The corn from which ethanol is derived requires large amounts of water and petroleum-based fertilizer to produce and, according to some studies, diverts land from pastures and rain forests, which store carbon. The result is increased carbon in the atmosphere.
In its proposal, the air board seeks to quantify these so-called "indirect land use changes," a calculation that effectively assigns a high carbon intensity to corn-based ethanol in relation to other fuels.
That decision has touched off a furious debate among scientists, some of them industry-supported and others with environmental affiliations. A letter criticizing the air board's methods, released by the New Fuels Alliance, an ethanol industry group, was signed by 111 scientists, including researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.
Several missives supporting the air board's approach were signed by leading California energy academics, including UC Berkeley's Daniel Kammen and Michael O'Hare.
The push for ethanol as an alternative to imported oil spurred the construction of 172 plants in 25 states by the end of 2008. But in recent months falling oil prices has made ethanol less cost effective. More than 20 plants have closed, including five in California.
"The proposed regulation will do nothing to start them back up," said Gary Meltz of the fuels alliance. "It would be devastating nationally because . . . as goes California, so goes the nation on many environmental standards and regulations."
But environmentalists praised the rule as the only fair approach. "It's a complicated issue, but the basic principle is simple," said Patricia Monahan, a vehicles expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Set a performance standard, let fuels compete in the marketplace to meet the standard, and keep politics from distorting the science. It's about reducing carbon, not picking winners or losers."
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margot.roosevelt @latimes.com
