Regulatory agencies are planning to implement policies targeted at mitigating greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)—e.g., low carbon fuel standards and carbon trading. Biofuels are viewed as a path to achieve these goals. Biofuels, however, pose challenges to regulators because their GHG emissions...

A key argument in the societal debate against polices to support biofuels is that production of these alternative fuels may in fact consume more energy than they generate and emit more greenhouse gases than they sequester (Fargione et al., 2008; Searchinger et al., 2008; Rajagopal and Zilberman, 2007;...