22 Comments

• Oranjepan 4th Dec '08 - 6:58pm

  Yes, it is important to show our solidarity with the Orangutans: we stand shoulder to shoulder with them in the evolutionary tree.

• asquith 4th Dec '08 - 8:27pm

  Biofuels are an example of the idiotic transactionalist mentality of New Labour.

  Roll your debts from one credit card to another, you can avoid payment day indefinitely. We know that doesn’t work in the economy & it doesn’t work environmentally. So why switch from one polluting fuel to another instead of trying to show restraint & develop genuinely green technology? Because the transition would require bold thinking & change, so it must be avoided according to the “minds” in government.

  I am a member of Friends of the Earth & I have called upon them to make more of opposition to biofuels. There are still people who imagine that greens support this stupidity.

  This is all just greenwashing of the kind New Labour & large corporations love. It angers me because we have the technology, the scientists, the educators, the entrepeneurs & a workforce lying idle who could all be deployed in a sustainable economy. But we can’t be bothered.

• David Evans 4th Dec '08 - 10:41pm

  I agree with most of the posts. The only bit I would debate is the view that Labour and Large Corporations are the main anti-greens. I’m afraid most politicians are prone to greenwash gestures – e.g. the EU banning tungsten bulbs, but continuing its monthly trip to Strasbourg. Ultimately most of what they come up with is just a gesture, so that they can persuade us they really are trying.

• ciyulk 4th Dec '08 - 10:56pm

  Yes, but I think banning tungsten bulbs throughout the internal market will do more to combat climate change than scrapping a monthly trip to Strasbourg.

  That said, if the European Parliament could stop meeting in Strasbourg, it would. It’s not as though they enjoy doing it.

• David Evans 4th Dec '08 - 11:19pm

  I’m not sure of the validity of the claim. Yes they use less energy, but what proportion of the heat tungsten bulbs generate is wasted? I haven’t seen any research on this. If anyone else has, I would appreciate it. Also, I haven’t seen any evidence on how much energy it would take to extract the poisonous mercury from them when they are used up. They tend to weigh four or five times as much as tungsten bulb, but recycling them has been totally ignored in the rush to make a gesture. Now if the EU had established standards to ensure that low energy lightbulbs were recycled, then I would say they were getting closer to being real greens.

  As for them not enjoying Strasbourg. They don’t hate it enough to be bothered to do anything about it. Until they do, I’m afraid I have the same level of disdain for them as I have for most other politicians – All talk and little real action (certainly when it might affect themselves).

• ciyulk 4th Dec '08 - 11:33pm

  The decision over whether or not to meet in Strasbourg isn’t the European Parliament’s to make. It’s made by the European Council. Why would you disdain someone or something for not doing something that they’re not capable of doing?

• Joe Otten 5th Dec '08 - 12:03am

  Now the argument that seemed to save the biofuel target at conference was that some biofuels are relatively benign, not your palm oil on peat but your sugar in south Brazil, or something like that. So our policy should be seen as just supporting these good (or debatable) biofuels.

  And yet the reality is that we have a disaster of an EU biofuel target and we must say so as clearly as possible.

  The other problem, I suppose is that it wouldn’t have been anywhere near a “zero carbon” policy without the biofuel contribution. At least not without changing the position on nuclear power too.

• asquith 5th Dec '08 - 5:42am

  The EU is all too often a vehicle for clunking statism 🙂

• Warren Jeremy 5th Dec '08 - 11:31am

  It’s a good selective eco-rant Jim, but there’s a number of points in response

  First biofuels are a transition technology not a permanent solution. While the green movement and Liberal Democrats are right to complain about ‘bad biofuels’ like Indonesian palm oil, it is not correct to attribute that complaint to Brazilian sugar cane or other first generation fuels with a lower field to wheel CO2 impact than boring old oil. You seem to be arguing that we should stick with burning petrol until we can all plug our cars into the national grid, something that is many years away. Not to mention that more and more oil will come from harder to reach and more environmentally damaging sources like tar sands as easy to reach sources decline.

  Second you argue that these and even second generation biofuels (which are from waste and have no impact on food production) are competitors to electricity generation from biomass which is more environmentally friendly. The implication of this argument is again that you believe electric-powered transport is just around the corner. This is nonsense, the battery technology required for mass electric personal transport is not here yet, sales are tiny and falling due to the downturm. There is no national roadside grid at the moment, no generation capacity to take on transport, or infrastructure of battery exchanges, and the cost of all of these will be staggering. Most car manufacturers are as a result betting on hybrids as we transition from fuel to power.

