Biofuels and their by-products: Global economic and environmental implications
BIOMASS & BIOENERGY
Authors: Taheripour, Farzad; Hertel, Thomas W.; Tyner, Wallace E.; Beckman, Jayson F.; Birur, Dileep K.
Abstract
Recently a number of papers have used general equilibrium models to study the economy-wide and environmental consequences of the first generation of biofuels (FGB). In this paper, we argue that nearly all of these studies have overstated the impacts of FGB on global agricultural and land markets due to the fact that they have ignored the role of biofuel by-products. Feed by-products of FGB, such as dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS) and oilseed meals (VOBP), are used in the livestock industry as protein and energy sources. Their presence mitigates the price impacts of biofuel production. More importantly, they reduce the demand for cropland and moderate the indirect land use consequences of FGB. This paper explicitly introduces DDGS and VOBP into a global computational general equilibrium (CGE) model, developed at the Center for Global Trade Analysis at Purdue University, to examine the economic and environmental impacts of regional and international mandate policies designed to stimulate bioenergy production and use. We show that models with and without by-products reveal different portraits of the economic impacts of the US and EU biofuel mandates for the world economy in 2015. While both models demonstrate significant changes in the agricultural production pattern across the world, the model with by-products shows smaller changes in the production of cereal grains and larger changes for oilseeds products in the US and EU, and the reverse for Brazil. Models that omit by-products are found to overstate cropland conversion from US and EU mandates by about 27%. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Combined Effect of Genetic Factors, Age, and Smoking on the Risk of Developing Myocardial Infarction
KARDIOLOGIYA
Authors: Osmak, G. J.; Matveeva, N. A.; Titov, B. V.; Nasibullin, T. R.; Mustafina, O. E.; Shakhnovich, R. M.; Kukava, N. G.; Ruda, M. Ya.; Favorova, O. O.
Abstract
Objective: to elaborate a complex model for myocardial infarction (MI) risk assessment considering the combined effect of genetic predisposition, age and smoking. Materials and methods. The study included two independent samples of ethnic Russians: 325 patients with MI and 185 individuals without history of cardiovascular diseases (controls) from the Moscow region, and 220 patients and 197 controls from the Republic of Bashkortostan. Genotyping of polymorphic loci of genes CRP (rs1130864), IFNG (rs2430561), TGFB1 (rs1982073), FGB (rs1800788) and PTGS1 (rs3842787) was performed. To construct the predictive models, we used logistic regression with stepwise inclusion of variables. The predictive value was evaluated by the area under the curve (AUC) in a ROC-analysis. The factor was considered as a marker at pAUC <0.05 calculated by the method of DeLong. The marker was considered effective at AUC >0.60. Results. Three separate genetic variants FGB rs1800788*T, TGFB1 rs1982073*TT, CRP rs1130864*TT, and biallelic combination IFNG rs2430561*A PTGS1 rs3842787*T whose association with MI we described earlier, were used to construct the composite genetic marker (AUC = 0.66 in the training and test samples) by the logistic regression method. Adding to the obtained composite genetic marker such parameters as age and smoking allowed to create a complex MI risk marker, which was characterized by the predictive value stability (AUC =0.77 in the training sample and 0.82 in the test sample). Conclusion. The obtained complex model for MI risk assessment was reproduced in two independent samples of Russian ethnicity individuals from different regions of Russia with different gender identities, and allowed to have a reasonable chance (about 80%) of distinguishing patients and healthy individuals.