This week Dr Townsend, and others involved in something called the International Nitrogen Initiative, are meeting in Paris to try to organise an international assessment of what is going on. This would do for nitrogen what the IPCC has done for carbon. To some, worries about nitrogen will doubtless seem to be no more than the latest environmental bandwagon. But the case of biofuels shows that without proper consideration of all greenhouse gases, not just CO2, it is too easy to rush headlong into expensive methods of mitigation that actually make things worse.
© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009
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