Biofuels: Genocide with a greenwash
Today the Financial Times reports that BP has begun to significantly invest in biofuel technology, and this week alone has signed two deals to fund biofuel projects…
BP is to invest at least £32m in a joint venture with D1 Oils, the quoted UK based alternative fuels company, to develop the inedible oilseed Jatropha as a biodiesel.
The move is the latest escalation of BP’s move into alternative fuels, following its $400m investment in a joint bioethanol plant with Associated British Foods and DuPont announced earlier this week.
Andrew Jack | BP signs second biofuel deal in a week
Meanwhile Grain, an organisation representing poor farmers in developing countries, has devoted the entirety of the latest issue of their journal, Seedling, to savagely lambasting the biofuel industry and exposing the extreme destruction it’s causing. The issue can be downloaded (3.4MB PDF) and I urge anyone with an interest in this subject to do so. The editorial opens as follows…
We are devoting almost all of this edition to a single topic — the rapid expansion of biofuels across much of the globe. In the process of gathering material from colleagues and social movements around the world, we have discovered that the stampede into biofuels is causing enormous environmental and social damage, much more than we realised earlier. Precious ecosystems are being destroyed and hundreds of thousands of indigenous and peasant communities are being thrown off their land. We believe that the prefix bio, which comes from the Greek word for “life”, is entirely inappropriate for such anti-life devastation. So, following the lead of non-governmental organisations and social movements in Latin America, we shall not be talking about biofuels and green energy. Agrofuels is a much better term, we believe, to express what is really happening: agribusiness producing fuel from plants to sustain a wasteful, destructive and unjust global economy.
We begin with an introductory article that, among other things, looks at the mind-boggling numbers that are being bandied around: the Indian government is talking of planting 14 million hectares of land with jatropha; the Inter-American Development Bank says that Brazil has 120 million hectares that could be cultivated with agrofuel crops; and an agrofuel lobby is speaking of 379 million hectares being available in 15 African countries. We are talking about expropriation on an unprecedented scale.
Editorial | Seedling Magazine (3.4MB PDF)
But you don’t need to take the word of Grain. After all, they’re an organisation with the radical agenda of “promot[ing] the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge”. Instead ask the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. They report that “basic food prices for poor countries are being pushed up by competition for land from biofuels” (BBC article). And this is an industry that’s only just getting going! It is absolutely imperative that it doesn’t get much further. Because if the plan is to replace any liquid fossil-fuel shortfall created by a peak in oil production with agrofuels (and certainly that seems to be BP’s plan), then it will almost certainly result in one of the most devastating famines in history. Millions will die. Because wealthy car owners in the USA, UK, Ireland or Japan are able, and willing, to pay more for a tank of jatropha-seed-oil than a Malawian or Ethiopian can afford to pay for a loaf of bread.
And it’s not even as if a switch to agrofuels would help address that other looming crisis — climate change. It will just make that situation worse too.
UPDATE: For lots more info, check out Biofuelwatch (http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/)
Obviously where biofuels require rainforests to be chopped down and burned, emitting greenhouse gasses and making oran-utans extinct (as with Indonesian palm oil), biofuels are a shit idea. But before we all develop ideological hatred of the concept of biofuels, it’s worth remembering that not all of them need to be produced in this way.
Jatropha for example sounds like it might be groovy. It grows in barren land where fuck all else grows, so no habitats are destroyed and no crops are burned. It could be a much-needed source of income for some of the poorest parts of the world. See this article from the Guardian’s, ahem, shell-sponsored advertorial.
This dumb rush to biofuels, this setting of targets for their use by such and such a date, is already proving to be really damaging, but there is promise that some sustainable biofuel could happen. Nowhere near enough to meet world demand I’m sure, but some.
June 29th, 2007 | 7:10pm
by Ryan
I agree with you Ryan. In fact when I write about biofuels I usually put in a paragraph like:
The trouble is that, in my honest opinion, our society is not currently geared up to work this way. So long as the global dictatorship of market capital is in place (at the risk of sounding a bit Old Red) then those who produce biofuels will be doing so under a legal obligation to maximise profit.
This is the essential problem with any solution to the energy crisis that relies upon Big Business to implement it… they’re simply the wrong people for the job. And in a sense that’s not even their fault. We’ve legally tied their hands so that the only “solution” they can pursue must be the one that generates the most profit for their shareholders during the next business-cycle. And if that “solution” actually exacerbates the problem… well, that’s a “cost” that can be externalised. Sorry world.
It strikes me, therefore, that so long as we allow profit-driven corporations to be the primary agents of action within our society that biofuels — in practice — have to be ideologically opposed.
In an ideal world a council would decide to purchase or requisition a small plot of local land and set up a non-profit, publicly-owned and publicly-financed trust to hold that land and organically farm it for biofuels (preferably a multi-purpose crop like hemp). The oils produced would never appear on any market and would be used exclusively to fuel local public transport. And perhaps farm machinery on small sustainable farms. That’s a scheme I could get behind.
Unfortunately however; we live in a world of continent-wide targets and oil companies investing hundreds of millions of pounds. And the agrofuels / biofuels distinction is only useful to a point… because it seems to me that we’re witnessing the start of “Biofuels” being pushed almost like a brand-name. There’s a fecking massive advertisement on the Naas Road near where I live. It covers the entire side of a very long building… a car dealership. The entire billboard is filled with brightly-coloured high resolution sunflowers. “Powered by Nature” is superimposed in calm tones.
First up… like petroleum isn’t natural? What’s that all about? More importantly though, it’s an indication of where we’re going with this if we allow it. I’m not sure it’s possible — even now — to separate biofuels from BioFuelsTM.
July 2nd, 2007 | 10:35pm
by Jim Bliss