In one of life's little moments of synchronicity, this is what I referred to yesterday as "occupying a lot of landscape."
A
paper published on Tuesday by the Nature Conservancy predicts that by 2030, energy production in the United States will occupy a land area larger than Minnesota — in large part owing to the pursuit of domestic clean energy.
The authors call it “energy sprawl” — a term meant to draw attention to habitat destruction, and to warn that biofuels in particular will take up substantial amounts of land.
...
The paper looked at several scenarios, including a “base-case” derived from current Energy Information Agency forecasts for the country’s energy mix in 2030, as well as various permutations of efforts to cap greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change.
The study took into account only land impacts in the United States; thus for example the land required to drill for oil in Saudi Arabia, one of the United States’s biggest suppliers, was not considered. Nor was “indirect land use” taken into account. That is the controversial idea that growing soy for fuel in the United States could simply push soy-for-food production to, say, Indonesia, where CO2-sipping forests would then be razed for soy farming.
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/study-warns-of-energy-sprawl/
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