Getting real about biofuels
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From the Rainforest Action Network website: Heard all the buzz lately about how biofuels might break our oil addiction? Maybe even halt global warming? We’ll just transfer our addiction from fossil fuels to biofuels without reducing consumption, we’ll lower our greenhouse gas emissions, and the farmers growing our new fuel supply will benefit. Sounds simple, right?
There are several small-scale biofuel initiatives that may provide locally grown alternatives to oil. However, even if combined with plug-in hybrid cars powered by a green grid and expanded mass transit, responsibly grown biofuels can only be a small part of the answer to America’s oil dependence. More importantly, these initiatives are being eclipsed by the massive expansion of the global biofuel infrastructure. Agribusiness, oil, energy and auto companies are deceiving consumers and profiting by furthering the myth of a biofuel solution to global warming. Even the term biofuel, which evokes nature and vitality, is misleading. That’s why we call these destructive industrial substances agrofuels.
Fool Fuels - a bridge to the future?
Comments (1 - 2 of 2)
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Right and wrong.
Global capacity for transport biofuels is around 10% of the amount of fossil fuels currently used. Biofuels (biodiesel and bioethanol) industry is far from 'small-scale', accounting for around 2% of usage and growing daily. Hybrid cars are a PR exercise - if you want to reduce use of fuel, either change to a smaller car or don't make the journey. Agribusinesses, etc, are not 'deceiving customers' - they are playing catch-up with mainly European legislative moves - and this is happening even in the USA - to reduce the dependency on oil. One reason being global climate change and another being energy security. The farmers will benefit, and the consumers will pay as they should. Pay for what? Self-indulgence! Most to benefit will be the under-developed countries, where biofuel feedstocks can be grown as cash crops. Stop knocking until you have done your homework. |
Below is a rather simplistic defense of an industry, and doing so by ignoring some realities. Agrofuels are supported and promoted and marketed and lobbied in the USA by a huge industry, with a government made of "agrobidness" allies all too eager to work from the inside. This really isn't "deceptive", just open, out front, bold, frank, in-your-face, personal and corporate greed on display. The sadly simplistic, artificial, made up, manipulative choice offered below of either not transporting anything or using a smaller vehicle could be used as an analogy, an example of bad parenting.
Land for agrofuels puts pressure on land for wildlife habitat, land for food, and land for overpopulation--all uses which will not tolerate yet more pressure. The twin justification of oil security and cash for agrofuels to small farmers is a scam. Whether a country invades another sovereign country for its oil or for its land is immaterial. Small farmers are the last and least to benefit from such scams, since the agrobidness industry is based on the largest scale possible. One comment made below is true: "Biofuels (biodiesel and bioethanol) industry is far from 'small-scale'...." And finally, cash for agrofuels is cold comfort when the population is starving, because demand created by foreign investors has eliminated food crops.
EU now has greatly moderated and even reversed their attachment to agrofuels so that argument is simply false. But if USA is portrayed as "catching up" to EU we'll have to follow suit and change and improve our own thinking on agrofuels, and the position described above by the Rainforest Action Network is a start.
A pair of studies recently (Feb 2008) released also show the economics and benefits of agrofuels do not measure up to the marketing hype of the industry. Agrofuels actually add to Carbon release and anthropogenic global warming.
NOW someone needs to do their homework--noting the distinction between homework and propaganda--and also do some deep soul-searching.
David
Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!