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Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian. Read the article.
We are paying dearly for the green agenda. We are paying for it with out of control energy prices that set new records seemingly daily. And we are paying for it as part of the insane biofuel agenda. As to the latter, according to the Guardian, an unreleased World Bank report cites biofuels as being the cause of a 75% increase in world food prices.
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This from the Guardian:
The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.
. . . The news comes at a critical point in the world's negotiations on biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialised countries meet next week in Hokkaido, Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium on the use of plant-derived fuels.
. . . Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".
. . . [P]roduction of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.
. . . [T]he report author, Don Mitchell, is a senior economist at the Bank and has done a detailed, month-by-month analysis of the surge in food prices, which allows much closer examination of the link between biofuels and food supply.
. . . "It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices," said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser, last night. "All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change."
Showing posts with label biodiesel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biodiesel. Show all posts
Sunday, July 6, 2008
The Wages Of Green
Friday, January 25, 2008
Slouching Towards Brussels & Economic Oppression
And what rough beast,
its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Brussels
to be born?''
My apologies to Yeats, from whom I request some indulgence for the minor rewording of the final stanza of his poem, The Second Coming.
The rough beast to which I refer is the European Union, now about to emerge from the treaty of Lisbon as a super-state and the central government for all its subordinate members. And from the vantage point of the average middle class person in Britain, the EU can only be seen as a rough beast indeed. The economic costs of this beast are only beginning to be felt. They portend to get much worse.
The average per capita GDP in the UK is estimated at £23,500 and is rising at about 2.9% annually. Enter the EU.
Food Costs –
The most basic expense for all people is food. And here, the EU is doing no one any favors. Their insane insistence on biofuel production is taking arable land and world wide agriculture out of the food business and into the energy business. Supplies of food are decreasing while demand is rising world wide. The outcome does not require a degree in economics to figure out. According to a recent Telegraph article, "food prices are accelerating at their fastest rate since records began, fuelling a rise in the average family's shopping bill of £750 a year." And to add insult to injury, we now know that biofuels are far less environmentally friendly than fossil fuels. The global warming enthusiasts at the EU who have politicized the science of climate change for their own ends still have not yet come to grips with that last bit.
Energy Costs –
Get ready for energy costs to make a real rise in the coming decade, compliments of the EU. The estimate right now from Open Europe is that households will have to pay up to £730 a year to fund plans to tackle climate change." That is assuming all goes as planned. The fact is that the numbers might only rise more as the brilliant plans hatched to meet EU targets for renewable energy appear to be boondoggles waiting to happen.
The cleanest source of renewable energy is atomic power which, right now, provides almost 20% of Britain’s energy needs. But aging plants will almost all be decommissioned before 2023, and while plans exist to build some replacement plants, the projection today is that atomic energy will be providing only 7% of Britain’s energy by 2020.
What is planned instead are a series of two very ambitious – and highly questionable – projects to meet the EU targets. The first is Severn Barrage Tidal project which is hoped to provide 5% Britain’s energy needs when built prior to 2020.
The cost of the 10 mile barrage is estimated at a minimum of 15 billion and would be the largest world wide. . . [T]he barrage could . . . provide up to 5% of UK electricity . . . The Renewable Energy Centre released a cautionary statement highlighting its concern that the Government, in its urgency to meet its carbon targets has "plumped for a project which will cost billions of pounds, take over ten years to construct and which may prove in the long term, not to be a cost effective or sustainable solution."
. . . The Barrage relies on the ebb tide and so produces energy only at these times in the tide cycle. Bearing in mind the fundamental principle that electricity can not be stored, this in effect creates supply spikes to the National Grid. In order to keep the power supply constant, the barrage will need to be supported by several gas fired power stations which in turn will produce carbon emissions. This will not only affect the cost effectiveness of the barrage but contradict the aim of finding other energy alternatives to fossil fuels.
Read the entire article. Other problems involve the impact on wildlife and sustainability of the barrage in light of silt build-up.
But then there is the real boondoggle - the insane plan hatched by Labour to turn Britain and its coastline into a giant wind turbine farm. Current plans are to generate 30% of Britain’s energy by wind turbines by the Year 2020.
