HEAT Excerpt #23: Biofuels are a BAD IDEA
From George Monbiot’s well-researched and rather articulate new book, “HEAT: How to Stop the Planet Burning”. (you can grab a copy HERE - directly from the publisher, thus reducing the accumulated ‘carbon value’ of the book as it won’t have to travel to other warehouses):
“The environmentalists who support the wider use of biofuels picture the crops they like best. They see the nodding heads of sunflowers, or the blue blossoms of the linseed plant. They talk of algae which can be grown in desert ponds, or the use of straw and other wastes to produce ethanol. . . But what they will not see - in fact what they flatly and repeatedly refuse to understand - is that a global commodity market selects not the most satisfying vision, but the cheapest commodity. And at present and for the forseeable future the cheapest commodity is palm oil. What this means is that biofuel production is a forumula not only for humanitarian disaster but also for environmental catastrophe.”
Understand, George wants us to find ‘the answers’ just as much, if not worse, than you or I. However, he very much fears putting efforts into schemes that will only set us back, not just a little but a lot.
“In 2005, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production:
Between 1985 and 2000, the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia.
In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia. Almost all the remaining forest is at risk . . . The orang-utan is liekly to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and many other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The entire region is being turned into a vegetable field.
Before oil palms are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon than the palm trees will ever accumulate, must be felled and burnt. . . A paper published in NATURE estimates that the fires ignited in Indonesia in 1997, the result of felling rainforest trees, released between 13 and 40 per cent as much carbon dioxide as the world’s consumption of fossil fuels. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.
Song ‘o the Day: I’m not telling you what it is. Just hit play. [audio:halloates.mp3]
biofuels, climate-change, fossil-fuels, george-monbiot, global warming, malaysia, sumatra, sumatran-rhino
Tags: books, environment
And in Mexico the cost of tortillas has increased by 60% due to using corn to make ethanol.
Sunday marks Rachel Carson’s 100th birthday. She wouldn’t like biofuels if she were alive today.
I believe you’re right, Gail. Rachel Carson would understand that, however quaint it is to run around, say, Sonoma County, using biofuel, when it catches on it won’t be possible to use locally-sourced vegetable oil waste products. No, we’ll be helping deforest Brazil.
I used the same tortilla info in a talk I gave to the Berkeley Gray Panthers last month - sourced from Lester Brown and the Earth Policy Institute, of course.