Browse > Home / Opinion / Today in Biofuels Opinion: New York Times calls for “pushback against biofuels”; “paradox of production: examines alt energy business model; “Industrial Agrofuels — Feeding the Planet to Our Cars” leads in Grist poll

Today in Biofuels Opinion: New York Times calls for “pushback against biofuels”; “paradox of production: examines alt energy business model; “Industrial Agrofuels — Feeding the Planet to Our Cars” leads in Grist poll

April 8, 2008

New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Paul Krugman in “Grains Gone Wild” writes that “The subsidized conversion of crops into fuel was supposed to promote energy independence and help limit global warming. But this promise was, as Time magazine bluntly put it, a “scam.” This is especially true of corn ethanol: even on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains. But it turns out that even seemingly “good” biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation. And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.” Krugman is less sure about alternatives, offering a suggestion that there be more aid to the U.N.’s World Food Program, an undefined “pushback against biofuels”, and the bromide that “cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.”

The Star reports that the price of rice has reached $760 per tonne, and that “For 3 billion people around the world that was the most important news report of today and will almost certainly be the most important story for years to come….Just a few weeks ago, its price was one-third lower at $580 a tonne. The higher the price of rice, the less gets eaten by those now spending 50 to 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food.” The post is of importance, despite the fact that except in small test projects in Japan, rice is not converted into biofuels. Is this a knock-on effect from the increasing presence of speculators in food commodities? As carry-through from shortages in other staple foods such as wheat, that have caused consumers to turn to rice? A knock-on effect of biofuel production?

A most interesting argument on the “paradox of production” appears in the Archdruid Report, pointing out that “every other energy source currently used in modern societies gets a substantial “energy subsidy” from oil…..the energy used in uranium mining and reactor construction, for example, comes from diesel rather than nuclear power, just as sunlight doesn’t make solar panels. What rarely seems to have been noticed, however, is the way these “energy subsidies” intersect with the challenges of declining petroleum production to boobytrap the future of energy production in industrial societies. The boobytrap in question is an effect I’ve named the paradox of production. It’s …. not simply that petroleum will become scarce in the future….It’s that a huge proportion of industrial society’s capital plant…was designed and built to use petroleum-derived fuels, and only petroleum-derived fuels. Converting that capital plant to anything else involves much more than just providing another energy source.”

Liberty Maven wrote that ethanol has “nine strikes” and “retired the side”, saying that ethanol consumes more energy than it produces, quoting the 2005 Pimentel/Patzek study as its first strike, and adding that wood waste and switchgrass are worse.

Earthtimes reports remarks by Dr. Thomas Elam, president of FarmEcon that “the policy favoring ethanol and other biofuels over food uses of grains and other crops acts as a regressive tax on the poor….The biofuels policy that is driving higher prices of corn, other grains, and soybeans will cost the U.S. economy more than $100 billion from 2006 to 2009….It is inevitable that these costs will be passed along to consumers.”

Cleantech reports on an email circulating the internet, revealing that “Last year, your government spent more than $8 billion of your tax dollars to achieve the following results: Dramatically increase the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, Accelerate the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, Raise the price of milk, bread, beef and other grain-dependent products by more than 20%, Increase world hunger. How did they do this? Two words: ethanol subsidies.” The post went on to repeat a popular mantra, that “the amount of corn it takes to produce enough ethanol to fill the tank of your typical SUV one time could feed the average person for one year”. On the SUV image, Michael Ott of Biowa responds that critics repeat the charge “without pointing out the fact the fact that corn used for ethanol is inedible.”

Cleantech is currently running a poll, offering respondents an choice of statements that include:  “Biofuels Kill”, “Industrial Agrofuels — Feeding the Planet to Our Cars”, “Biofuels — Destroying the Biosphere One Car at a Time”, and “None of these. You are a shill for big oil and a bad person!”. Option two currently has more than half the votes, and “biofuels kill: currently leads “you are a shill for Big Oil”.

Gristmill ran a post saying that biofuels are “Worse than coal”, calling “Industrial agrofuels” an “enemy of the entire planet”, adding that “Replace [liquid fossil fuels] with today’s biofuels, and you would have an unmitigated ecological disaster of planet-killing proportions….Biofuels have already razed more ecosystems than all the coal mines in history, and dumped on Safeway and its customers. The piot said that Safeway sells biofuels only because “it has a customer base that has been duped into thinking it is an environmentally superior fuel.” The post adds that “Biodiesel enthusiasts have become emotionally invested in the idea, and once that happens, you can argue yourself blue in the face because recent brain research has shown that strong emotions always trump rational argument.”

Hmmm, that last thought seems to offer some insight into the Gristmill post.

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    Written by Jim Lane · Filed Under Opinion 

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