The problem is that wind turbines are far from effective – and indeed, indications are that relying on wind power for anything over 10% of electricity needs destabilizes the power grid. That said, the one place that wind turbines have been tried in serious numbers – Denmark, which built enough wind turbines to generate 19% of their power needs- there have been all sorts of problems associated with them to the point where all further wind turbine construction has been halted. There is a good essay of the massive negatives associated with wind turbines here, and an excellent essay by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph not long ago. The bottom line is, between the insanity of the Labour government and the hubris of the EU, the middle class Brit is going to be taking it in the shorts on energy costs in the coming decade.
Immigration related costs -
The first thing to understand about immigration is that, for all practical purposes, it is the EU and not Britain which controls Britain’s borders. EU Treaties dating back to the 1957 Treaty of Rome require that Britain open its borders to all people from EU countries. Further, EU law plays the majority role in requiring Britain to allow in people from outside the EU – and than prevents Britain from getting rid of the worst of them.
And immigration into Britain is now at record levels, exceeding half a million foreign nationals each year – with corresponding record levels of British nationals emigrating. Beyond that, "a migrant baby boom is fuelling the fastest growth in the UK's population since the 1960s - with one in every five children now born to foreign mothers." The rate of immigration into the UK and the immigrant baby boom pose to add 50 per cent to today's population" in four decades. Indeed, the number of immigrants is so significant as to threaten the Central Banks controls on inflation. With that in mind, do recall that in 2004, the Home Office was telling Britain that immigration from the new EU states "would be no more than 13,000 a year."
One ramification of this is that now, "in a total of 1,338 primary and secondary schools - more than one in 20 of all schools in England - children with English as their first language are in the minority." This is putting a severe strain on school funding. And not surprisingly, it is putting a severe strain on all aspects of Britain’s infrastructure. Another aspect is the loss of jobs for Brits in their own country. "More than half a million British-born employees have vanished from the UK workforce since the influx of Eastern European immigrants." Gordon Brown made a pledge in September to "create British jobs for British workers" – but has since had to quietly bury the plan because it would be an illegal practice under EU law. One would think the Prime Minister might know how EU law effects his country and his ability to govern – particularly before signing away Britain’s sovereignty to the EU.
The increase in immigration is also driving a corresponding above inflation increase in local council taxes to meet the increasing demands on local infrastructure. The average local council tax is now up to £1,145. The average rise in council taxes is 4%. As an aside, the problems here are being compounded as Labour is redistributing council tax revenues from the strapped south to Labour electoral strongholds in the north.
And lastly, there has been an explosion – in some areas by more than nine-fold - in crime associated with the vast increase in immigrants, particularly those from Romania. They are lured by Britain’s "generous benefits system" and do appear to be making the most of it.
Dane geld to the EU -
Parliament which just approved a massive transfer of wealth to the EU after only a bit more than 3 hours of debate. As the EU Referendum calculates, that works out to a transfer of British tax dollars at a rate of "£481 million a minute." As it stands now, the UK’s "net contributions to the EU will increase from an already horrendously large £4.7 billion" to £10 to £11 billion in 2011. A warning to the UK citizenry – gird your loins and keep your hands on your wallets. The tax man cometh.
EU Regulation of the Economy -
The EU is still in its nascent stages – with its full powers far from reaching their zenith. Yet even now it is apparent that the EU is making "a tireless effort to regulate everything." And of course, all new regulations inevitably impose some financial cost to implement and enforce – and in the EU’s case, to decipher. In addition, many regulations impose additional burdens by raising the price of existing goods and services or making less costly options unavailable. For example, see here, here, here and here.
Then there is the other not quite salutary effects of regulation – making it difficult for new businesses to enter into and compete in highly regulated markets. It would seem the EU excels at that.
Update: See this humorous application of EU regulation. It falls into the category of "you just can't make this stuff up."
Summary:
So how much, in toto, is all of this going to cost the average Brit, today and a decade from now? If I had a supercomputer and a year to analyze direct and indirect costs, perhaps I might be able to find an answer. In any event, it is fair to say that the costs are already significant and will only rise based on all of the above. Given all the above, the cost of the EU for the average Brit portends to become oppressive over the next decade. The EU is seen by those on its gravy train as a socialist utopia. I doubt that vision will be shared by anyone not on that train, even today. Which is why Europe is in the midst of a coup, with the EU slouching towards Brussels to be born while the people of the UK and Europe are denied any say in its birth.
