Biofuels: the methadone fix for civilised oil junkies?
All petrol and diesel sold at UK pumps now has to include at least 2.5% biofuels. Erroneously termed renewable fuels—because they’re not, they’re not even recycled fuels for the most part—biofuels are made from crops such as sugar cane or maize. The types of plants most commonly used do not grow in the UK, or when they are found growing in the UK, they are not grown in significant volume. The biofuel percentage requirement will rise to 5% by 2010. The government claims the enforced change will make vehicles more environmentally friendly.
Let’s forget the costs of importing the fuel, shall we, and the land set aside for growing these crops that could have been used to grow food instead, and the energy and carbon involved in processing the fuel… Then there are the reports of increased deforestation in South America to ‘free up’ land for biofuel production, the fact that the switch to biofuels will exasperate the runaway escalation of food prices, the US turning over enough land to ethanol production to have alternatively fed many hundreds of thousands of people…
Running public transport on recycled cooking oil from restaurants and the food manufacturing industries would be different, and is already done in some parts of the UK, though not many. But when we are on the brink of unprecedented world hunger, devoting land to growing fuel for cars is fuel-junkie madness. Biofuels are nothing more than modern civilisation’s methadone response to declining fossil fuel reserves and global warming, and they provide a Get Out of Doing Anything Truly Radical card for politicians. Hydrogen might be the way forward, but not yet; we’d have to make sure cars wouldn’t be at risk of spectacularly exploding like the zeppelins of the last century. Even so, we seem utterly unable as a species to grasp that all resources—not just oil and gas, but metals and minerals, the very soil itself, the plant and animal kingdoms—are finite.
The world just keeps on giving. Well actually, it won’t.
tags: biofuels, deforestation, environment, fossil fuels
1 comment on “Biofuels: the methadone fix for civilised oil junkies?”
April 15th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Tesco, which today announced unprecedented profits for 2007 of £2.8bn, and continues to work hard to conquer the US as well as the UK for the markets for just about everything, has claimed all its biodiesel comes from rapeseed and soya, but was forced to admit palm oil can make up a significant part of its product after a sample analysed was found to contain 30 per cent palm oil.
So Tesco lied. What a surprise.
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