Tragic Planet

I’ve always been opposed to the use of various crops for producing biofuels. While they sound good on the surface, when you look at them more closely it is easy to see that they entail more drawbacks than benefits. First of all these biofuels are not effective energy sources because they require nearly as much energy to produce as they end-up containing (same goes for hydrogen by the way). Various studies show that ethanol produced from corn uses anywhere from 80% to 105% as much energy as it contains. Other crops like oil palms and sugar cane are more efficient, but still require large amounts of energy to produce. So biofuels are really just another way to store and transport energy, not a real energy source like oil, wind or solar. The second problem with this is that all the energy needed to plant, cultivate, harvest, transport, and transform these crops into fuel generate a lot of CO2 emissions. So while these fuels burn more cleanly, their overall environmental impact is no better than that of oil, perhaps even worse. So these fuels really give us a false impression of being green, and they give governments a way to appear to be doing something about the environment, when they really are not.

Because of this inherent lack of efficiency in producing biofuels, the only way they can be profitably produced is through heavy government subsidies to farmers and energy companies. The danger of these subsidies is that they encourage farmers to displace food crops and this drives-up the price of food; an alarming fact considering that millions of people already don’t have enough to eat on this planet, and it will only get worse. An even bigger danger is that this sudden interest in biofuels is pushing many countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brazil, to slash-and burn valuable rainforest and replace them with oil palms or sugar cane. This slashing and burning of the carbon-rich rain forests and peat is releasing 10 times as much CO2 as the fuels produced will save. This is also destroying precious rain forests, destroying wildlife habitat, and causing severe disruption to the whole ecosystem. I have seen first-hand in southern Costa Rica the effects of destroying rain forests to plant oil palms as well as the effects of replacing man-power intensive banana crops with low-labour oil palms, putting thousands of people out of work in the process.

And now western governments are signing treaties with third-world countries, encouraging them to continue the destruction of their most precious resource (the rain forests) in exchange for biofuels production. So once again, western governments are exploiting third-world countries, and transporting first-world problems to the third world. George Monbiot has just published an article entitled A Lethal Solution that discusses these very dangers and denounces the governments hiding behind these so called “green fuels”.

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