Eco-campaigner Calls For "Freeze on Biofuels"
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Channel 4 March 29, 2007
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Biofuels are the current favoured option in the battle to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and slow down global warming, but environmental specialists and campaigners are warning that whilst biofuels - produced from sustainable-source crops which absorb carbon as they grow - are not necessarily an ethically-sound alternative to fossil fuels.
Award-winning writer and university professor George Monbiot has long warned of the implications of biofuel production, and in response to Chancellor Gordon Brown's biofuel-friendly Budget last week (tax rebates till 2010, when fuel suppliers are expected to provide at least 5% of their fuels as biofuels) has published a new article in which he describes policy on the issue as "plain fraud" which "causes more harm than good" and is "a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster". It's a sobering thought for those believing that ethanol and biodiesel could be guilt-free fuels. Monbiot cites problems in Mexico, where the price of maize has doubled, wheat prices are at a ten-year high and the poor are rioting - because, according to the United Nations' food and agriculture department, farmers are selling their crops for ethanol rather than for food.
Besides the use of current agricultural land for crops for fuel, instead of food crops, Monbiot quotes evidence that "virgin habitat", such as the rainforests of Indonesia, is being ploughed up at an alarming rate. The growth of palms for oil - for biodiesel for the European market "is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang-utan in the wild."
"There are similar impacts all over the world", he writes. "Sugarcane producers are moving into rare scrubland habitats in Brazil, and soya farmers are ripping up the Amazon rainforests& Indigenous people in South America, Asia and Africa are starting to complain about incursions onto their land by fuel planters." And if this all seems worthwhile to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, then think again: as the land and forests are cleared, "both the trees and the peat they sit on" are burnt. Research suggests that every tonne of palm oil created results in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions - 10 times as much as conventional petroleum.
More detail on Monbiot's argument, and his sources, can be found at guardian.co.uk or monbiot.com, but his point is clear. "The reason governments are so enthusiastic about biofuels is that they don't upset drivers. They appear to reduce the amount of carbon from our cars, without requiring new taxes. It's an illusion sustained by the fact that only the emissions produced at home count towards our national total. The forest clearance in Malaysia doesn't increase our official impact by a gram.".
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Source: Channel 4
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