Would you propose that a person, or persons who populate a planet, do
nothing? Much as the "author" does?
The problem doesn't lay with the feedstock(s), but with the human
"livestock" (or "deadstock," depending upon how you perceive the mental
incapacities of humans).
Think about this for a moment. Well over 200,000,000 people out of a
265,000,000 US population are going to engorge themselves on enormous
amounts of meats and cheeses in the next 35 days - everything imaginable
from kielbasa to knockwurst to corned beef to pork to turkey. They don't
seem to have much of a problem with eating ineffciently, letting the likes
of beef cattle consume 10-16 pounds of edible grains for every 1 pound of
edible beef put on their plate.
But does your author even bother to mention this immoral level of avarice
and excess? What? There is no fault with a society that would pork out on
meat when 10 or more starving people could be fed off the same grains that a
stinking cow snozzles down and spews out as waste?
Yet he has ample nerve to bitch in the same manner about biofuels. I'll
wager the mental midget gets up from his last Christmas leftover dinner a
full 10 pounds heavier than he started on November 24th. Think he'll make
mentio of that double-standard of excess and waste? Doubtful. Equally as
doubtful that he'll pay full fare on his coronary bypass surgery years down
the road as a result of such gluttony, leaving hundreds of other premium
payers to pony up a share for his selfishness.
The only thing that's starving relative to this "article" is the author's
brain for oxygen, as he obviously hasn't taken anything but one singular
aspect into consideration, with the apparent purpose of deriving a skewed
end result. There are other factors, such as all the feedmeal/flour that is
a byproduct of much oil production. There's the avarice of the meat
consuming market. There's the failure to initiate and propigate fuel
efficiency measures that would reduce liquid fuel consumption. There's the
failure to promote a social principle of conservation/efficient use of
liquid fuels.
Instead, this bozo presents a global market that maintains all its present
consumption habits and patterns, substituting only one fuel for another.
It's mindless, as is your author's piece-meal premise.
Happy Humbug.
Todd Swearingen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Myles Arnott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 9:00 PM
Subject: [Biofuel] Fuel for nought ...?
Hi everyone,
I'm pretty new to this group, and have been following
most of what has been posited and discussed with much
interest. However, I came across this article today
and was made to feel a little uneasy.
I believe there is a lot of good (both environmental
and humanitarian) to be achieved throught the use (and
governmental support) of this sort of renewable
energy, and call upon those better informed than
myself to put my mind at ease.
Are we missing the bigger picture?
Yours,
Myles.
"Fuel for nought"
The adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and
environmental disaster
George Monbiot
Tuesday November 23, 2004
The Guardian
If human beings were without sin, we would still live
in an imperfect world. Adam Smith's notion that by
pursuing his own interest, a man "frequently promotes
that of ... society more effectually than when he
really intends to promote it", and Karl Marx's picture
of a society in which "the free development of each is
the condition for the free development of all" are
both mocked by one obvious constraint. The world is
finite. This means that when one group of people
pursues its own interests, it damages the interests of
others.
It is hard to think of a better example than the
current enthusiasm for biofuels. These are made from
plant oils or crop wastes or wood, and can be used to
run cars and buses and lorries. Burning them simply
returns to the atmosphere the carbon that the plants
extracted while they were growing. So switching from
fossil fuels to biodiesel and bioalcohol is now being
promoted as the solution to climate change.
Next month, the British government will have to set a
target for the amount of transport fuel that will come
from crops. The European Union wants 2% of the oil we
use to be biodiesel by the end of next year, rising to
6% by 2010 and 20% by 2020. To try to meet these
targets, the government has reduced the tax on
biofuels by 20p a litre, while the EU is paying
farmers an extra ?45 a hectare to grow them.
Everyone seems happy about this. The farmers and the
chemicals industry can develop new markets, the
government can meet its commitments to cut carbon
emissions, and environmentalists can celebrate the
fact that plant fuels reduce local pollution as well
as global warming. Unlike hydrogen fuel cells,
biofuels can be deployed straightaway. This, in fact,
was how Rudolf Diesel expected his invention to be
used. When he demonstrated his engine at the World
Exhibition in 1900, he ran it on peanut oil. "The use
of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem
insignificant today," he predicted. "But such oils may
become in course of time as important as petroleum."