  Third you imply strongly that this year’s boom in food prices is largely attributable to biofuels. You do not mention that this commodity boom has now collapsed, along with all other commodity markets, or that it has largely been driven by a growth in population and living standards in Asia, or frankly that with collapsing prices the presence of biofuels in the agricultural sector will help reduce those falls and protect some rural workers from the worst of that impact. I regret that might increase the cost of your bagels in Finchley, however creating jobs and stopping poverty is sometimes the price we need to pay for our breakfast.

  Fourth you only briefly mention third generation biofuels from organisms like algae and yeast in passing and your reference to second gen as noted does not mention they are from waste products. Neither of these have an impact on food production. Both of these will benefit and be adopted more quickly from the R&D based on the profits from first generation sales, and development of the biofuels infrastructure to support them. You cannot jump from one technology to another overnight. You again appear to be suggesting that we should keep burning oil until the best biofuels are widely available. How does that help the planet?

  Fifth you talk about indirect land use as though it was an environmental problem only attributable to biofuels. This is baloney. All developments have an indirect land use impact, whether that’s converting derlict land to jatropha cultivation or building social housing on a field. It would be arbitrary and unfair to target one industry with a climate change penalty not attributed to others. Are you arguing for example that two identical fields of sugar cane should pay different carbon taxes because one is used for sugar in coffee and the other is refined for transport to carry the sugar cubes to market? Should a field converted from forest today be subject to a more stringent penalty than one converted 600 years ago? Nor though is there nearly enough research to put an accurate penalty in place even if land use changes could be incorporated into general carbon tax. More research is needed.

  Sixth, you talk about monocultures, deforestation, orangutans and losing biodiversity. I have some sympathy with this line and the environmental impacts of any development needs to be sensitive to what it displaces, whilst particularly developing economies should not become too dependent on one or two crops. But I don’t hear you complaining about the 99% of the palm oil industry used for food. Are you arguing the monkey-murdering peanut-butter manufacturers are ethical, or do you see the tiny biofuels industry as a softer target?

  The Liberal Democrats are right to take a cautious approach to biofuel regulation, demanding high sustainability standards, proper field to wheel assessments of environmental impact and support for research into second and third generation fuels. But the approach you are demanding is hysterically anti-scientific, would condemn us to use undiluted more polluting petrol for at least 20 years, possibly condemn many rural workers to years of grinding poverty, and do very little to encourage improved standards of land use in all industries. If we want to stop bad biofuels use, let’s campaign for better standards, more accountability and transparency, and higher carbon taxes applied fairly across the entire economy, not just one industry.

• Julian H 5th Dec '08 - 11:49am

  Asquith: “There are still people who imagine that greens support this stupidity [biolfuels].”

  Greenpeace website from a few years ago:

  “Greenpeace today welcomed the Government’s announcement on a mandatory sales target for biofuels as a small step in the right direction”

  ‘A target for 5% blended biodiesel and 3% ethanol blended petrol from biomass sources, while not ambitious, is an urgently needed step in the right direction to tackle climate change,’ said Greenpeace climate campaigner, Vanessa Atkinson.”

• David Allen 5th Dec '08 - 6:20pm

  Asquith: “There are still people who imagine that greens support this stupidity [witch hunting].”

  Greenpeace website from a few centuries ago:

  “Greenpeace today welcomed the Government’s announcement on a mandatory quota for ducking stools as a small step in the right direction”

• Julian H 6th Dec '08 - 12:50pm

  Thank you, David Allen – a hilariously witty interjection, there.

  Here’s a quotation from a current Greenpeace web-page:

  “Biofuels could be part of a sustainable solution to climate change, by reducing emissions from road transport, especially when combined with more energy efficient transport.”

• David Evans 6th Dec '08 - 1:53pm

  ciyulk,

  I would disdain them because they haven’t done anything worth the name. If a motion was passed at the EU stating that the relocation to Strasbourg was an environmental disaster, I think that the European Council would think again. Currently all I see in your excuse for them is a willingness to allow them to pass the buck by pleading impotence. As a committed green member of the Lib Dems, I am not prepared to excuse them in this way.

  David

• David Allen 6th Dec '08 - 7:54pm

  Julian,

  You’re getting on my nerves now. I don’t speak for Greenpeace, but here is what their website says:

  “As you may have already seen, along with WWF, the RSPB, Friends of the Earth and enoughsenough.org, we’ve placed an advert in several of today’s papers warning the government about the environmental risks of biofuels as an alternative to petrol and diesel.”

  and

  “The government wants to know what you think about biofuels. Tell them we need strict and compulsory controls to make sure they really are green fuels.”

