In a move sure to gain the appreciation of at least some hunger activists, EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard and Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger announced that The European Commission will be limiting crop-based biofuels to just 5 percent of transport fuel until at least the year 2020. Activists have been railing against the use of crops and other food sources for fuel as millions go hungry around the world.

“Finally the European commissioners have come to their senses,” said Clare Coffey, policy adviser at ActionAid. “They are firmly acknowledging that using precious food and agricultural land to fuel our cars is bad for people and bad for the environment. In a world where a billion go to bed hungry every night, that is immoral.”

While the limits will be put in place for crop-based fuels once passed by EU governments and lawmakers, development of other biofuels will move forward towards a goal of having at least 10 percent of the fuel mix be from renewable sources by 2020. According to a statement by Oettinger at a recent meeting of EU energy ministers, the difficulty in that will be finding sources that are as cheap to produce as crop-based ones currently used.

The United Nation’s food agency recently called for the U.S. to change its policies on crop-based biofuels because of the danger of a worldwide food crisis, but it seems the European Union is the only one taking that advice to heart. “We cannot continue to burn food in our petrol tanks while poor families go hungry,” said Natalia Alonso from Oxfam. Truer words aren’t spoken too often and we definitely need to speed up the development and production of non-food-based biofuel sources.

[via The Guardian]

Image Credit: Frapestaartje/Flickr

The post European Union Set To Limit Crop-Based Biofuels appeared first on REVMODO.

Like many states, Massachusetts has a set of renewable portfolio standards that requires electricity suppliers to get an increasing percentage of their energy from renewable sources. Earlier this year, the state’s Department of Energy Resources came out with a proposed set of rules that would regulate the efficiency of biomass plants and the sorts of material they’re allowed to use if they want to be deemed renewable.

Among other things, plants would have to operate at 60 percent efficiency to qualify for a full renewable energy certificate and at 50 percent efficiency to get a half certificate. The biomass industry finds that prohibitively restrictive. Rob Cleaves, president of the Biomass Power Association, told AOL Energy that no pure biomass-to-electricity plant can meet the standard, meaning that only plants with a heat component would qualify. A number of biomass plants have been proposed in Western Massachusetts, but developers find it difficult to build them near industrial plants that could make use of large amounts of heat.

The regulations, which the state legislature is now considering, would also limit wood used in biomass plants to residue from logging operations, like tree tops and branches, rather than whole trees, and require that a sufficient amount of biomass remain in the forests to support the local ecosystem.

Ultimately, the main issue being debated is whether burning trees can be considered carbon neutral. The biomass industry argues that, because trees absorb carbon as they grow, burning them remains carbon-neutral as long as more trees are planted and forests are managed sustainably. But some environmentalists point to studies reporting that, under some scenarios, wood-burning biomass plants can increase carbon emissions for decades even if they replace fossil fuels.

Photo credit: Duncan Brown (cradlehall)/Flickr

The post Massachusetts Mulls New Biomass Standards appeared first on REVMODO.