Great Perks on Biodiesel!

no_ones_song · #1 04-16-2008, 05:00 PM

If biofuels take off, they will cause a global humanitarian disaster.

yayz!

Quote:

To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the UK. Even the EU's more modest target of 20% by 2020 would consume almost all our cropland.

If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the impact on global food supply will 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.

This prospect sounds, at first, ridiculous. Surely if there were unmet demand for food, the market would ensure that crops were used to feed people rather than vehicles? There is no basis for this assumption. The market responds to money, not need. People who own cars have more money than people at risk of starvation. 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: the number of livestock on earth has quintupled since 1950. The reason is that those who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who buy only subsistence crops.

Green fuel is not just a humanitarian disaster; it is also an environmental disaster. Those who worry about the scale and intensity of today's agriculture should consider what farming will look like when it is run by the oil industry. Moreover, if we try to develop a market for rapeseed biodiesel in Europe, it 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 it will stimulate an industry that has already destroyed most of Brazil's cerrado (one of the world's most biodiverse environments) and much of its rainforest.

Anyone see it 'happening' yet?

Insomnia · #2 04-16-2008, 09:10 PM

They are already having torilla riots over rising food prices (thanks to biofuels in the US) in Mexico...

Another thing this article fails to mention is the carbon emissions involved in harvesting and processing the oils which are HIGH HIGH HIGH.

thisbytes · #3 04-20-2008, 06:28 PM

What's humorous as fuck is that these grave situations are totally unnecessary and totally manufactured.

I watched a an Indy Car race last night from Japan. Guess what technology the pace car they were using was running on....

Water.

orchestral · #4 04-26-2008, 03:14 PM

yeah i wrote about this 3-4 years ago, and everyone sassed me about it.

but really, what kind of retards are we when we think growing mass amounts of fuel is the answer. as if we have so much extra space to grow food in (who needs rainforests, or fields that grow actual food)? as if agriculture is a reliable economic sector? anyone who put more than 3 seconds of thought into the biofuel concept saw this coming. land-based biofuels are a GIANT waste of time, money, and energy. algae based fuels, may be the only solution under the biofuel umbrella.

Cecilia Ann · #5 05-05-2008, 05:06 AM

Opinion: Bring on the right biofuels (International Herald Tribune, 24/4/2008)
By Roger Cohen

NEW YORK - Fads come fast and furious in our viral age, and the reactions to them can be equally ferocious. That's what we're seeing right now with biofuels, which everyone loved until everyone decided they were the worst thing since the Black Death.

Where fuel distilled from plant matter was once hailed as an answer to everything from global warming to the geostrategic power shift favoring repressive one-pipeline oil states, it's now a "scam" and "part of the problem," according to Time Magazine. Ethanol has turned awful.

The supposed crimes of biofuels are manifold. They're behind soaring global commodity prices, the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, increased rather than diminished greenhouse gases, food riots in Haiti, Indonesian deforestation and, no doubt, your mother-in-law's toothache.

Most of this, to borrow a farm image, is hogwash and bilge.

I'll grant that the fashion for biofuels led to excess, and that some farm-to-fuel-plant conversion, particularly in subsidized U.S. and European markets, makes no sense. But biofuels remain very much part of the solution. It just depends which biofuels.

Before I get to that, some myths need dispelling. If Asian rice prices are soaring, along with the global prices of wheat and maize, it's not principally because John Doe in Iowa or Jean Dupont in Picardy has decided to turn yummy corn and beet into un-yummy ethanol feedstock.

Much larger trends are at work that dwarf the still tiny biofuel industry (roughly a $40 billion annual business, or the equivalent of Exxon Mobil's $40.6 billion profits in 2007). I refer to the rise of more than one third of humanity in China and India, the disintegrating dollar and soaring oil prices.

Hundreds of millions of people have moved from poverty into the global economy over the past decade in Asia. They're eating twice a day, instead of once, and propelling rapid urbanization. Their demand for food staples - and once unthinkable luxuries like meat - is pushing up prices.

At the same time, the rising price of commodities over the past year has largely tracked the declining parity of the beleaguered dollar. Rice prices have shot up in dollar terms, far less against the euro. Countries like China are offloading depreciating dollar reserves to hoard stores of value, like commodities.

Food price increases are also tied to $120 oil. Fossil fuels are an important input in everything from fertilizer to diesel for tractors.

Another myth that needs nuking is that the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed to make way for Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol. Almost all viable cane-growing areas lie hundreds of miles from the rain forest. Brazil has enough savannah to multiply its 3.5 million hectares of cane-for-ethanol production by ten without going near the Amazon ecosystem.

Brazilian rain forest is burning, as it long has, for a complex mix of economic reasons. Brazil's successful ethanol industry - 80 percent of new cars run on ethanol or gasoline and all gasoline comprises 25 percent biofuel - is not one of them.

The danger in all this anti-biofuel hysteria is that we're going to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Those hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians who are now eating more will be driving cars within the next quarter-century. What that will do to oil prices is anybody's guess, but what's clear enough is that ethanol presents the only technically and economically viable alternative for large-scale substitution of petroleum fuels for transport in the next 15 to 20 years. It's not a panacea but it's a necessary bridge to the next technological breakthrough.

The question is: which ethanol?

Right now, the biofuel market is being grossly distorted by subsidies and trade barriers in the United States and the European Union. These make it rewarding to produce ethanol from corn or grains that are far less productive than sugarcane ethanol, divert land from food production (unlike sugarcane), and have environmental credentials that are dubious.

What sense does it make to have a surplus of environmentally-friendly Brazilian sugar-based ethanol with a yield eight times higher than U.S. corn ethanol and zero impact on food prices being kept from an American market by a tariff of 54 cents on a gallon while Iowan corn ethanol gets a subsidy?

"It would make a lot more sense to drop the tariff, drop the subsidy, and allow Brazilian ethanol into the United States," said Philippe Reichstul, the chief executive of a biofuel company in São Paulo. "Pressure on U.S. land will be slashed."

The United States and Europe should maintain their biofuel targets - a European plan for renewable fuels to supply a tenth of all vehicle fuel by 2020 is under pressure - while rethinking the policies that favor the wrong biofuels.

The real scam lies in developed world protectionism and skewed subsidies, not the biofuel idea.

Forum Stats:

Latest Threads: