The great biofuel hoax - and the evil resulting

Until biofuels can be manufactured economically and in quantity from plant waste byproducts, they should, I think, be resisted by any person who claims to have a moral sense.

As everyone knows, biofuels have been touted with great vigor by the Bush administration, as well as practically every other Western government, as the answer to over-reliance on petroleum fuels. The reason is not that the world is running out of oil - on the contrary, the globe is practically floating in it (though the wrong places have most of the reserves). The reason for the shift to biofuels is to stop global warming.

There are excellent reasons to move our energy reliance away from oil, but shifting to biofuels to stop global warming isn't one of them. I won't even address here the issue of whether (a) the world really is warming, or (b) whether petroleum use is a the principal cause. Both these matters are still unsettled by scientists (though not by politicians). My point here is that what we are doing is growing food crops to convert to ethanol, and this fact has two very deleterious effects: (a) it produces more, not less, gases presently described as "greenhouse" gases, said to cause global warming, and (b) makes all foods more expensive.

The Guardian newspaper has an article today focusing on the latter aspect, but does touch on the former.

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - that is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world's biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in the journal Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels. Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%. That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.

That's what happens when activists and politicians focus on only one thing, carbon dioxide, the the big meanie of global warming. Yet methane and nitrous oxide are said by climatologists to be far more powerful in inducing global warming than CO2. Why focus on CO2? Michael Crichton pointed out in his book, State of Fear, that if the atmosphere was a football field, the amount of CO2 would be one inch of the field. Nonetheless, gobal warming alarmists say that a minute increase of that one inch places the entire earth in jeopardy.

Yet, according to the Guardian, the most damaging fact about biofuels is not they that will make global warming worse, but that

... using food to produce biofuels "might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further". This week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls "a very serious crisis". Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren't entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.

Get the irony? Global petroleum reserves are at an all-time high, while global food reserves are at one of their lowest levels in the modern era, yet we're reducing the amount of food we grow in order to use less oil. Already in the US, 15 percent (1.6 billion bushels) of corn production is devoted not to the table, but to the tank. The effect on the prices of other foods has been felt hard, especially animal foods, such as chickens, for which corn is a major foodstuff. Feed corn for livestock has risen sharply in price.

The Guardian concludes, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, "If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies ... [m]illions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry." Couldn't happen, you say? Well, consider that the banning of DDT in 1972 has resulted in the deaths of more people than died around the world in World War II (see this piece in 21st Century Science and and Technology magazine). Never underestimate the power of governments to destroy, and be especially wary when they claim the best of intentions in order to do so.