  Now I grant you that falls just short of total opposition, but, why exactly are you so keen to paint them as big supporters of biofuels, when they manifestly are not?

• Joe Otten 7th Dec '08 - 11:44am

  Warren,

  Certainly Asian prosperity also contributes to high food prices, and a global recession reduces them again. But it fairly cast-iron economics that using biofuels will also push up food prices and/or reduce biodiversity by putting more land under the plough. When this recession is over, we can expect food prices to spike again, unless there is a step change in agricultural efficiency (way beyond anything that GM can currently offer).

  Another way of looking at this is as a land use issue. Given enough land per person, carbon neutrality is trivially easy. We can substitute land use for any more direct carbon savings if it is more economic. Even if this means putting the poor man’s dinner in our car.

  So this can be good in that it gives us more flexibility – we can trade off pressure on land against pressure on carbon emissions. But this is a trade-off and therefore not a solution, either to carbon emissions or, going the other way, to pressure on land use.

• Julian H 7th Dec '08 - 12:39pm

  David,

  I can only apologise profusely for getting on your nerves. I trust I haven’t marred the weekend in the Allen household.

  It’s clear that “greens” have supported biofuels, and that many subsequently changed their minds when the consequences of government suport for biofuels (in the form of subsidies, regulation, “targets” et cetera) were discovered.

  This, to me, shows up the problem with the idea that governments can control energy creation and use for some kind of beneficial social end; and the fact that Greenpeace still have a mixed message (“biofuels could be good, but only if they’re really green…”) demonstrates this problem with such managerialism.

  That, of course, is only my view, and I welcome others – but this is a tad tangential to my original point – which was simply to show evidence against this idea that “greens” have always vehemently opposed the use of biofuels and been aware of their shortfalls.

  I again apologise for any antagonism I may have caused in trying to make this contribution.

  Yours ever,

  J

• asquith 7th Dec '08 - 6:08pm

  Julian, that shows Brown’s shortcomings more than anything else. You may like to remember that, while I am not as libertarian as yourself, I have before stood alongside you in denouncing mindless statism.

  “Greens” have made a long list of mistakes in their time & shouldn’t always be listened to. But it is essentially target-driven governments that have laid emphasis on stupidity like ethanol, not environmentalists.

  Is it not unanimously agreed that New Labour couldn’t care less about the environment? As I said, they are fully part of the debt-based culture. They are the party of buy to let & of credit cards, much more so than Thatcher, who always maintained her Methodist integrity & wouldn’t have stood for that kind of thing.

  As a result, it appealed to them to promote “biofuels”. It was ideal to them. We could carry on doing exactly what we were doing, but instead of oil we’d use something else. Chop down a tree, stick another one up & we’re even. The fact that this isn’t the case doesn’t matter to them. This is why I used the analogy of shoving debt from one credit card to the next: it is how they think.

  New Labour have never been economic liberals. They love big business, but not entrepeneurs or the market. They have never really understood anything but large, controlled organisations, public or private. I could go on & on & start talking about PubCos, but hopefully you’ve got it now, as incoherent as I’ve probably been.

• Julian H 7th Dec '08 - 8:53pm

  Yuh, I agree with most if not all of that.

• asquith 7th Dec '08 - 9:16pm

  Sweet 🙂

• Jim Roland 8th Dec '08 - 4:23pm

  Firstly some bad news. Since I wrote the above article, it has emerged that the Council of Europe, represented by France, has vetoed the legal provision drafted by the ITRE Committee of MEPs that indirect land-use change emissions must be accounted for in the European biofuel ’emissions savings’ requirement.

  Now to answer several points in turn:

  David Evans,

  With tungsten bulbs the heat losses associated with the marginal electricity (in generation and transmission) are likely to be much greater than from using central heating, domestic gas fires etc. to generate the same heat.

  The net benefit will be considerably less in a property with only electrical
  heating, but one must beware of estimates of the payback time of CFLs not taking account of the corresponding increase in other heating, whether that is electric or from domestic burners.

  Warren Jeremy,

  First, you refer to “Brazilian sugar cane or other first generation fuels with a lower field to wheel CO2 impact than boring old oil” but such calculations of impact did not take into account the emissions resulting from indirect land-use change, nor valuing other aspects of the land-uses indirectly displaced.

  I introduced above why indirect land-use change (ILUC) is so significant. The Gallagher Review rightly highlighted incorporation of ILUC as the key direction of recent analyses, notably by Fargione et al, Searchinger et al, Plevin et al. Furthermore a recent analysis by Zah et al for the Swiss Government which attempted to combine outcomes of biofuels found that sugar cane ethanol was environmentally worse than petrol, even without properly accounting for indirect effects.