Biofuel Disaster Part II
Biofuels are rapidly becoming the penultimate symbol of the dangers of politicized science and the hubris of the global warming entuhsiasts. I blogged below on the disaster that the embrace of biofuels portends for food prices, not to mention the fact that biofuels are anything but a green panacea. Indeed, biofuels do far more damage to the environment than burning fossil fuels. Today, a series of articles flushes out those themes:
A team of researchers led by Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen has found that growing and using biofuels emits up to 70 percent more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. They are warning that the cure could end up being worse than the disease.
Biofuels, once championed as the great hope for fighting climate change, could end up being more damaging to the environment than oil or gasoline. A new study has found that the growth and use of crops to make biofuels produces more damaging greenhouse gases than previously thought.
German Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen and his team of researchers have calculated the emissions released by the growth and burning of crops such as maize, rapeseed and cane sugar to produce biofuels. The team of American, British and German scientists has found that the process releases twice as much nitrous oxide (N2O) as previously thought. They estimate that 3 to 5 percent of nitrogen in fertilizer is converted and emitted, as opposed to the 2 percent used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its calculations.
. . . The findings come in the wake of an OECD report earlier this month, which warned against rushing to grow reneweable energy crops because they cause food shortages and damage biodiversity while producing limited benefits.
The growth of corn for ethanol in the United States has already overtaken its cultivation for food, while in Europe the main biofuel crop is rapeseed.
Read the entire article. And as to the effect of the biofuel insanity on food prices, there is an exceptional article in Der Spiegel:
Food prices are skyrocketing. Arable land is becoming scarce. And forests continue to disappear across the globe. The world must decide between affordable food and biofuels.
All it takes for Hans Dietrich Driftmann, a businessman from Germany's northern Holstein region, to explain the way the world works is a package of muesli -- or at least to explain the way his world, the world of agricultural markets, works.
Driftmann picks up a packet of "Köllns kernige Multikorn-Flocken" ("Kölln's Crunchy Multigrain Flakes") and reads out the list of ingredients: oats, wheat, barley and rye. Then he slips a set of price tables out of a plastic sleeve and does a couple of calculations to illustrate how the prices of the muesli's ingredients have changed: rye has gone up by 55 percent, barley by 70 percent and wheat 90 percent. The price of oats has also skyrocketed -- by 80 percent -- since the last harvest a year ago. This final figure is what really hits home for Driftmann.
Meanwhile, almost all supermarkets appear to have raised prices across the board: for bread and butter, milk and cheese, pork and poultry, noodles and chocolate, apple juice and beer. The growing wave of price hikes has pushed inflation to its highest level in 14 years.
Some of those who were born after World War II and never experienced leaner times may only now be learning that food does have a value, even an existential one. Suddenly they realize that food is in fact an indispensable resource, critical for life, and that they can no longer expect it to be available at all times and in all places -- especially not at guaranteed low prices.
When German Agriculture Minister Horst Seehofer, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), opened this year's Green Week agricultural fair in Berlin last week, it was under a completely new set of assumptions. For decades, the industrialized world enjoyed the questionable luxury of producing far more milk, butter and wheat than its citizens could ever consume. The surplus was exported, provided buyers could be found, or was placed into indefinite storage or destroyed.
This folly has now come to an end. Europe's mountains of butter have been depleted, its grain silos emptied and its lakes of milk drained. "The era of overproduction is behind us," says Stephane Delodder, an agricultural specialist with Rabobank in the Dutch city of Utrecht.
Worldwide flows of goods are shifting and becoming reorganized. For the first time, we are seeing the emergence of a truly global agricultural market driven by the underlying force of all economic activity: the scarcity of goods. Wheat supplies, for example, have reached a 30-year low. In only one year, inventories in the European Union have plummeted from 14 million to one million tons.
Given this situation, the meteorological forecast of a drought in Australia, an important wheat exporter, can trigger a minor earthquake on the world's futures exchanges, where commodities prices are constantly hitting new all-time highs. Nothing fuels the fantasies of commodity traders quite as effectively as a bushel of wheat or a hectoliter of rapeseed oil.
