Do biofuels cause more harm than the benefits they provide and should there be a Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation?
Things are not what they seem when it comes to renewable energy. Most people, including those who should know better, think that all energy from renewable sources is equally benign and all should be supported equally. In fact this simplistic approach can cause more damage than benefits. You end up with heat pumps and biomass boilers being installed in places where they cause more emissions than traditional fossil fuels, for example.
We have to be discriminating in our energy choices and that applies to renewable energy as much as it applies to fossil fuels. In the world of energy there is no democracy – only hard facts and science that should determine what we do. There has been a rush towards using more biofuels. I cannot really describe it as a rush, more of the typical slow shuffle that typifies the UK’s use of renewable energy, but even a shuffle, it is shuffles to a worse place, is a bad thing.
Biofuels are fuels for transportation made from plants. Brazil uses the most biofuels at the moment converting sugar cane into ethanol, but the countries of south east Asia are converting rain forests into palm plantations, which are subsequently used as biofuels. The United States is giving over more and more hectares to produce biofuels from maize.
Yesterday the Chief Government Scientist, Professor Robert Watson, urged caution; we should not rush into biofuels, he said, because their apparent carbon saving benefits may be outweighed by their emissions in production and other important environmental bad effects.
It was an important intervention because a Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation – requiring petrol and diesel sellers to use 2 ½ % of their products from biofuels come into effect on April Fool’s Day, and the last thing that the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation should do is increase overall carbon dioxide emissions when it is supposed to reduce them.
As I see it there are four issues:-
1. Biofuels produced from virgin forest land do damage by releasing the carbon dioxide stored in the forest, usually by burning, without us being sure that the replacement fuel will store away as much as has been lost.
2. Ploughing virgin land releases carbon dioxide in the soil; although not enough research has been done some scientists believe that this release easily outweighs any fossil fuel carbon saving. There is some research that indicates that it takes around ten years for a newly planted forest to become carbon neutral because as you clear the ground to plant trees your ground clearance releases carbon dioxide in rotting organic matter in the soil. The way to produce a carbon store using trees quickly is to retain what you have and let the forests naturally regenerate and spread slowly.
3. There is no way at present of ensuring that your biofuel comes from a sustainable non damaging source.
4. The giving over of land from food production to fuel production has sent food prices spiralling. Ask any Mexican (whose staple is maize) what has happened to corn prices in the last twelve months.
Professor Watson is an experienced and renowned scientist who understands the complexities of climate change. We should heed his advice and make sure that the shuffle to biofuels does not turn into a rush, but rather stands still while we pause awhile to consider things more carefully.
There is an interesting article in the New Scientist about carbon dioxide in the soil which outlines the issues; you can read it at http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2958
Filed under: biofuels, biomass, climate change, energy, global warming | Tagged: maize prices, Professor Robert Watson, renewable transport fules obligation, soil and carbon dioxide
The Greeks have had an answer to this problem for a long time, they use a technique of using seedballs instead of ploughing. I have cut a paragraph from a website that discusses this:
http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2006/120306.htm
“Oddly enough, there are not a lot of books about Natural Farming out there, perhaps because it is a plan that emphasizes “not doing” instead of “doing.” The heart of the technique is seedballs. “Just make seedballs” is Fukuoka’s advice. A seedball is a small ball (about 2cm) of clay and humus mixed with seeds. The “dirt” protects the seeds from birds and other seed-eaters, and when the seedball is “activated” by rainfall the seed is already slightly “buried” because it is surrounded by a bit of dirt. One can use a single type of seed, as might be typical of a rice field, or a mixture of dozens or even hundreds of seeds, as might be used for a vegetable garden. You just throw the seedballs out and let nature do the rest. This will create a natural mixture of vegetables growing together. They just grow like weeds. Whatever tends to grow best in a particular microlocation, with its mixture of sun exposure, soil qualities, water exposure, etc, will multiply while less appropriate species fade away. By mixing hundreds of seeds together, you give nature hundreds of options for what to grow there.
That’s about all you need to know. “Just make seedballs.” Everything else can be learned, apparently, from personal experimentation based on this foundation.”
Further reading can be found at:
http://fukuokafarmingol.info/fover.html&
http://www.permaculture.org.au/
Peter
It is a very interesting idea but farming is big business these days so don’t hold your breath waiting for farmers to adopt this.
Robert
Robert….the front page of the Independent Saturday,12th, April,2008: The crisis in the world today is a food shortage caused by the rush for bio-fuels.
