He added moving ahead with solar and other renewable energy projects is needed to slow climate change. "You may have noticed just last week a news report by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization that posited a forecast of warming for Yellowstone National Park of 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century," Zichella said. "We may have bought a little time on carbon emissions due to the economic downturn, but we are still in a situation where we can't expect that energy growth is going to remain stagnant for an indefinite period time."
Dustin Mulvaney, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke mainly about biofuels.
He noted a backlash against biofuels started five or six years ago, subsequent to the energy policy act of 2005 that mandated the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol and policies in Europe that encouraged biodiesel production. "We saw a rapid expansion of land use that was committed to fuel production. We started seeing massive deforestation, particularly in Southeast Asia; we saw images of Orangutan habitat and tiger habitat being destroyed. And then we heard certain accusations against abuses to labor, slave labor even, in the sugarcane industry in Brazil."
People then started questioning the benefits of biofuels, and some controversial studies came out that questioned their energy pay back time, which was relatively low when compared with solar and geothermal, Mulvaney said. "We started seeing so much fossil fuel was being used to grow things like corn that in some cases there was more carbon being emitted than when you burn gasoline," he said.
And that was before land use was taken into account. Clearing land caused increased carbon emissions and in some cases deforestation, he said. Controversial studies showed palm diesel oil was the worst offender, with it taking 423 years to pay back the carbon lost while clearing land in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Others argued that producing biofuels actually cultivates the next biological invaders because the characteristics looked for--high seed production, high density and drought tolerance, for example--are all characteristics of invasive species, Mulvaney said. Still others argued that a lot of innovative biofuel technologies rely on genetic engineering. "Whether or not there's a risk associated with it, there's a perception of risk," he noted.
"Most recently, the controversy around biofuels has been extended to land grabs, particularly in parts of the world where there are food security issues," Mulvaney said.
But one must keep the problems with biofuels in perspective. "To put them in context, the dark side is not nearly as dark as what we see in the fossil fuel industry," Mulvaney said. "Yet that doesn't mean we should be treating these sectors homogeneously even within the sector."
--Dorothy Hinchcliff