Food and Fuel Consumption the Biggest Environmental Stressors

Today is World Environment Day. On that occasion, UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) this week released a report "Assessing Environmental Impacts of Production and Consumption" (press release: here, also in The Guardian). The report looks at the compound environmental impacts for human health, ecosystem health, and natural resources from industrial/agricultural production and also from a human consumption point of view. The report concludes that use of fossil fuels and consumption of foods have the most significant environmental impacts including impacts on the availability and quality of water resources:

Scrap Irrigated Biofuel Crops & Plant Solar Farms!

After thinking some more about the numbers in yesterday's blog, here is a revolutionary idea: take irrigated biofuel crops already existing in the sunny Southwest (including California) out of production and put solar farms on those fields instead. Why? With no additional land used, we'ld have more energy in the grid, less chemicals in groundwater, less groundwater overdraft, and/or water leftover for the rest of us (including the rest of agriculture).

How is that going to work?

Water and Land Use Intensity of Solar Power vs. Biofuels

In continuing to grasp some basic land use and (ground)water use issues associated with energy production, it occurred to me during some recent discussions with my wondeful friends and colleagues Stephen Kaffka, Dan Putnam (both UC Davis), Margot Gerritsen (Stanford), and Wayne Spencer (Conservation Biology, San Diego) to compare the water intensity of solar power (see blog below) with that of another renewable energy source: biofuels. In the Southwest, all three (food&fiber production, biofuel production, and solar power) compete for land and water. Comparing water use and land use of a solar farm and an ethanol-corn farm in the Southwest on a per MWh-basis is not going to be favorable for biofuels, I figure - given all that irrigation water. But how bad is it?