fields of the western San Joaquin Valley He thinks the key to setting effective policy is to put sustainability front and center in its full dimension--from economics to climate change--rather than making it simply a subset of reducing greenhouse gases. Recent attempts to model the impacts of using biofuels are impressive, yet need refinement, according to Kaffka, particularly when it comes to understanding indirect land-use changes. “I think it’s falsely modeled.” For instance, Kaffka said a recent modeling effort for the California Air Resources Board did not adequately reflect what is occurring in large parts of Africa or on many marginal lands in the tropics. It also did not account for new crops and cropping systems, or advancements in agricultural technology, according to Kaffka, who further notes that not all conversion of land to farming is necessarily destructive. Many of the changes in land use also are not driven by growing use of biofuels, he maintains, but instead by economic development opportunity. Ultimately, analyses of the impacts of biofuels should be expanded to include holistic models of cropping, Kaffka said. For example, he noted that the soil fertility of farmland requires that at least a portion of what is considered waste residue be left on the land. Yet, the portion may vary based on crop rotation. A corn-tomato rotation maintains carbon levels in the soil and could potentially make production of cellulosic ethanol from corn stover sustainable. “If you can do that, you begin to make corn look a lot like sugar cane,” said Kaffka, alluding to the success Brazil has had in substituting ethanol made from cane for gasoline. Kaffka sees other niches for the use of bioenergy in the Golden State as well. So as the state moves forward on bioenergy, he thinks that humility should be the watchword. Policy makers should encourage innovation, and expect mistakes and needed corrections along the way. Meanwhile, they should not constrain innovation by prematurely setting sustainability criteria. Instead, he advises the state to gradually increase sustainability requirements as knowledge and public consensus about biofuels improves.

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PERSONALITIES PLUGGED IN: Sustainable Economics

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