Myles,
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 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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