Worth reading again, if you've already seen this. VERY persuasive arguments.
TM
Subj: [GWTF] Feeding Cars, Not People: The Adoption of Biofuels Would Be a
Humanitarian and Environmental Disaster
Date: 6/10/2006 4:48:54 AM Central Daylight Time
From: [log in to unmask] (Karen Orr)
Sender: [log in to unmask] (Global Warming/Clean
Energy Task Force)
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<A HREF="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/">Feeding Cars, Not People</A>
November 23rd, 2004 in
<A HREF="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/category/climate-change/">climate change</A>, <A HREF="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/category/food/">food</A>, <A HREF="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/category/transport/">transport</A>
The adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 22nd November 2004
If human beings were without sin, we would still live in an imperfect world.
Adam Smith’s notion that by pursuing his own interest a man “frequently
promotes that of … society more effectually than when he really intends to promote
it” and Karl Marx’s picture of a society in which “the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all” are both mocked by one
obvious constraint. The world is finite. This means that when one group of
people pursues its own interests, it damages the interests of others.
It is hard to think of a better example than the current enthusiasm for
“biofuels”. Biofuels are made from plant oils or crop wastes or wood, and can be
used to run cars and buses and lorries. Burning them simply returns to the
atmosphere the carbon which the plants extracted while they were growing. So
switching from fossil fuels to biodiesel and bio-alcohol is now being promoted as
the solution to climate change.
Next month the British government will have to set a target for the amount of
transport fuel that will come from crops. The European Union wants 2% of the
oil we use to be biodiesel by the end of next year, rising to 6% by 2010 and
20% by 2020.(1) To try to meet these targets, the government has reduced the
tax on biofuels by 20 pence a litre, while the EU is paying farmers an extra 45
euros a hectare to grow them.
Everyone seems happy about this. The farmers and the chemicals industry can
develop new markets, the government can meet its commitments to cut carbon
emissions, and environmentalists can celebrate the fact that plant fuels reduce
local pollution as well as global warming. Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, biofuels
can be deployed straight away. This in fact was how Rudolf Diesel expected his
invention to be used. When he demonstrated his engine at the World Show in
1900, he ran it on peanut oil. “The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may
seem insignificant today,” he predicted. “But such oils may become in course
of time as important as petroleum.”(2) Some enthusiasts are predicting that if
fossil fuel prices continue to rise, he will soon be proved right.
I hope not. Those who have been promoting these fuels are well-intentioned,
but wrong. They are wrong because the world is finite. If biofuels take off,
they will cause a global humanitarian disaster.
Used as they are today, on a very small scale, they do no harm. A few
thousand greens in the United Kingdom are running their cars on used chip fat. But
recycled cooking oils could supply only 100,000 tonnes of diesel a year in this
country,(3) equivalent to one 380th of our road transport fuel.
It might also be possible to turn crop wastes such as wheat stubble into
alcohol for use in cars – the Observer ran an article about this on Sunday.(4)
I’d like to see the figures, but I find it hard to believe that we will be able
to extract more energy than we use in transporting and processing straw. But
the EU’s plans, like those of all the enthusiasts for bio-locomotion, depend on
growing crops specifically for fuel. As soon as you examine the implications,
you discover that the cure is as bad as the disease.
Road transport in the United Kingdom consumes 37.6 million tonnes of
petroleum products a year.(5) The most productive oil crop which can be grown in this
country is rape. The average yield is between 3 and 3.5 tonnes per hectare.(6)
One tonne of rapeseed produces 415 kilos of biodiesel.(7) So every hectare of
arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of transport fuel.
To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would
require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United Kingdom.(8) Switching to
green fuels requires four and half times our arable area. Even the EU’s more
modest target of 20% by 2020 would consume almost all our cropland.
If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the impact on global food
supply will be catastrophic: big enough to tip the global balance from net
surplus to net deficit. If, as some environmentalists demand, it is to happen
worldwide, then most of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce
food for cars, not people.
