Understanding the revised land use changes and greenhouse gas emissions induced by biofuels

Alexandre Gohin

No 15-08, Working Papers SMART from INRAE UMR SMART

Abstract: We analyze two puzzling results released by the California Air Resource Board who recently revises its land use changes and greenhouse gas emissions induced by biofuels. First the absolute reduction in the US average soya biodiesel estimate is much greater than the reduction in the US average corn ethanol one. Second the EU canola biodiesel estimate is twice the US canola biodiesel one. We find that these two puzzling results are mostly explained by some weak initial economic data. In both cases, the underestimation of the oilmeal production values biases upwards the carbon emission estimates. We then recall that any economic analysis is only worth the quality of the supporting data. The current focus on unobserved elasticity values to assess biofuel impacts is not sufficient.

Keywords: biofuels; land use changes; models; data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C68 Q11 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rae:wpaper:201508

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