"Biofuels Are No Cure for Climate Change"

Here.

Excerpt:

Biofuels sound green. They’re made from things that were once green—corn, palm oil, sugar cane and other agricultural products. And they’re being touted as green. A Department of Energy’s resource page for biofuels says, “Hey students! Biofuels such as bioethanol and biodiesel can make a big difference in improving our environment.”

But don’t judge a climate cure by its color. Give it a rub, and you’ll find that the term ‘biofuels’ is actually obscuring an insidious reality. For that reason, many people, especially in the global South, have taken to calling them “agrofuels.”

Consider this statement from the Landless Worker’s Movement in Brazil in March, where biofuel production is skyrocketing: “We can’t call this a ‘bio-fuels program.’ We certainly can’t call it a ‘bio-diesel program.’ Such phrases use the prefix ‘bio’ to subtly imply that the energy in question comes from ‘life’ in general. This is illegitimate and manipulative. We need to find a term in every language that describes the situation more accurately, a term like agro-fuel. This term refers specifically to energy created from plant products grown through agriculture.”

And it’s this agricultural production that has so many people worried. Biofuels need land, which means traditional food crops are being elbowed off of the field for fuel crops. Biofuel production is literally taking the food out of people’s mouths and putting into our gas tanks. Already, increased food costs sparked by increased demand are leaving populations hungry. The price of wheat has stretched to a 10-year high, while the price of maize has doubled.

Need more land? Clear cut some forest. Is there a word beyond irony to describe a plan to mitigate climate change that relies on cutting down the very trees that naturally remove carbon from the atmosphere? Stupidity, perhaps? The logic is like harvesting a sick patient’s lungs to save her heart. Huge tracks of Amazon rainforest are being raised to the biofuels alter like a sacrificial lamb, and the UN suggests that 98 percent of Indonesia’s rainforest will disappear by 2022, where heavy biofuel production is underway.

Still need land? Just take it. The human rights group Madre, which is backing the five-year moratorium, says agrofuel plantations in Brazil and Southeast Asia are displacing indigenous people. In an editorial published on CommonDreams last week, Madre Communication Director Yifat Susskind wrote, “People are being forced to give up their land, way of life, and food self-sufficiency to grow fuel crops for export.”

If this climate cure had a prescription bottle, the side effects would read: “Biofuels may cause drowsiness, headaches, human rights abuses, land deforestation, water depletion, worldwide hunger, and climate change.” Wait, climate change? That’s right; this cure is actually a cause. Biofuels themselves may have a small carbon footprint, but the energy used to grow and process the fuel make for one large bear paw in the mud. Biofuels depend on the manufacturing of fertilizers, fuel used to power equipment, and fuel used to transport crops and fuels, which can offset any gains made in using biofuels. An October study by the Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen determined that usage of nitrogen fertilizers causes biofuels to contribute more to global warming than petrol.

The Department of Energy (DOE) says biomass products, of which biofuels are derived, are “often more environmentally benign than their petroleum-derived counterparts.” If the DOE was a betting man, how much would it wager on ‘often?’

The movement against biofuels has grown from a groundswell to a tidal wave. In January, more than 220 organizations worldwide appealed to the European Parliament to abandon their mandatory biofuels target. Even the International Monetary Fund is feeling nervous. In October, an IMF research team posted an article on the IMF’s website which noted, “Until new technologies are developed, using food to produce biofuels might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further.”

Hat tip: China Confidential