This prospect sounds, at first, ridiculous. Surely if there was unmet demand
for food, the market would ensure that crops were used to feed people rather
than vehicles? There is no basis for this assumption. The market responds to
money, not need. People who own cars have more money than people at risk of
starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel and poor people’s demand
for food, the car-owners win every time. Something very much like this is
happening already. Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the
global increase in crop production is being used to feed animals: the number of
livestock on earth has quintupled since 1950.(9) The reason is that those who buy
meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who buy only
subsistence crops.
Green fuel is not just a humanitarian disaster; it is also an environmental
disaster. Those who worry about the scale and intensity of today’s agriculture
should consider what farming will look like when it is run by the oil
industry. Moreover, if we try to develop a market for rapeseed biodiesel in Europe it
will immediately develop into a market for palm oil and soya oil. Oilpalm can
produce four times as much biodiesel per hectare as rape, and it is grown in
places where labour is cheap. Planting it is already one of the world’s major
causes of tropical forest destruction. Soya has a lower oil yield than rape,
but the oil is a by-product of the manufacture of animal feed. A new market for
it will stimulate an industry which has already destroyed most of Brazil’s
cerrado (one of the world’s most biodiverse environments) and much of its
rainforest.
It is shocking to see how narrow the focus of some environmentalists can be.
At a meeting in Paris last month, a group of scientists and greens studying
abrupt climate change decided that Tony Blair’s two big ideas – tackling global
warming and helping Africa – could both be met by turning Africa into a
biofuel production zone. This strategy, according to its convenor, “provides a
sustainable development path for the many African countries that can produce
biofuels cheaply”.(10) I know the definition of sustainable development has been
changing, but I wasn’t aware that it now encompasses mass starvation and the
eradication of tropical forests. Last year the British parliamentary committee on
environment, food and rural affairs, which is supposed to specialise in
joined-up thinking, examined every possible consequence of biofuel production –
from rural incomes to skylark numbers – except the impact on food supply.(11)
We need a solution to the global warming caused by cars, but this isn’t it.
If the production of biofuels is big enough to affect climate change, it will
be big enough to cause global starvation.
<A HREF="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/">http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/</A>
<A HREF="http://www.monbiot.com/">www.monbiot.com</A>
The Energy Justice Network:
<A HREF="http://www.energyjustice.org/">http://www.energyjustice.org/</A>
References:
1. The European Union, 8th May 2003. Directive 2003/30/EC: On the Promotion
of the Use of Biofuels or Other Renewable Fuels for Transport. Official Journal
L 123 , 17/05/2003 P. 0042 – 0046.
2. Eg Monsanto, no date. The Biodiesel Revolution. <A HREF="http://www.monsanto.co.uk/biofuels/071202.html">
http://www.monsanto.co.uk/biofuels/071202.html</A>.
3. British Association for Biofuels and Oils, no date. Memorandum to the
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. <A HREF="http://www.biodiesel.co.uk/press_release/royal_commission_on_environmenta.htm">
http://www.biodiesel.co.uk/press_release/royal_commission_on_environmenta.htm</A>
4. Robin McKie, 21st November 2004. Forget the tiger. Put some mushrooms in
your tank . The Observer.
5. Department for Transport, 2004. Petroleum Consumption: by Transport Mode
and Fuel Type. <A HREF="http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_transstats/documents/page/dft_transstats_031767.pdf">
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_transstats/documents/page/dft_transstats_031767.pdf</A>
6. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Crops for Energy
Branch, 17th November 2004. Pers comm.
7. ibid.
8. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2004. Agriculture in
the UK 2003. <A HREF="http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/publications/auk/2003/chapter3.pdf">
http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/publications/auk/2003/chapter3.pdf</A>
9. Lester R. Brown, 1997. The Agricultural Link: How Environmental
Deterioration Could Disrupt Economic Progress. Worldwatch Paper 136. The Worldwatch
Institute, Washington DC.
10. Dr Peter Read, 20th October 2004. Good news on climate change. Abrupt
Climate Change Strategy Workshop. Press Release. <A HREF="http://www.accstrategy.org/goodnews.html">
http://www.accstrategy.org/goodnews.html</A>
11. House of Commons Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 29
October 2003. Seventeenth Report. <A HREF="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmenvfru/929/92902.htm">
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmenvfru/929/92902.htm</A>
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