Of course, the current uproar over rising food prices revolves around a lot more than consumers paying a few extra euros for milk, cheese and bread. The real issue is how mankind will be able to feed itself in the future -- and at what price.
How can agriculture feed a world that grows by 80 million people each year? A world that is increasingly exposed to climatic extremes? And, most of all, a world that doesn't just need food for people and feed for livestock, but is increasingly consuming fuel derived from plants?
The problem is that there is too much demand and not enough land. In a world hungry for agricultural products, the dilemma is that each hectare of arable land can only be used for one purpose at any given time. Potatoes can't be grown where corn is cultivated. Where rye is grown, there is no room left for oats. And when rapeseed is converted into biodiesel, there is no seed left to produce rapeseed oil. This fundamental conflict drives up the prices for agricultural crops. There are growing fears that the world could soon face a food crisis, and that the current bottleneck could expand into widespread starvation.
. . . The fact is that arable land cannot be increased at will. Over the past three decades, the amount of arable land worldwide has stagnated at about 1.5 billion hectares (3.7 billion acres). While new agricultural land is being added in Russia or South America, more and more land is lost to residential and industrial development in Asia and Europe. In China, eight million hectares (20 million acres) of land under cultivation have vanished within a decade. For comparison, just under 12 million hectares (30 million acres) of land are currently used for agriculture in Germany.
These spatial limitations would be tolerable if the world's population wasn't growing at such a breathtaking pace. A person born in 1950 has experienced mankind more than doubling its numbers from 2.5 billion to 6.6 billion people today. If the population grows to nine or even 10 billion by 2050, "the world will see an enormous need for additional biomass produced in agriculture," warns Franz Josef Rademacher, a mathematician in the southern German city of Ulm. Rademacher, a member of the Club of Rome, believes that "shortages will intensify dramatically."
At the same time, millions of people are changing their lifestyles and eating habits. The new middle class in Shanghai, Hanoi and Jakarta, no longer satisfied with a diet of rice and beans, has a growing appetite for pizza and pasta, burgers and pork chops. Meat consumption has doubled in the last 25 years and continues to grow. Meat production, though, requires large amounts of feed. A hog farmer needs three kilos of feed to produce a kilo of pork, and for beef the ratio is even higher: seven to one. Vast amounts of water are needed to produce the grain that goes into feeding livestock. It takes about 900 liters of water to grow enough corn for one kilo of feed.
. . . Governments spend billions to promote the production of plants that can be used to produce fuel and the development of production capacity. Growing amounts of rapeseed are being refined into biodiesel while corn and sugarcane becomes ethanol. On Wednesday, the European Commission examined ways to implement its ambitious climate resolutions. Marian Fischer Boel, the European Union's agricultural commissioner, is convinced that if Europe hopes to achieve its goal of a 20-percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020, "there will be no getting around biodiesel and ethanol." The demand for plant-based alternatives to fossil fuels increases along with the price of oil -- with far-reaching consequences for consumers. The EU is calling for fuels to include at least 10 percent biofuels by 2020.
When grain ends up in our fuel tanks instead of on our plates, food prices increase, as does the cost of feed such as corn silage and soybeans. Higher feed costs make it more expensive to raise livestock, which translates directly into higher prices for beef and pork. The price of oil -- OPEC in other words -- ultimately determines how much a pork chop costs at the supermarket.
The Americans, in particular, have high hopes for biofuel making them less dependent on oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf region. US farmers produced more corn last year than they have since the end of World War II. Tim Recker, a 43-year-old Iowa farmer, says that he and his fellow farmers get as much as they can out of the ground. "We're farmers. Our goal is to produce, produce, produce."
At a recent lunch on Recker's farm -- the meal was steak and beans -- his mobile phone gave a quick buzz: a text message with grain prices. Recker receives similar text messages about three times a day, and the news is almost always good. He and his neighbors are experiencing their own, personal economic miracle. Brand-new grain silos are popping up in the fields around Recker's farm, shining, rocket-like symbols of their builders' faith in the future. Many Iowans already refer to their state as "the new Texas," as if biofuel could serve as a complete substitute for oil.