  Down in your fifth comment you rightly acknowledge that indirect land-use change is significant.

  Second, you make a ‘straw man’ assertion that I implied that mass electric transport is just around the corner. I did not. I simply argued here is that enforced agrofuel use in the EU context is likely to be more harmful overall than the equivalent petroleum.

  You also refer to environmentally damaging alternative fossil fuel sources but the job of governments is to disincentivise more anything that is marginally more costly in externalities than conventional petroleum, not to say “Ah heck, lets throw a lot of subsidies at something worse than petroleum we can manufacture over here then”.

  Third, biofuels were undoubtedly a major cause of this year’s food price crisis which the FAO has warned may recur next year. Diverting food to fuel means there is less to go round the world’s poorest after the more affluent have fed themselves. Various developments have absorbed some of the spike including faster South American deforestation, rising production in Eastern Europe, abolition of EU set-asides, but the world’s land resources aren’t infinite, and the rising demand for meat and other commodities will increasingly collide with the need to curb deforestation even without throwing agrofuels into the mix.

  You profess concern for rural workers but I don’t hear your concern for the hundreds of millions with hungry bellies this year, nor what happens in the future as water and mineral phosphorus resources dwindle, nor the rural poor made landless by the march of monocultures in the South.

  Fourth, you describe second and third generation biofuels as from waste and having no “impact on food production”, but that depends on where they are sourced, and in most cases there are existing uses of a so-called ‘waste’ resource being competed with.

  Then you refer to developing an existing biofuels industry to help pave the way for future biofuels. That is like saying that having discovered that a drug makes patients worse, doctors should still prescribe it to new patients so as to help pave the way for an eventual beneficial drug. See also my original critique above.

  Fifth and sixth, you make a ‘straw man’ assertion about my views of indirect land-use change. Of course other land-use changes cause it but people need to eat and be housed, whereas we don’t need to substitute petroleum in cars or power stations with agrofuels considering their impacts, let alone subsidise this substitution.

  You say “99% of palm oil is used for food”, you seem to have forgotten about
  detergents and toiletries, you omit to mention that EU imports of palm oil for other uses combined have risen in recent years as rapeseed has been diverted to biofuel – indirect land-use change in action – or that around a third or more of palm oil in the EU is used as ‘green’ power station fuel.

  I am reminded of a similar remark to your “99%…” made by Jeremy Woods of ICL, reported by BBC News. Are you perchance he under alias? Considering the length of your comment and your professed insider Lib Dem Conference knowledge, I was surprised not to find anything else by “Warren Jeremy” online about biofuels or Liberal Democrats for that matter.

  Lastly you allege in your last paragraph a “hysterically anti-scientific approach”. I think my comparison with doctors prescribing drugs earlier in this comment well illustrates whose approach is the less scientific.

  Asquith, Julian H, David Allen:

  Even now several larger NGOs haven’t quite got it about why there is so little and limited scope for biofuels ever to be a wise choice. Grassroots
  campaigners against the use of vegetable oil fuel in CHP in the UK have been up against Greenpeace, Jonathon Porritt and a positive tone from Friends of the Earth. Also internationally it’s a mixed bag, e.g. in the US the Republican Party now opposes the ethanol mandate; in New Zealand the Green Party recently backed a biofuel obligation there.

• Warren Jeremy 9th Dec '08 - 5:38pm

  Jim,

  Thanks for researching me. I return the favour and note that you are are a lobbyist for an anti-biofuels NGO in that you are the moderator for the Campaign against Climate Change activist portal, itself linked to the biofuelwatch activist group, both facts you neglected to add to your ‘member in north london’ handle.

  To address your lobbying points though: The EU could not reach agreement on indirect land use change because the science is not there to support inclusion on any meaningful basis. You quote selectively from a tiny handful of studies including the Gallagher report which aggregated available work However what it said on that matter was this:

  “Mechanisms do not yet exist to accurately measure, or to avoid, the effects of indirect land-use change from biofuels. Consequently, the net GHG emissions from current biofuel targets cannot be assessed with certainty”

  That is not to say ILUC doesn’t matter or shouldn’t concern us, it should. But you cannot responsibly legislate on the basis of a few early studies that might be wildly inaccurate or prejudicial against one activity against another. ILUC is not new or an issue exclusive to biofuels, it impacts all development. What for example is the ILUC from converting grassland to a field of solar panels, or building a dock for ships to support wave power stations?