People are going hungry because farmers are planting bio-fuel crops instead of food crops…Filipino really enjoy to eat Potatoes but they are very expensive and seen as a luxury because they are not grown in large quantities in the Philippines, the UN recently made a report about dependency on rice, it concludes that rice is not very nutritional, hard to grow, low yield, requires vast amounts of water to grow…whereas potatoes are very nutritious, easy to grow, high yield per square metre, require little water to grow.
My impact on the bio-fuel problem has been to encourage farmers in one small town in the Northern Philippines to grow Potatoes, hopefully it will spread like a virus and protect the Philippines from starvation, because it currently imports more rice than it grows…
I hope to be able to educate people about the high efficiency stoves as being used by climate care. Filipinos are becoming hooked on “Shellane”, small tanks of LPG they use for their cooking stoves. The price rises by the day, one tank cost about 600 peso which is approximately equivalent to a weeks wages of a person working on a farm in the Philippines in a remote province, and I guess it uses plenty of carbon just to get it to the Philippines as well as the carbon released when they burn it, well I think I can forget about applying for a job in the facade of Shell its Renewable’s division…I am not going to get a job at Shell!
http://www.climatecare.org/projects/portfolios/Uganda-efficient-stoves
the Italian Government could use the idea of their older and wiser neighbor Greece and use the seed balls to lay down the seeds for trees and other diverse plants….also we should not obsess only about carbon/CO2 we should think why we are worried about the carbon/CO2 also…trees not only absorb Carbon they cycle vast amounts of water back into the atmosphere which has a cooling effect…I am not suggesting that we forget about the CO2 problem…I just think it would be good for us (the human race) to have a good think, and start doing things better…hydrocarbons are primitive but useful sometimes for quick bursts of energy…Solar thermal is capturing the energy directly so once you have the apparatus to a reasonable capacity you have a supply of free energy that you may have to reinforce with a small quantity of hydro-carbon energy…if enough people could be educated to understand Solar thermal its cost because of economies of scale would be reduced and then it would keep on growing because of its reduced cost…I think the pump needs priming to achieve this and the worlds governments are in a position to do this…why do you think they won’t do this?…maybe it has something to do with the taxes that they get from Petrochemicals? …as the oil runs out the price of oil will increase and the oil companies win because of the higher prices…the full set of taxes on oil products all increase? Gordon Brown and his side kick/puppet Alistair Darling have worked it out on an excel spreadsheet I am sure. So why help the Renewable energy industry when it will reduce tax revenue?
I agree that we should back off the route of Biofuels, and I thank Professor Robert Watson, but maybe Professor Robert Watson ought to be cautious about saying something that the government does not agree with, scientists who say something that threatens the life of the current UK government have in the past ended up dieing in suspicious circumstances such as Dr David Kelly, who allegedly committed suicide with a rusty penknife!? I think someone that clever would not take their own life in such a way, if at all………..
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2007/10/15/fingerprint-doubt-over-kelly-suicide-89520-19952329/
I prefer to characterise governments as incompetents, rather than in the middel of dark conspiracies; I don’y think they are competent enought to conspire!
I wholly agree with you about your characterization of the worlds governments as being incompetent, we are in concurrence about that! Also maybe you could try look at them from another perspective fraudsters, fraudsters are quite usually failures and turn to fraud from desperation, maybe just to be seen as successful, or socially accepted, usually the core problem is that they are lazy, stupid,have little in the way of morals but have very high aspirations. A Conspiracy isn’t really the right term for the behaviors of this government it is pure greed, maybe even “fraudster” is to high a label for politicians. A Conspiracy would not be so blatantly obvious it would be really subtle and sophisticated, a fiefdom or mafia would be more what I am thinking of!
One thing I can say they do not care about the environment and they will only know the true value of a tree when there are no more trees.
To fight the attitude of the government needs people with a laser like vision and energy to educate about and to roll out renewable energy, lobbying the government is a waste of time renewables can make economic sense, renewables the first to adopt new technology are often ridiculed, people installing Solar thermal panels on their houses are forward thinking trend-setters.
Maybe they will try to tax domestic renewable energy when it be becomes more fashionable and common place?!
The Illuminati is not a conspiracy, they have always had the bizarre/weird Illuminati symbol on the back of $ notes a conspiracy is secret isn’t it? It is more like a gentlemen’s club that operates (politics) for its own benefit and if you say the wrong things then you can not join in and share the loot !