. . . In places like New Orleans, it becomes clear that even in the America of high-tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft, the traditional agricultural industry still plays a powerful role -- and it's an industry in which a handful of corporations dominate the world market.
The largest is Cargill, a family-owned company from Minnesota founded in 1865. With its 158,000 employees and $88 billion (€60 billion) in sales, Cargill is in the same league with major international corporations like BASF, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard. In company literature, Cargill aptly describes itself as "the flour in your noodles, the salt on your French fries and the corn in your tortillas, the chocolate in your dessert and the sweetener in your soft drink."
Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Bunge form the legendary ABC complex. No one who hopes to be a player in the global business of renewable commodities can get around dealing with at least one of these companies. The agricultural multinationals buy grain and oilseed from farmers and cooperatives, store it in their own silos and dry and process it. They ship their products through their own transfer terminals and charter fleets of freighters to dispatch them to every corner of the world. They grind wheat into flour, process soybeans into animal feed and -- currently an especially lucrative activity -- convert rapeseed into biodiesel. ADM operates Europe's largest biodiesel plant at the Hamburg harbor, where anyone driving past the facility is immediately engulfed by the penetrating odor of French fries. By controlling the entire process, from harvest to finished product, these conglomerates manage to secure the most profitable part of the value-added chain for themselves.
The focus of their business is shifting more and more to the southern hemisphere. Vietnam and Thailand, for instance, have become important rice exporters, Indonesia and Malaysia have developed significant plant oil production industries, and both India and China export large volumes of sugar.
. . . A bitter struggle over the distribution of the best agricultural land has erupted worldwide, from Eastern Europe to halfway around the world in Brazil. Because of its mild climate, the large country straddling the Amazon is on its way to becoming the world's leading agricultural country. In the state of Goiás, which is one of Brazil's most important farming regions and roughly the size of Germany, agriculture has grown by about 7 percent a year since 1990. The country, already one of the world's top exporters of beef, soybeans, sugar, coffee and orange juice, still has enormous potential. "We can easily double our agricultural production," says Brazilian Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes.
The biofuel industry has taken the minister by his word, replacing former soybean fields, grazing land for cattle and cotton plantations with sugarcane fields. In the region surrounding Rio Verde, Goiás breadbasket, sugar barons known as usineiros have bought up vast estates -- paying high prices for the privilege. "Only fools aren't selling," says Gomes de Moraes, a 47-year-old cattle rancher.
. . . Billionaire investor George Soros and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn have acquired holdings in ethanol plants, as has AOL founder Steve Case. All of them are in Brazil hoping to turn a handsome profit, as well as to bask in the role of environmental activist. But the professional world has long harbored doubts over whether biofuel is as environmentally friendly as some believe.
In fact, there are now many critics of the industry, including the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), consumer organizations like Foodwatch, the German government's environmental expert council and even major food corporations like Nestlé. Their verdict on biofuel is devastating.
According to the OECD, expanded biofuel production will lead to "untenable strains" on the commodities markets "without yielding significant benefits for the environment." Foodwatch is convinced that the strategy, while benefiting farmers, will do nothing to protect the climate. Germany's environmental expert council says that the industry raises expectations that "fly in the face of accepted science." Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Lemathe bluntly characterizes biofuel production as "environmental lunacy."
The environmental upshot is indeed disappointing. Much of the energy the farmers produce is offset by the amount of energy that goes into producing the plants in the first place. They consume fossil fuels to harvest plants, for shipping, for storage and drying, not to mention the energy required to produce pesticides and fertilizers. The economical possibilities are also limited. Even if the US's entire corn crop were converted into fuel, it would satisfy only about 12 percent of the demand for gasoline.
In Germany, the rapeseed plant has displaced many other crops. Few farmers plant feed peas or beans anymore. Rapeseed fields, with their yellow flowers, take up the largest amount of space -- 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres), or about 60 percent more than in 2000 -- among renewable commodities. Some of the expansion comes at the cost of fallow land, green space and bogs -- in other words, natural CO2 sinks.
A simple calculation points out biofuel's less-than-stellar potential. To fill the roughly 100-liter (26-gallon) tank of an SUV, an ethanol producer has to process about a quarter of a ton of wheat. This is enough wheat for a baker to bake about 460 kilograms of bread, which has a total nutritional value of about a million kilocalories -- enough to feed one person for a year.
