The sustainability of biofuels : a principled lifecycle assessment of the 2009 European Union Renewable Energy Directive and its framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drastic reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are needed in order to mitigate the effects of climate change. The European Union (EU), a leader in climate change mitigation, has adopted an ambitious strategy to achieve its mitigation goal. A piece of this strategy is the Renewable Energy Directive. The Directive establishes mandatory renewable energy targets for member states. Cognizant that in order to achieve the target of 10% of final energy consumption in the transport sector member states would have to rely heavily on biofuels, the EU, in the spirit of sustainable development, included in the Directive sustainability criteria for biofuels. The criteria were needed because, although biofuels can be carbon neutral and an effective replacement for fossil fuels, the production of biofuels can have serious environmental and socio-economic consequences. This thesis concludes that the Directive will not result in the sustainable production of biofuels. This conclusion is based on the principled lifecycle assessment of the Directive and its framework. This approach is a combination of core principles of sustainable development – integration, equity, precaution and polluter pays – and of the basic tenets of lifecycle assessment, a methodology designed to measure the lifecycle impacts of a product. Due to the reliance by member states on first generation biofuels, biofuels produced under the Directive’s regime are not likely to reduce GHG emissions compared to fossil fuels, and are likely to increase water pollution, the loss of biodiversity and food insecurity. The negative impacts of biofuels production are caused mainly by the agricultural production of feedstocks, especially through indirect land-use change. Furthermore, the cost of pollution is not internalized by the regime and biofuels subsidies are not linked to environmental concerns. Therefore, the lifecycle impacts of EU biofuels production do not accord with core principles of sustainable development. Only second and third generation biofuels, which are not yet available on a large-scale, seem to have the potential to be sustainable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".