Biofuels – Fuel for Famine
It has been offered up that biofuels like ethanol will help create jobs and reduce the overall problem of global warming. While this may be true it could come at a cost greater then the help it offers.
A number of countries have jumped on the biofuels bandwagon in the past few years. The US Congress is developing a proposal that would grow biofuel production to 36 billion gallons by 2022 from the current 2012 mandate of 7.5 billion gallons. The European leaders are requiring that a minimum of 10% of fuels will have to come from biofuels by the year 2020. The trend is obvious.
This past Tuesday the United Nations released a major report on bioenergy. Among the positive statements about the benefits of biofuels there were also alarms raised about the negative impacts of biofuels. The report said “Unless new policies are enacted to protect threatened lands, secure socially acceptable land use, and steer bioenergy development in a sustainable direction overall, the environmental and social damage could in some cases outweigh the benefits,”
It also says that bioenergy represents an “extraordinary opportunity” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it warned that “rapid growth in liquid biofuel production will make substantial demands on the world’s land and water resources at a time when demand for both food and forest products is also rising rapidly.”
Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Program, said on the agency’s Web site Tuesday that the rising prices are “threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger,”
In addition to the UN report there was also an excellent paper written by the National Center for Public Policy Research titled “Thanks to Congress, Ethanol and Biofuel Mandates Cause Food Prices to Soar”. In the paper the author, Dana Joel Gattuso, writes that the redirection of food crops to biofuels is causing food prices to soar. It also stated that this is “drawing us into an ugly “food-versus-fuel” battle: “Any diversion of land from food or feed production to production of energy biomass will influence food prices from the start, as both compete for the same inputs.”
Does it come down to a fight between clean “renewable” fuel versus food? Do we lose either way? Let us know what you think.
The full UN report is available at esa.un.org/un-energy/pdf/susdev.Biofuels.FAO.pdf
The National Center for Public Policy Research paper is available at http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA564.html
The Energy Independence and Security Act was signed into law on 12/19/07. There are a couple of key items in that bill that should benefit all of us. Probably the biggest news item was the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standard being raised. The law sets the new target at 35 miles per gallon for the combined fleet of cars and light trucks by model and it has to be reached by the year 2020. Also included in the bill were provisions to raise the energy efficiency standards for a broad range of lights and appliances. This includes regular light bulbs and fluorescent lamps additionally efficiency standards were set for external power supplies, and the majority of major home appliances.
