Biofuels and you You are buying them, you are
From 1st April 2008 2.5% of the fuel sold in the UK had to come from a renewable source. This Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO) is one of the very few government policies to tackle the greenhouse gas impact of motoring. But it was launched to a chorus of discredit and disapproval not only from green groups but government scientific advisers too. There are four key charges on the sheet: the dash to biofuels may hasten climate change not halt it, more biofuel means less food, more land under fuel crops means less space for wildlife, and it gives gas guzzlers an excuse to guzzle gas. In fact it seems that the seed of a biofuel industry is germinating in a very hostile environment. So lets weigh up some of the arguments.
What are biofuels? They are any fuel made from plant material. Biodiesel tends to come from rapeseed or palm oil; bioethanol from wheat, maize and sugar cane. The core green idea is that the carbon dioxide released when they are burnt is absorbed as the plants grow. So you are simply cycling CO2
round the
biosphere, rather than pumping carbon into the atmosphere from a source safely stored underground in the form of oil.
What is the real carbon balance of biofuels? That depends on which type. They all harness their energy from sunshine but then require varying amounts of further energy in the form of fertiliser, tillage, transport, and the actual refining process. And the variation is huge: the best – probably some types of Brazilian sugar cane – can deliver around five times less greenhouse gas emissions than petrol, the worst – probably palm oil grown in recently felled jungle – can be responsible for eight times more greenhouse gas pollution. Jeremy Woods from Imperial College London reckons the most efficiently produced UK wheat when turned into ethanol saves about half of the greenhouse carbon emissions compared with regular petrol.
Will biofuels trigger food shortages and price hikes? Food prices are rising and biofuels are catching much
of the blame but in reality they are only one factor changing world agriculture. The world population is rising, increasingly wealthy Asians are eating more meat which needs a lot of animal feed and increasingly erratic weather has made global harvests less reliable. Jacques Diouff, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, told me that biofuel will become essential to supplying the world’s energy and points out that this may seem alarming when there already close to one billion hungry people in the world. But, while he foresees some short term regional stress, he believes the demand for food and fuel will empower farmers and allow them to invest and deliver higher yields. It's just too early to know how this fundamental shift in agricultural economics will bed down, but the outcome will be crucial to our food bills, the fate of the hungry and the success of the whole biofuels project.
Will wildlife suffer? One of the ways out of the food vs fuel dilemma is to take new land into production – but wild things live there. This is already happening in Indonesia and parts of Brazil and Africa where forest is torn up to plant oil palms or sugar cane. In Europe set–aside has recently been ploughed up as cereal prices rocket. But there is also much underused land in Eastern Europe and Africa
ou are buying them, you are b
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www.arthurrankcentre.org.uk
agriculture and food
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