Our “Democracy” is really an illusion, and all the other political systems are just as equally corrupt. Anarchy is just another political system as well because chaos doesn’t last for long. Top heavy management of our lives from big politics and big business is the problem, a command economy will fail Ultra capitalism will fail they are extremes of over control of everybody.
It is really amazing that the USA & UK can pay for an invasion and Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan but cannot subsidize/or make 0% loans to buy domestic renewable energy instead I think I would vote for a reduced cost of energy, instead of more military action, wouldn’t you!?
But the clubs that run the worlds various political apparatus love war more than they love our planet.
I am not a tree hugger or a paranoid person worry whether or not there are conspiracies because undoubtedly there are many conspiracies in this world small and big. I like to see and value the beauty of our fragile planet, and if we have ways of obtaining energy that are more economical in the long term and cleaner we should use them.
The trade in oil products is quite near to drugs but it isn’t ilegal, traders in biofuels are smuggling oil to the USA to claim subsidies available for mixing fuel there it has been named ” splash and dash” in the media.
You have to think also that gangs conspire to do stupid crimes as well!
Conspiracy ( agreeing, planning to participate) is a very effective way of achieving something bad, such as fulfilling their greed, for incompetent people.
I even personally know of people who have been put in prison for “conspiracy to defraud” who are really stupid and un-educated and incompetent.
A conspiracy can be between two or more people and usually involves talking, as we know politicians are very good at talking. During and after a conspiracy usually the participants usually will hide any knowledge about the conspiracy and lie if they are asked about it, doesn’t that sound like a politician?! Politicians are professional liers and rarely reply to questions with a 100% truthful answer.
I think that politicians have a hard job; they have to make the right decisions but in doing so their decision making in a democracy is influenced by the fact that they want to be re-elected. Their desire to be re-elected distorts their judgement or justifies a decision made to appease the electorate on the grounds that their are better than the other lot even if they make the odd bad decision, because the other lot will harm the country much more.
The desire to be re-elected is because they really love the trappings of power, democracy is basically the lobbyist with the deepest pockets such as oil companies, electricity and Gas Industry.
Never mind Genersys is I am sure much more agile than the oil companies, lobbying for Genesys would not need to be pay offs/freebies for MPs like the Oil industry it could be education for the public, which is much more closer to democracy than lobbying. Another point to remember, is that it is a lot harder for a giant to change direction and It is hard for one of these giants to grow any bigger.
Companies such as BP and Shell have big budgets to market their “green energy” divisions however most of the budget goes on advertisements, the advertisements are not selling an eco-friendly product they are purely PR pretty much like the government I think! The big oil companies could have helped to build momentum in the Renewable energy industry but of course they do not want to because it would accelerate their demise, so they pretend to be angels and they pretend they have realized how much damage oil is doing. Making people starve and causing more CO2 emissions is not a good solution!!
Have you released your book “the energy age” as a .pdf?
If not could I suggest that you do, i have a personal copy and it gives an excellent overview of the current energy situation. http://www.scribd.com is really good public place to publish.
We have to be very careful with biofuels; we exploit the third world terribly as it is, but to take away their food so that we can drive around in over powered cars or fly cheaply around the world will cause, in the long term, resentment, and ultimately increase pressure by forcing peoples to move from where they now live to places where they they will not starve.
The Energy Age as a pdf is a good idea.
Robert
.pdf books increase our knowledge with a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions I have the project Gutenberg library on DVD. your book the energy age would I estimate would be about 30-40MB because it has quite a few pictures. without the pictures a .pdf of the book could be as small as 1MB.
Benjamin Crowell, crowell@ physics.umn.edu , has free concise Physics textbooks which he has published on his website http://www.lightandmatter.com, If you made Energy Age .pdf public domain I would love to have a copy! .pdf is so much easier to search for keywords! It is possible to search many .pdf books at the same time for a keywords using adobe acrobat full search. With paper books that would take weeks to do! The Energy age is gathering dust behind the counters of B&Q where I bought my copy!
OK I think I have already persuaded you to give your book away free as a .pdf, Here is another free book “The Idea Virus” from the master of Marketing “Seth Godin” which will be a worthwhile read for you to make an impact on the energy problem and then to write chapter 13 of the Energy age! What I am trying to say is that your book offers a good insight on how to tackle the energy problem so release it as an idea virus.
http://www.sethgodin.com/ideavirus/downloads/IdeaVirusReadandShare.pdf
I’ll look at that Peter
Robert