[Sustain] My Piece On Agro-fuels In Beyond Chron

[Eric Brooks]

Hi all,

I got a good guest editorial spot for a piece I wrote strongly 
criticising biodiesel and the agro-fuels industry.

See below or: 
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Guest_Editorial_The_Terrible_Illusion_of_Biodiesel_5133.html


    Guest Editorial: The Terrible Illusion of Biodiesel

/by Eric Brooks, 2007-11-26/

I read with shocked and tired eyes E. "Doc" Smith's recent glowing 
article <http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5132> about 
San Francisco's biodiesel program. As an environmental activist with 
over two decades experience, every time I see an article like this, I 
lose another little bit of precious life and hope.

Smith and others like him, trumpeting the valor of biodiesel and other 
biofuels, need to knock it off immediately. Biodiesel does -not- produce 
fewer greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum diesel, in fact it 
produces more. And the reality gets even worse than that. Biodiesel and 
other biofuels have suddenly become a huge booming industry which, 
because of the the nature of how those fuels are produced, is now 
destroying the planet and human civilization much faster than global 
warming.

This needs to be repeated... The new biofuels boom is -worse- than 
global warming. And unwitting starry eyed supporters of it like Willie 
Nelson and E. "Doc" Smith are the keystone that is helping massive 
multi-national corporations get the planet's increasingly 
environmentally conscious public to become blindly hooked on a 
devastating, diseased, biofuels illusion.

Those of us on the cutting edge of fighting the climate crisis have been 
struggling mightily to get people to wake up from this illusion for the 
last decade and we are beginning to get attention; but not nearly fast 
enough to stop corporations like ADM, Cargill, British Petroleum (BP), 
Monsanto, and many others from ramping up a massive explosion in 
biofuels, bioplastics, and biochemicals production which is already 
visibly and measurably increasing our already serious global 
environmental collapse at an almost exponential rate.

The key problem of perception is french fry oil. When told of how some 
people are now running their cars on used vegetable oils that would have 
been thrown away, environmentally conscious people immediately get very 
excited by the idea. I myself long ago, got very excited about it. But 
then I started thinking about all of the work that the environmental 
movement has done to fight corporate monoculture agriculture's 
devastating impact on the the planet. I started to crunch numbers in my 
head, and I immediately realized that biofuels could not possibly be a 
good thing, and that soon they would present the worst environmental 
disaster we have ever faced. That grim realization is now becoming a 
reality.

The problem is one of sheer scale. The amount of fuel that can be 
produced from recycling used cooking oil is only a tiny fraction of the 
total fuel used every day by diesel automobiles. What this means is that 
projects like San Francisco's waste oils biodiesel program will quickly 
run out of those waste oils long before even a small part of San 
Francisco's fleet of diesel cars, trucks and construction equipment is 
converted to biodiesel. At that point there is only one place to get the 
supposedly magical biodiesel; from massive corporate plantations of 
monocrops grown specifically to produce biodiesel.

In fact, because of European requirements for biofuel use, this is 
already happening. As you read this article, huge amounts of both 
rainforest, and food crop land, are being cleared in order to produce 
automobile fuel crops, most prominently, biodiesel from palm oil. The 
impact is already staggering and is getting worse very rapidly. And as 
rainforest and cropland are being destroyed, some grain food prices are 
skyrocketing both because food crops have been replaced by fuel crops 
and because many former food crops themselves are being used to produce 
fuel -instead- of food.

This process is devastating the global ecosystem and economies in the 
global South; the latter which are already staggering under the terrible 
weight of a global agriculture industry that is eating up lands which 
once produced local food, in order to grow and sell to the world market, 
higher priced export crops. Take one look at the world's insane love of 
the automobile, and at the booming production of new automobiles for 
countries like China, and it is easy to see that biofuels are the 
-ultimate- export crop; which will form the foundation of a planet and 
civilization killing industry, if we allow their production to proceed 
any further.

And as this cropland and rainforest clearing rages forward, the process, 
because it is accompanied by realities like top soil disturbance (which 
releases CO2) and the burning of undesirable trees and plant wastes, is 
creating massively higher CO2 releases than even petroleum products 
produce. For example, biodiesel made from palm oil produces -ten- times 
more global warming gasses than petroleum diesel.

To complete the grim cycle, every time someone like Smith, however noble 
and well intentioned, writes a smarmy smiling article about how great 
and progressive biofuel is, the big ag companies go to Congresses and 
Parliaments all over the world with an even further gleefully deceived 
public as back-up, to get increased subsidies for this new devastating 
biofuels industry.

And biofuel is just the beginning. These companies are now branching out 
into bioplastics, biochemicals, and biopharmaceuticals. Companies like 
BP (with its new 500 million dollar labs at UC Berkeley) are literally 
making plans to manufacture everything we produce now from petroleum and 
natural gas, from plant crops instead. The result of such nonsense is 
easily predictable - a much more rapid planetary collapse which will be 
completed in our own lifetimes.

This insanity must be stopped immediately, and the first step is to stop 
painting glowing images of biofuels and start painting the accurate, 
Bosch like nightmare panorama, of biofuels as a disaster, which is now 
eating our planet alive, faster than global warming.

To start getting a sense of the nature and scale of this problem, I 
recommend reading a couple of articles by science writer and 
environmental activist George Monbiot at, 
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/ and 
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/
/
Eric Brooks is Co-Chair of the San Francisco Green Party Sustainability 
Working Group./

-- 
"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." -- Che Guevara

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