The US Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (DOE) is funding a $1.4 million, three-year study by Purdue faculty members to determine ways to alter lignin and test whether the genetic changes affect the quality of plants used to produce biofuels. A hybrid poplar tree is the basis for the research that is part of the DOE's goal to replace 30 percent of the fossil fuel used annually in the United States for transportation with biofuels by 2030.
Bulletin articles
In 1972, a study conducted by the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), on growing consumer trends alerted politicians and scientists all over the world. The research titled “The limits of growth” was prepared by an international group of scientists, researchers and industrialists – later to be know as the Club of Rome – and became a classic for the analysis of the relationship between production and environment.
The modalities of biofuel consumption and production are already causing a negative impact on food security, rural livelihoods, forests and other ecosystems, and these negative impacts are expected to accumulate rapidly. Large-scale, export-oriented production of biofuel requires large-scale monocultures of trees, sugarcane, corn, oil palm, soy and other crops. These monocultures already form the number one cause of rural depopulation and deforestation worldwide.
There are some 800 million automobiles in the world, consuming over 50 percent of the energy produced in the world, making individual vehicles the prime cause of the greenhouse effect. Although there is consensus that climate change is a fact, there is no serious intention of changing the life-style causing it and instead, technological solutions are being sought to enable the companies benefiting from this model to maintain their profits.
In this context, over the past years biofuels have started to be promoted as an alternative to global warming.
In July 2006, Pulp and Paper International reported on a conference called World Bioenergy 2006. The conference took place in Sweden, where biofuels provide 25 per cent of Sweden’s energy and the majority of its heating. “Pulp mills with combined heat and power plants sending excess energy to district heating systems are an established part of the country’s infrastructure and a useful source of extra income for its pulp mills,” notes Pulp and Paper International.
Everyone now seems to agree that the Earth’s climate is changing as a direct result of human activities and that the social, environmental, political and economic consequences will be catastrophic if nothing is done – and fast – to address the problem.
Infrastructure development in the name of regional economic integration poses one of the greatest challenges to environmental sustainability and social justice today. The initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) is a striking example of this new trend. IIRSA proposes a series of large-scale, high-risk and debt-heavy mega-projects that would result in extensive alterations to landscapes and livelihoods in the region.
A thorough report by Leigh Brownhill and Terisa E. Turner (“Climate Change and Nigerian Women’s Gift to Humanity”) traces Nigerian resistance to massive oil exploitation --which has not rendered any good for the country’s people (see WRM Bulletin Nº 56) -- and highlights women’s leading role in that struggle.
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.
The World Bank has become the main international trader of carbon credits. Its new role gives rise to a series of conflicting interests.
The 9th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change held in Milan in 2003 allowed Northern companies and governments to establish plantations in the South under the Kyoto Protocol’s “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM), allegedly to absorb carbon dioxide and to store carbon. COP-9 allowed the use of plantations of genetically engineered (GE) trees [also known as genetically modified, GM, or transgenic trees] as carbon sinks, that is to supposedly offset carbon emissions
On 11 September 2006 the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) (the Brazilian environmental authority) approved the Environmental Impact Assessment on the construction of two dams in Brazilian territory on the Madera River, the largest tributary to the Amazon River.