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Hi all,<br>
<br>
I got a good guest editorial spot for a piece I wrote strongly
criticising biodiesel and the agro-fuels industry.<br>
<br>
See below or:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Guest_Editorial_The_Terrible_Illusion_of_Biodiesel_5133.html">http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Guest_Editorial_The_Terrible_Illusion_of_Biodiesel_5133.html</a><br>
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<h2>Guest Editorial: The Terrible Illusion of Biodiesel</h2>
<p><i>by Eric Brooks, 2007-11-26</i></p>
I read with shocked and tired eyes E. "Doc" Smith's recent <a
href="http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5132">glowing
article</a>
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.<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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,
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/">http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/</a> and
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/">http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/</a> <br>
<i><br>
Eric Brooks is Co-Chair of the San Francisco Green Party Sustainability
Working Group.</i>
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<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." – Che Guevara</pre>
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