Critics say U.S. policy has lagged to become an "impediment" to renewable energy efforts

The Bush administration will invest $18.4 million in biofuel projects through grants to U.S. corporations and universities, Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said yesterday.

But some of the more than 5,000 attendees at the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference, where Mr. Schafer made the announcement, openly questioned whether U.S. renewable energy efforts were too small to make a difference.

Some of the delegates to the convention said the world must spend as much as $3 trillion by 2030 to avert a global environmental crisis.

"We'll see an increased emphasis on biofuels," said Mr. Schafer, who called the biomass projects a "juncture of agriculture and energy."

From its environmental leadership role in the 1980s, U.S. policy has lagged to become an "impediment" to renewable energy efforts, said German Parliamentary State Secretary Michael Muller.

He accused the United States of abandoning many of the environmental goals of the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming. The United States is not a signatory to the Kyoto pact.

The agreement calls on developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5 percent below their 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

The United States "will have to make increased headway in the future," Mr. Muller said through an interpreter.

He mentioned wind energy programs in Germany and other European countries as examples of the "hard and concrete achievements" that are needed.

Dutch European Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans said he was encouraged by environmental efforts among American states, but they had not yet risen to an adequate level in federal policy.

"It is much higher on the European agenda than on the U.S. agenda," Mr. Timmermans said. "For awhile, it was the other way around."

He suggested wider use of international partnerships to develop renewable energies as alternatives to burning fossil fuels, which emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

During the conference at the Walter Washington Convention Center, the European Commission formally signed on to the Bush administration's "methane to markets" program for extracting fuel from gases produced by coal, landfills and agricultural waste. The European Commission represents the 27 nations that are members of the European Union on political issues.

The program started in 2004 with a goal of spending $53 million over five years on projects to produce methane as a fuel, largely in developing countries.

Mr. Timmermans said the program "would help us to foster the ties that we need."

Biomass projects commonly use switchgrass, corn, hemp, sugarcane, soybeans and fertilizer to produce fuels. However, they also have created a controversy over whether using large tracts of land to grow plants for fuels is a better use of agricultural production than growing food.

The grants would include nearly $1 million for North Carolina State University to develop a low-cost method of producing ethanol from biomass; $866,576 to the University of Florida to genetically engineer sugarcane that can be fermented into a fuel; and $1 million to Packer Engineering, Inc. of Naperville, Ill., to research methods for converting farm byproducts to fuel.

By: Tom Ramstack

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