So are the SUVs of the rich ultimately consuming the bread of the poor? According to Lester Brown, the president of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, this question sums up the essence of a new clash between North and South. "The stage is clear for a conflict between 800 million car owners and the two billion people who represent the poorest of the poor worldwide."
The poor are the first to feel the painful effects of turbulence in agricultural markets. Some spend up to 80 percent of their disposable income on food. "The world's poorest people are especially hard-hit," says John Powell, the deputy executive director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
. . . China already depends heavily on Brazil for its grain imports, and the two countries have signed extensive supply agreements. The world's pantry can apparently offer virtually unlimited capacity to satisfy Chinese demands -- but this comes at a high price for the rest of the globe. Ancient rainforests are being destroyed. As the agricultural industry expands its sugarcane plantations, soybean farmers are forced to move closer to the Amazon, where they buy land from cattle ranchers. The ranchers, in turn, burn down the rainforest to create new grazing land.
This illustrates how the scarcity of agricultural commodities contributes to the destruction of highly vulnerable vegetation zones, not just in the Amazon region, but also in Malaysia and Indonesia, where oil is derived from the fruit of palm trees. Environmental activists refer to the product as "clear-cutting diesel." According to Paulo Adario of Greenpeace Brazil, "the rainforest burns when the prices of soybeans and ethanol go up."
. . . Schmitz has observed the global agricultural markets for years. Thanks to a complex computer program he and his research team have developed, the professor can even steal a glimpse into the future. The program simulates what happens when the agricultural conditions change -- as is currently the case.
To run the program, Schmitz feeds vast amounts of data into the computer, including population growth and income development figures, as well as columns of numbers relating to the production, consumption and costs of agricultural commodities. In a probable scenario, demand will continue to rise, because emerging economies like China, India and Indonesia still have a lot of catching up to do. "We have to get used to the idea of a prolonged phase of rising prices," says the professor.
How long would it last? Although Schmitz doesn't want to pin himself down, he says that the current shortages are not a phenomenon that will end in a few months -- or even in a few years. Schmitz predicts: "This could continue for two or three decades."
Read the entire article.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Biofuel Disaster
The road to hell is paved by with good intentions - and it would appear that the cars driving that road today are running on biofuels. The pavement for the road is being provided by the good intentions of the morally unassailable global warming enthusiasts who want to save the planet.
Biofuels may be the biggest eco-boondogle to ever hit the world. I guess I should probably qualify that last sentence with the word "yet." Given the incredible hubris of the EU and others who have wholly politicized the science of global warming for their own ends, things are bound to get much worse before someone puts a stake in this idiocy.
Between the rapid rise in food prices that is being felt most acutely by the world's poor, food shortages that are beginning to occur, the harm being done to the world's ecology, and the tremendous costs involved, there is little question that the rush to embrace biofuels is a disaster that will go into the history books. When even the good folks at the UN are calling this insanity "a total disaster," you know that there are some real problems.
This today from Der Spiegel:
The European Union has announced plans to increase the use of gas and diesel produced from plants. But the critique against biofuels is mounting. Many say they are even more harmful than conventional fossil fuels.
. . . The European Union on Wednesday unveiled a far-reaching plan . . . aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent relative to 1990 and dramatically upping the share of renewable energies in the 27-member bloc's energy mix. The scheme also calls for 10 percent of fuel used in transportation to be made up of biofuels. That last element, though, is becoming increasingly controversial -- and environmental groups, this week, are leading an aggressive charge to put a stop to biofuels.
"The biofuels route is a dead end," Dr. Andrew Boswell, a Green Party councillor in England and author of a recent study on the harmful effects of biofuels, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "They are going to create great damage to the environment and will also produce dramatic social problems in (tropical countries where many crops for biofuels are grown). There basically isn't any way to make them viable."
The evidence against biofuels marshalled by Boswell and other environmentalists appears quite damning. Advertised as a fuel that only emits the amount of carbon dioxide that the plants absorb while growing -- making it carbon neutral -- it actually has resulted in a profitable industrial sector attractive to countries around the world. Vast swaths of forest have been felled and burned in Argentina and elsewhere for soya plantations. Carbon-rich peat bogs are being drained and rain forests destroyed in Indonesia to make way for extensive palm oil farming.
