invasives

Biofuel Program could Invite Giant Grass Invasion

- by John Upton, July 2013. Source: Grist 

Here’s another environmental incentive to ditch the car: That gas you buy at the pump could soon be helping towering invasive grasses wreak havoc on America’s ecosystems.

The EPA recently approved the use of giant reed and napier grass as biofuel ingredients under its Renewable Fuel Standard program. The program requires oil companies to blend a minimum amount of biofuel into the gasoline that they sell. To receive EPA approval under the program, fuel created from grass must produce 60 percent less greenhouse gas than does normal gasoline.

But in approving the use of the two grasses as feedstocks for biofuel, the federal government has begun promoting plantations that environmentalists warn threaten the American landscape and its native species. 

A new report released by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) details yet another in a long and growing list of ecological and economic threats from industrial-scale biomass energy: the risk of bioenergy crops becoming invasive species.