Biofuels
do not solve but only worsen climate change
The volume of fossil fuels burnt by
the “oil” civilization in one year contains an amount of organic
matter equivalent to four centuries of plants and animals.
“We must break our addiction to oil”
President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address,
but he wasn’t advising people to use less oil. Instead, he launched
the “Advanced Energy Initiative,” that would increase the federal
budget by 22 percent for research into “clean” fuel technologies,
including biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel obtained from
conventional agricultural crops (such as soy and maize) or other
oil-seeds (particularly oil palm), sugar cane or other cereals.
Faced by the problem of global warming
caused by the enormous carbon emissions, the governments of the
industrialized countries do not consider reducing demand but are
trying to fix things on the supply side. Substitution of oil by
biomass implies the occupation of vast tracts of land with monoculture
plantations.
The European Union hopes that by the
end of 2007, 2% of the use of fuel it now uses will come from
biodiesel, rising to 6% by 2010 and 20% by 2020. However it is
very unlikely that it will devote its land to this type of crops:
the cost of biofuel is considerably lower if the energy crops
are produced in other countries, and not only due to cost. As
pointed out by the British journalist George Monbiot: “In order
to move our cars and buses with biodiesel, we would require 25.9
million hectares. There are 5.7 million hectares in the United
Kingdom. If this were to happen all over Europe, the consequences
on food supply would be catastrophic: enough to tip the scales
from being excess producers to becoming net losers. If, as some
environmentalists claim, this were to be done on a world scale,
most of the arable surface of the planet would have to be given
over to producing food for cars, not for people. This outlook
would seem, at a first glance, to be ridiculous. If the demand
for food could not be covered, wouldn’t the market ensure that
crops be used to feed people instead of cars? Nothing is sure
about this. The market responds to money, not to needs.”
Thus the following stage of colonization
has started and the industrialized world is aiming at the countries
of the Third World, where companies can appropriate vast tracts
of land, find cheap labour and neglect the serious negative environmental
impacts involved in the establishment of large monoculture plantations,
from which biofuels will be refined at the expense of forests
and lands suitable for food growing.
Thus the soy bean plantations in Argentina
are displacing, little by little, the quebracho forests in the
Chaco, while in Paraguay they are replacing the Pantanal, the
Mata Atlantica and the Chaco, and in Brazil, the Pantanal, the
Mata Atlantica, the Cerrado and the Caatinga. Between 1990 and
2002, the planted area of oil palm on a world level increased
by 43 percent. Most of this growth took place in Indonesia and
Malaysia. Between 1985 and 2000, oil palm plantations have
been responsible for 87 percent of the deforestation in Malaysia
and there are plans to occupy another 6 million hectares of forest.
In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forests have
become the land of oil palm plantations. In Indonesia, thousands
of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands and Indonesian
workers suffer from the rigorous working conditions and brutal
trade unions repression (see WRM
bulletin No. 109). The forest fires that so often cover
the region with smoke are mainly caused by palm tree growers (see
WRM
bulletin No. 97). The whole region is becoming a gigantic
vegetable oil field. In Uganda the destruction of tropical forests
and indigenous forest lands has begun in order to produce palm
oil and sugar, and since the forests of the Bwendero peninsula
were felled, the Ssese Islands are being destroyed by strong winds
and low salaries (see WRM
bulletin Nº 109).
The argument about the “goodness” of
biofuels is that they do not contribute to carbon emissions; burning
them simply returns to the atmosphere the carbon dioxide the plants
took out when they were growing in the field, so they would be
“carbon neutral.” However this is only true depending on what
was there before the plantation was established. Burning and slashing
forests to give way to plantations of oil palm releases enormous
carbon reserves. In marshy forests, where there is peat, once
the trees are cut the plantations dry out the soil. When the peat
dries, it oxidizes and releases even more carbon dioxide than
the trees.
Furthermore, research carried out by
David Pimentel, a professor at Cornell University New York and
Tad Patzek, a professor of chemical engineering at University
of California Berkeley, reveal that with current processing methods
more fossil energy is used to produce the energy equivalent in
biofuel. Even when research includes in its calculations the energy
necessary to build processing plants, farm machinery and labour
– usually not included in this type of analysis – it has not included
the cost of waste treatment or the environmental impact of intensive
bio-energy crops, such as the loss of soils and environmental
pollution due to the use of fertilizers or pesticides. All this
demolishes the neutrality of biofuel regarding carbon emissions.
Biofuels do not set out to change the
present model of unsustainable energy production aimed at unsustainable
consumption, and would do no more that add new problems to humanity.
But their worst sin is that they are disguised as a solution.
Article based on information from: Resistencia,
Nº 60, Oilwatch Bulletin, April 2006,
http://www.biodiversidadla.org/content/download/28726/133766/
version/1/file/Boletin+Resistencia+N°+60+-+BIOCOMBUSTIBLES.pdf;
“Las Nuevas Repúblicas del Biocombustible”,
http://www.eco-sitio.com.ar/ea_07_republicas_biocombustible.htm;
“¿Representan los biocombustibles alternativas ecológicas al petróleo?”,
Ambientalistas en Acción,
http://www.censat.org/A_A_Analisis_177.htm