Some enthusiasts are predicting that if fossil fuel
prices continue to rise, he will soon be proved right.
I hope not. Those who have been promoting these fuels
are well-intentioned, but wrong. They are wrong
because the world is finite. If biofuels take off,
they will cause a global humanitarian disaster.
Used as they are today, on a very small scale, they do
no harm. A few thousand greens in the United Kingdom
are running their cars on used chip fat. But recycled
cooking oils could supply only 100,000 tonnes of
diesel a year in this country, equivalent to one 380th
of our road transport fuel.
It might also be possible to turn crop wastes such as
wheat stubble into alcohol for use in cars - the
Observer ran an article about this on Sunday. I'd like
to see the figures, but I find it hard to believe that
we will be able to extract more energy than we use in
transporting and processing straw. But the EU's plans,
like those of all the enthusiasts for biolocomotion,
depend on growing crops specifically for fuel. As soon
as you examine the implications, you discover that the
cure is as bad as the disease.
Road transport in the UK consumes 37.6m tonnes of
petroleum products a year. The most productive oil
crop that can be grown in this country is rape. The
average yield is 3-3.5 tonnes per hectare. One tonne
of rapeseed produces 415kg of biodiesel. So every
hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of
transport fuel.
To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in
other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are
5.7m in the UK. Even the EU's more modest target of
20% by 2020 would consume almost all our cropland.
If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the
impact on global food supply will be catastrophic: big
enough to tip the global balance from net surplus to
net deficit. If, as some environmentalists demand, it
is to happen worldwide, then most of the arable
surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food
for cars, not people.
This prospect sounds, at first, ridiculous. Surely if
there were unmet demand for food, the market would
ensure that crops were used to feed people rather than
vehicles? There is no basis for this assumption. The
market responds to money, not need. People who own
cars have more money than people at risk of
starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel
and poor people's demand for food, the car-owners win
every time. Something very much like this is happening
already. Though 800 million people are permanently
malnourished, the global increase in crop production
is being used to feed animals: the number of livestock
on earth has quintupled since 1950. The reason is that
those who buy meat and dairy products have more
purchasing power than those who buy only subsistence
crops.
Green fuel is not just a humanitarian disaster; it is
also an environmental disaster. Those who worry about
the scale and intensity of today's agriculture should
consider what farming will look like when it is run by
the oil industry. Moreover, if we try to develop a
market for rapeseed biodiesel in Europe, it will
immediately develop into a market for palm oil and
soya oil. Oilpalm can produce four times as much
biodiesel per hectare as rape, and it is grown in
places where labour is cheap. Planting it is already
one of the world's major causes of tropical forest
destruction. Soya has a lower oil yield than rape, but
the oil is a by-product of the manufacture of animal
feed. A new market for it will stimulate an industry
that has already destroyed most of Brazil's cerrado
(one of the world's most biodiverse environments) and
much of its rainforest.
It is shocking to see how narrow the focus of some
environmentalists can be. At a meeting in Paris last
month, a group of scientists and greens studying
abrupt climate change decided that Tony Blair's two
big ideas - tackling global warming and helping Africa
- could both be met by turning Africa into a biofuel
production zone. This strategy, according to its
convenor, "provides a sustainable development path for
the many African countries that can produce biofuels
cheaply". I know the definition of sustainable
development has been changing, but I wasn't aware that
it now encompasses mass starvation and the eradication
of tropical forests. Last year, the British
parliamentary committee on environment, food and rural
affairs, which is supposed to specialise in joined-up
thinking, examined every possible consequence of
biofuel production - from rural incomes to skylark
numbers - except the impact on food supply.
We need a solution to the global warming caused by
cars, but this isn't it. If the production of biofuels
is big enough to affect climate change, it will be big
enough to cause global starvation.
End
___________________________________________________________
ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://wwia.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/biofuel
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Biofuel archives at Infoarchive.net (searchable):
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://wwia.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/biofuel
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Biofuel archives at Infoarchive.net (searchable):
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/
