Are Biofuels the Answer?

Joan Carlin. 2005.2

Shifting the public transport fleet onto biodiesel might be a good idea, but how feasible is it to shift the entire transport fleet onto biofuel?

Biofuel Buses - Some Questions

SA Premier Rann has just announced that more than 500 Adelaide buses will be converted to biodiesel. This announcement is very welcome but there are some questions that still need to be asked. For example:

Biofuels as a General Replacement for Liquid Fossil Fuels

In an article published in the Guardian in November 2004 - Feeding Cars, Not People - George Monbiot asserts that the adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster. According to Monbiot:

"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.

"Those who have been promoting these fuels are wellintentioned, 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.

"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."

As an example, Monbiot estimates that switching to biofuels (in the UK) requires four and half times the arable area of the UK. If the same thing were to happen all over Europe, the impact on global food supply would 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.

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.

A Disaster for the Environment

Monbiot argues that "green fuel" is not just a humanitarian disaster; it is also an environmental disaster. Developing a market for rapeseed [canola]biodiesel in Europe 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 soya oil 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.

Monbiot concludes "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".

www.monbiot.com

Comment

Perhaps biodiesel should be seen as an interim measure as it is more difficult to get people out of their cars!

2007.10.6