EESI Chairman of the Board Responds to New York Times' Paul Krugman on Biofuels

Read the Krugman Article

Below is the text of Chairman Ottinger's letter to Paul Krugman:

April 8, 2008

Dear Mr. Krugman:

I am a great fan of yours and regular reader of your op ed pieces.  I specialize at Pace Law School in assisting developing countries adopt affordable and environmentally sensitive energy laws to promote their economic development, working through IUCN and UNEP, UNDP and UNDESA.  I was in Congress for 16 years heading the Energy Conservation and Power Subcommittee.  In the past year or so I have been focusing on biofuels.

I was concerned about your yesterday’s column unconditionally condemning biofuels.  There are biofuels such as corn, wheat and soy beans that earn that condemnation.  But there are other biofuels such as Jatropha and related plants that can thrive in desert soils with very small need for water, pesticides or fertilizers that do not replace agricultural lands.  A lot of work also is being done on utilizing waste crop by- products, and waste wood cellulose and algae for biofuels. If these so-called second generation feed stocks are utilized and used locally, they require little transportation energy to bring them to a processing plant and satisfy local needs for electricity and factory and transportation fuels.

These second generation biofuels could be invaluable to developing countries, indeed poor rural areas anywhere, particularly to meet the needs of the some 2 billion people not presently served at all by electricity.  The tropical areas in which most of the developing countries lie are ideally suited to growing these crops.  And they create local jobs requiring little or no importation of sophisticated processing equipment. For many developing countries that are being devastated economically by the high price of oil, these biofuels may be the only answer to providing the energy they need for development.  They can not use other renewable energy resources like solar and wind because they can not afford the equipment, expertise and infrastructure to support hem. 

A number of international agencies are now formulating biofuels standards to protect against environmentally and socially damaging biofuel feedstocks and practices.  I work with the Roundtable for Sustainable Biofuels run by the Polytechnic Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland, that is putting an enormous and very well organized effort into creating such standards.  And countries such as those in the European Union are in the process of requiring environmental certification of any biofuels they import.  Hopefully these standards will be adopted universally.

So I hope at some point you can qualify your opinion of biofuels to welcome those that will help poor countries and avoid environmental and social damage.

Best regards.

Dick Ottinger

Photo of Mr. Ottinger from pace.law.edu