Mad on Biofuels

Palm oil kernels. Photograph: AFP.

It's not hard to understand why western politicians are mad keen on biofuels. Biofuels, which derive from food crops like corn, sugar cane and palm oil, seem like a silver bullet for several intractable problems. These problems include rising global carbon emissions, depleted fossil fuels, and dependence on unstable parts of the world for oil supplies.

The idea of biofuels also conforms with the Zeitgeist - that we can solve all our problems with a technological fix and do something good "for the environment" while continuing to lead our car-dependent and consumerist lifestyle. All gain and no pain, in other words.

Increasingly, scientists and commentators are questioning the assumption that greater use of biofuels will automatically cut carbon emissions. As Lewis Smith of The Times points out, biofuels will cause a great deal of environmental damage unless strict controls are imposed on how they are grown.

In Indonesia, large areas of rainforest and peatlands (which trap an enormous amount of carbon) are being cleared for palm oil plantations. A similar process is occurring in Brazil which produces ethanol from sugar cane. Replacing carbon-rich tropical forests with palm oil and sugar cane plantations leads to vast increases in greenhouse gas emissions, whatever carbon savings are subsequently made by substituting biofuel for fossil fuel. And the process of growing, harvesting, transporting and refining crops and feedstock, which depends on large inputs of fossil fuels (e.g., oil to run tractors, coal to power production plants), also results in significant emissions.

This is not to say that biofuels per se are a bad idea. Rather, biofuels should be one element in a bundle of sustainable energy and transport practices. Biofuels should only be used if it can be demonstrated that they are produced sustainably and that their use significantly cuts emissions. If we are serious about reducing emissions, a good start would be to ban biofuels from palm oil and sugar cane plantations that have been carved out of rainforest, and, as Smith suggests, focus on "restoring and protecting forests".

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Comments

[Don]

"Increasingly, scientists and commentators are questioning the assumption that greater use of biofuels will automatically cut carbon emissions."

This questioning of Biofuels is not new, or a sudden revelation. I remember studying stuff in the mid-90s where it was clear that the inputs required for many biofuel crops exceeded the energy outputs.

The reason biofuels are attractive in Europe and the USA is pure politics. It gives those countries an excuse to subsidise their farmers, again.

[Peter]

Good points Don, thanks.

Re. the questioning of biofuels, is it the case that there is much more of a public debate around the merits or otherwise of biofuels now, as opposed to say the mid-1990s, because climate change, oil depletion and the environment are much higher on the political agenda?

[Bill]

In most industrialized countries which also have sufficient agricultural staple production to have a shot at self-sufficiency, agricultural policy is to provide publicly-funded subsidies sufficient to ensure that domestic needs are met in a bust year. That means that there's overproduction in an average year, and vast overproduction in a boom year. If the excess produce is allowed to enter the domestic market, it drives prices down, in a cycle which requires ever more subsidy to remain effective.

That leaves several options:

1) You can plow it under. That has the great benefit of trapping most of the accumulated energy of the just-completed growing season in a way that contributes to the productivity of the following season. From an environmental or long-term economic perspective, this is by far the best option. Unfortunately, the voting public tends to be too clueless to recognize what's happening, and tends to misconclude that their tax dollars are being plowed under in an attempt to drive up the prices they pay at the grocery store.

2) The government can claim it ("buying it" from the producers) and sell it on the international market, generating some revenue to make it look like the whole policy is less expensive. This puts the government in the position of having to compete not only with its own exporters (if that's allowed) but with both the domestic producers within potential purchasing countries, and all of the other governments which are trying to pursue a similar agricultural policy.

3) You can give it away, and call it "foreign aid." This is the type of foreign aid that causes all of the domestic producers within the dumped-on countries to go out of business, since they can't compete with free. It means that in boom years, people in developing countries have lots of babies, because free food is plentiful. Then a bust year comes, and the little children all show up on television, starving, because there are no longer any local farmers to feed them.

4) You can develop technologies like the production of "TV dinners" which take ordinary foodstuffs and turn it into something which will "keep" for more than one growing season. This is a very good thing to pursue in the long term, but has the disadvantage of not being very palatable to consumers in developed countries with finicky tastes, in the mean-time.

5) Or, you can create a long-term-storable food substitute, that uses up the excess production in the same way making tinned foods or TV dinners or high-tech "bagged salad greens" out of it would. That's biofuel. It doesn't matter that it takes more than a gallon of gasoline to make a gallon of biofuel, because the point of the gallon of biofuel isn't to be more ecologically responsible than the gallon of gasoline... It's to use up excess agricultural production in boom years in a way which taxpayers won't notice, and which _won't matter at all_ when it goes away entirely in a bust year, and you need that corn to feed people.

Long-term, biofuel is pabulum to the voters, rather than good policy. Good policy would be to develop better ways of storing a rotating stock of food, while still being able to plough under last year's rotated-out stock without too much energy loss.

[Kotare]

Very interesting and well argued, Bill. Thanks for commenting. But how easy is it to switch back from crops produced for biofuel to crops produced for food, if increasingly biofuel is being substituted for fossil fuel, and demand for oil generally is increasing?