Biofuels Would
Be A Disaster
By George Monbiot
23 November, 2004
The
Guardian
If
human beings were without sin, we would still live in an imperfect world.
Adam Smith's notion that by pursuing his own interest, a man "frequently
promotes that of ... society more effectually than when he really intends
to promote it", and Karl Marx's picture of a society in which "the
free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all" are both mocked by one obvious constraint. The world is finite.
This means that when one group of people pursues its own interests,
it damages the interests of others.
It is hard to think of a better example than the current enthusiasm
for biofuels. These 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 that the plants extracted while
they were growing. So switching from fossil fuels to biodiesel and bioalcohol
is now being promoted as the solution to climate change.
Next month, the
British government will have to set a target for the amount of transport
fuel that will come from crops. The European Union wants 2% of the oil
we use to be biodiesel by the end of next year, rising to 6% by 2010
and 20% by 2020. To try to meet these targets, the government has reduced
the tax on biofuels by 20p a litre, while the EU is paying farmers an
extra €45 a hectare to grow them.
Everyone seems happy
about this. The farmers and the chemicals industry can develop new markets,
the government can meet its commitments to cut carbon emissions, and
environmentalists can celebrate the fact that plant fuels reduce local
pollution as well as global warming. Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, biofuels
can be deployed straightaway. This, in fact, was how Rudolf Diesel expected
his invention to be used. When he demonstrated his engine at the World
Exhibition in 1900, he ran it on peanut oil. "The use of vegetable
oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today," he predicted.
"But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum."
Some enthusiasts are predicting that if fossil fuel prices continue
to rise, he will soon be proved right.
I hope not. Those
who have been promoting these fuels are well-intentioned, 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. A few thousand greens
in the United Kingdom are running their cars on used chip fat. But recycled
cooking oils could supply only 100,000 tonnes of diesel a year in this
country, equivalent to one 380th of our road transport fuel.
It might also be
possible to turn crop wastes such as wheat stubble into alcohol for
use in cars - the Observer ran an article about this on Sunday. I'd
like to see the figures, but I find it hard to believe that we will
be able to extract more energy than we use in transporting and processing
straw. But the EU's plans, like those of all the enthusiasts for biolocomotion,
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.
Road transport in
the UK consumes 37.6m tonnes of petroleum products a year. The most
productive oil crop that can be grown in this country is rape. The average
yield is 3-3.5 tonnes per hectare. One tonne of rapeseed produces 415kg
of biodiesel. So every hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes
of transport fuel.
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.
It is shocking to
see how narrow the focus of some environmentalists can be. At a meeting
in Paris last month, a group of scientists and greens studying abrupt
climate change decided that Tony Blair's two big ideas - tackling global
warming and helping Africa - could both be met by turning Africa into
a biofuel production zone. This strategy, according to its convenor,
"provides a sustainable development path for the many African countries
that can produce biofuels cheaply". I know the definition of sustainable
development has been changing, but I wasn't aware that it now encompasses
mass starvation and the eradication of tropical forests. Last year,
the British parliamentary committee on environment, food and rural affairs,
which is supposed to specialise in joined-up thinking, examined every
possible consequence of biofuel production - from rural incomes to skylark
numbers - except the impact on food supply.
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.
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