Because the forests are often torched and the peat rapidly oxidizes, the result is huge amounts of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. Furthermore, healthy peat bogs and forests absorb CO2 -- scientists refer to them as "carbon sinks" -- making their disappearance doubly harmful.
Indeed, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, released in October 2006, estimates that deforestation and other comparable land-use changes account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions around the world. Biofuels, say activists, accelerate that process.
"We are causing a climate catastrophe by promoting agro-fuels," Greenpeace agricultural specialist Alexander Hissting told SPIEGEL ONLINE, using his group's preferred term for biofuels. "We are creating a huge industry in many parts of the world. In Indonesia, something akin to a gold rush has broken out."
The European Union seems to have taken note of the gathering biofuels storm. The plan has noted that the 10-percent goal is dependent on whether "production is sustainable," as an EU PowerPoint presentation delivered to reporters on Tuesday noted. The EU also wants to make it illegal to use biofuels made from crops grown in nature reserves or in recently clear-cut forest lands. Crops grown in places valuable as carbon sinks are also to be avoided.
But critics doubt whether such clauses, which call for acceptable fields to be certified, is enforceable. "At the moment, such certification systems are very incomplete and it is very unlikely that they will ever work," says Boswell. "The biofuel supply chain is incredibly complicated."
Even EU scientists doubt whether the supposed benefits of biofuels will ever outweigh the costs. A recent report in the Financial Times cited an unpublished study by the Joint Research Center, a stable of European Commission scientists, as saying that the "uncertainty is too great to say whether the EU 10 percent biofuel target will save greenhouse gas or not." It noted that subsidies in place to promote biofuels would cost European taxpayers between €33 billion and €65 billion by 2020.
Environmentalists say that emissions aren't the only serious problem created by the biofuel boom. Even crops grown in northern countries, like corn in the United States or rapeseed in Germany and the rest of Europe, harbor major dangers to the climate. Both maize and rapeseed are voracious consumers of nitrogen, leading farmers to use large quantities of nitrous oxide fertilizers. But when nitrous oxide is released into the atmosphere, it reflects 300 times as much heat as carbon dioxide does. Paul J. Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel prize for chemistry, estimates that biodiesel produced from rapeseed can result in up to 70 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels. Corn, the preferred biofuels crop in the US, results in 50 percent more emissions, Crutzen estimates.
. . . Another issue receiving increasing attention recently is that of rising food prices as foodstuffs are turned into fuel. Price increases for soybeans and corn hit developing countries particularly hard. Indeed, there have already been food price riots in Mexico, Morocco, Senegal and other developing countries. While the price increases cannot be pinned entirely on biofuels, it has certainly played a role. In October, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler called for a five-year moratorium on biofuels to combat rising prices. Using arable land for biofuels, he said, "is a total disaster for those who are starving."
Slowly, it appears that some governments are beginning to listen to the chorus of criticisms. Last autumn, the Canadian province of Quebec announced that it would cease building plants to produce the biofuel ethanol. And on Monday, the UK's House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee called for a stop in the increase of biofuel use. "Biofuels can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road transport. But at present, most biofuels have a detrimental impact on the environment overall," committee chairman Tim Yeo said, according to Reuters.
The European Union has reacted with anger to the UK report. Andris Piebalgs, European commissioner for energy, told the Guardian that "the Commission strongly disagrees with the conclusion of the British House of Commons report."
The report, though, is music to the ears of environmentalists like Boswell. "We have been highlighting these problems for a number of years," he says. "Now it is time for the UK government to act on the committee report."
Read the entire article. Take note of the final paragraph, because there is a lot of irony in it. The UK is no longer a sovereign nation. It is a province in the EU, and by the recently signed Treaty of Lisbon, EU laws take precendce. While the UK can produce report after report, the bottom line is the EU, which has written global warming explicitly into the constitution, will have the only say on biofuels. I find it amazing that there are still people in the UK who do not understand that reality. And the EU gives every indication that it intends to fiddle while Rome burns in a biofuel conflagration.
Update: Much more on the facts and figures associated with the biofuel insanity here.
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