  Your response to that is to claim biofuels are special as they are ‘unnecessary’. You claim this by suggesting they are all universally and unambiguously already worse than petrol. But the point is we really don’t know that and that has not been the conclusion of studies about direct impacts.

  Second you neglect the indirect cost to both the environment and future generations in using petrol today for energy that could be used tomorrow to create useful products or simply left in the ground as a carbon sink. You don’t know and have no basis for believing that biofuels are worse than petrol once you go down the route of speculating about indirect feedback loops. Looking for example at a report: Life Cycle Assessments for Agrofuels (Rughani), that is linked to from the website of your partner lobby, it goes through these loops and concludes at the end

  “Assessments based on emissions, at this point illuminates the irrelevance of such a reductionist analysis.”

  And while I welcome your back-pedalling on instant electric transport alternatives you also sidestep my point that different types of oil have dramatically different impacts on the environment, by asserting that governments should do something about that as well. Sure they could… and one thing they could do is demand equal well to wheel sustainability standards and tracking for conventional fuel. But you haven’t argued for that, you’ve just attacked biofuels as a special case in need of special discriminatory legislation to the benefit of conventional petrol producers.

  You again restate your exaggerated case about food prices and get quite confused on this point. Gallagher agrees with you that there short-term effects on prices that might be significant in some areas… but that in the long-run the overall effect is small. These effects are also true of the spike in other commodities like oil. Those spikes have collapsed. You do not acknowledge this and continue to argue wrongly as though biofuels were in imminent danger of casuing a famine.

  You say the world’s land is not infinite, clearly true. However I see no analysis from you about the appallingly low productivity of much agriculture, particularly in the third world, and what impact competition from biofuels, or food/fuel integration through crop rotations, will have on boosting that productivity and finding solutions to the problems of water and mineral use that you mention. Biofuels, particularly if well regulated, should encourage better land use directly, and indirectly in food production. Preserving bad practice in the name of conservation entrenches poverty.

  Finally on your drug point, I reject your anti-scientific premise. Your criticism of biofuels is based on assumed knowledge of impact without fair comparison based on speculative studies the EU and Gallagher deem insufficient to make meaningful or fair legislation. The subsidies spent today will benefit not only those biofuels we know have less direct impact than petrol, but also future fuels that will have dramatically less impact, through the building of infrastructure and experience. Relying on petrol is not a solution.

• Jim Roland 10th Dec '08 - 1:38am

  Warren or is it Jeremy,

  You continue to make many ‘straw man’ accusations and I will not be rising to them all. However:

  (i) I don’t see why you call me “lobbyist”, since like so many others I am not paid as a campaigner, and the views are my own, not specifically of any group I belong to. There is however a link to the CCC Activist Portal you mention for interest via my name on this comment as with my last.

  (ii) I have not been selective, I have simply cited highly influential studies. See also my quote from the JRC in my original article; the JRC is probably the world’s most cited authority on biofuel emissions balances. Do you think it is responsible to drop legislation to account for ILUC after the JRC has warned that the ILUC of biodiesel alone is likely to outweigh the total field to wheels savings [if any] of all EU biofuels?

  (iii) As I am sure you well know, agrofuels are orders of magnitude less land-efficient than almost any other current means of energy-gathering, including solar PV and wave power and that is why ILUC is so significant for agrofuels.

  (iv) If you want to talk about feedback loops, there is the danger of Amazon collapse if it is reduced below a certain size (according to Avissar and colleagues’ model). Also Anderson and Bows’ recent paper which advanced the analysis of feedbacking specifically warns that we need strict curbs on deforestation even to stay within 3-4°C of warming.

  Also if you want to talk about advancing science, there is the issue that whereas standard N2O values have been used in biofuel LCAs, and top-down pro-rating by Crutzen et al., ILUC means the marginal planting is taking place on less disturbed, more carbon-rich soils which according to limited data in the JRC Well-To-Tank report probably emit well above-par N2O when N-fertilized. Get published on that and win a whole new world of friends.

  (v) Re. other more polluting alternatives to conventional petroleum. As I originally stated I cannot fit everything into one article, but I have incidentally campaigned within Friends of the Earth to make more of an issue of these around international climate talks.

  (vi) Re recent falls in food commodity prices, already discussed in my previous comment under “Third…”

  (vii) The FAO report I cited warns that most of this year’s food supply correction has been in the global North. Biofuel expansion has contributed to the fertilizer supply bottleneck/price shock which has reportedly inhibited small farmers in the South this year. You talk about the value of rotational crop opportunities but there is not a problem of a lack of markets for winter rape, but rather the problems caused in many cases by palm oil, soya and so forth as they expand to mop up rising demand for veg-oils and animal feed.