Dave Greene at BaySense ponders biofuels.

From the NewScientist (via Drudge):

From the orangutan reserves of Borneo to the Brazilian Amazon, virgin forest is being razed to grow palm oil and soybeans to fuel cars and power stations in Europe and North America. And surging prices are likely to accelerate the destruction...

The rush to make energy from vegetable oils is being driven in part by European Union laws requiring conventional fuels to be blended with biofuels, and by subsidies equivalent to 20 pence a litre.

The chief pull quote from that NewScientist article:

“Once again we are trying to solve our environmental problems by dumping them on developing countries”

That's a point I've been making for a few years as the biofuel fetish has grown stronger. See Bio-Fuelish and Resource Discovery for examples of earlier posts, but the ideas are scattered throughout all posts dealing with energy, agriculture and climate. It isn't just that more land is being cleared for agriculture to make fuels, it is also that more water is used, biodiversity is reduced, yada, yada. All the existing reservations we have about industrial agriculture apply whether the crops are eaten by humans, fed to livestock or used for fuel. It makes no environmental sense at all to use biomass for fuel. The environmental benefits are tiny and disputed. There may be none at all. But the environmental costs are well known and truly staggering.

FuturePundit has picked up on the NewScientist article too, and InstaPundit has picked up on FuturePundit. I'm hurt. None of these guys said boo when I made these points. But maybe I understand. When NewScientist says it there is more authority, and they didn't unleash a shotgun blast of 57 reasons why bio-fuels are nonsensical, they picked one emotional issue and hammered it home. Bio-fuels kill rainforests.

Environmental harm is not the only problem with biofuels. All of the reservations we have now about subsidies skewing markets and having differential impacts around the world, usually with unanticipated negative consequences for those least able to stand such shocks, apply to biofuels. Ecologies are impacted, economies are impacted and so societies are impacted.

And it isn't as if we were doing a good job of feeding people now. Nearly 1 in 6 humans is food insecure now, and we expect another 3 billion in coming decades. It isn't yet clear just how we will feed them since it is estimated that to do it all we must double existing food production. It just seems silly to count on growing crops for the express purpose of burning them when people are starving.

We don't do things quite properly now. There is biomass that is just burned or rots uneaten by any human or domestic animal. But that is changing. Fewer and fewer wastes are produced as we become more efficient and frugal. Some wastes are "discovered" and become resources with significant value, and some wastes are eliminated by changing agronomic practice. For example the leaves and stalks of maize plants are sometimes considered wastes and are a disposal problem. Only a third of them are recognized as being valuable fodder. Increasingly these "wastes" are being consumed by livestock rather than burned or tilled into the soil, and smart growers are planting different varieties of maize that have more nutritious leaves and stems so that the "wastes" are even more valuable. This is a good example of burning competing with eating. If the fuel plant will pay more than the livestock grower then the maize stover gets burned rather than eaten. Would they be able to pay more without subsidies? Would the maize even have been grown without its subsidies?

Bio-fuelishness is likely to continue despite the fact that it is nonsensical from nearly every perspective. Kyoto is just as nonsensical and still has believers. The key to the insanity is in this remark by Roger Higman of Friends of the Earth UK:

"We need to ensure that the crops used to make the fuel have been grown in a sustainable way or we will have rainforests cleared for palm oil plantations to make bio-diesel."

Every part of that statement is nonsense, but it will get a pass from pseudo-environmentalists because it uses the s word. It becomes ever truer that the greatest enemies of the environment are environmentalists. There are exceptions of course, but anyone who still supports environmental groups or the environmental movement is confused or worse.

Update:

See also Green Accounting which refutes the laughably foolish idea that alternative energy increases security. A taste:

The idea of energy security is naive. To achieve it means isolation, refusal to trade with the world in any goods not just petroleum. That way lies madness as well as depression. Energy flows around the world in every product and service. It is only engagement with rest of the world, both the part we like and the part that hates us, that offers hope for security and peace.

» New Energy Currents: 2005-12-02 from Winds of Change.NET
After a two-month hiatus to 'adjust' to some new academic obligations, New Energy Currents is back, and better, with a more robust selection of links and significant expansions in two different directions. First and foremost,......[read more]
Tracked: December 2, 2005 01:45 AM