The Fuel Crisis, "Clean" Energy, the Poor and the Planet: THE GREEN ENERGY DEBATE 

("Biofuels: The Fake Climate Solution", "The Clean Energy Scam" & "Canadian Renewable Fuels Association Myth Busters" see all below) 

In this day and age we are absolutely overwhelmed with information.  This is a good thing when it boils down to it, but the process of wading through opinions, research, projections and statistics (which can all too easily be used to express the point one hopes to make when numbers are carefully and selectively presented) leaves most feeling frustrated, baffled and hopeless.  Add in the fact that fuel is perhaps the most politically and corporately invested topic and how are we to take information at face value?  Below are three pieces of writing each offering information.  Included is the statement from the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association claiming to bust the "myth" of ethanol being a problem, but one must also question the motive of any group with a vested interest in fuel, period.  

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Biofuels: The Fake Climate Change Solution

Each day, 820 million people in the developing world do not have enough food to eat. Food prices around the world are shooting up, sparking food riots from Mexico to Morocco. And the World Food Program warned last week that rapidly rising costs are endangering emergency food supplies for the world's worst-off.

How are the wealthiest countries responding? They're burning food.

Specifically, they're using more and more biofuels--alcohol made from plant products, used in place of petrol to fuel cars. Biofuels are billed as a way to slow down climate change. But in reality, because so much land is being cleared to grow them, most biofuels today are causing more global warming emissions than they prevent, even as they push the price of corn, wheat, and other foods out of reach for millions of people.

Not all biofuels are bad--but without tough global standards, the biofuels boom will further undermine food security and worsen global warming.

Sometimes the trade-off is stark: filling the tank of an SUV with ethanol requires enough corn to feed a person for a year. But not all biofuels are bad; making ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane is vastly more efficient than US-grown corn, for example, and green technology for making fuel from waste is improving rapidly.

The problem is that the EU and the US have set targets for increasing the use of biofuels without sorting the good from the bad. As a result, rainforests are being cleared in Indonesia to grow palm oil for European biodiesel refineries, and global grain reserves are running dangerously low. Meanwhile, rich-country politicians can look "green" without asking their citizens to conserve energy, and agribusiness giants are cashing in. And if nothing changes, the situation will only get worse.

What's needed are strong global standards that encourage better biofuels and shut down the trade in bad ones. Such standards are under development by a number of coalitions, but they will only become mandatory if there's a big enough public outcry. By confronting false solutions and demanding real ones, we can show our leaders that we want to do the right thing, not the easy thing.

As Kate, an Avaaz member in Colorado, wrote about biofuels, "Turning food into oil when people are already starving? My car isn't more important than someone's hungry child."

It's time to put the life of our fellow people, and our planet, above the politics and profits that too often drive international decision-making. This will be a long fight. But it's one that we join eagerly--because the stakes are too high to do anything else.

- Avaaz.org (An independent, not-for-profit global campaigning organization that works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people inform global decision-making)

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The Clean Energy Scam

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. "You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It's the remorseless economics of commodities markets. "The price of soybeans goes up," laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, "and the forest comes down."

Deforestation accounts for 20% of all current carbon emissions. So unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources--cars, power plants, factories, even flatulent cows--it needs to reduce deforestation or risk an environmental catastrophe. That means limiting the expansion of agriculture, a daunting task as the world's population keeps expanding. And saving forests is probably an impossibility so long as vast expanses of cropland are used to grow modest amounts of fuel. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started.

- Excerpt from TIME Magazine article by Michael Grunwald http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html

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Canadian Renewable Fuels Association - Myth: Using food to create fuel – making ethanol from corn, for example – will drive up my grocery bill and perpetuate hunger in the developing world.

Myth:

Using food to create fuel – making ethanol from corn, for example – will drive up my grocery bill and perpetuate hunger in the developing world. 

Fact:

Currently, only about 10 per cent of corn ends up as a consumer foodstuff. Most corn grown in North America is used as livestock feed, either domestically or overseas. Moreover, the cost of corn and other grains makes only a small contribution to the price of many consumer products, such as corn flakes and other cereals. A typical loaf of bread, for instance, contains about five cents worth of wheat. Yes, higher grain prices will result in slightly higher food prices. But a June 2007 analysis of food, energy and corn prices conducted by John Urbanchuk of LECG, LLC concluded that "rising energy prices had a more significant impact on food prices than did corn."

Ethanol does not take protein, fibre or fat from the food supply. Ethanol production uses only starch from grains, leaving the remaining protein, fibre, fats, vitamins and minerals. One bushel of corn produces more than 10 litres of ethanol and approximately 18 pounds of distillers grains – a significant ethanol co-product. Highly valued and nutritious, these grains are used in a variety of livestock feeds and can be exported for sale.

The supply of corn is rising. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that this year’s corn crop will be the largest in more than 60 years. Crop acreages are also up in Canada, at a time when more corn is being produced per acre every year. Canada typically produces just under 50 million tonnes of grain (wheat, barley, corn, oats, rye) annually, and exports about half of it. Consider: if all Canadian gasoline contained 10% ethanol, about 8 to 9 million tonnes of grain would be required. Even at this level, Canada would remain a major grain exporter. Furthermore, ethanol in Canada is normally produced from lower value grains such as barley, corn and feed wheat, and can even be made from poor quality and damaged crops. Higher value "bread" wheats will always remain in ample supply for export sales.

Increased demand for corn and other grains may help the developing world. Artificially low prices and ongoing surpluses are devastating to farmers in the developing world. As grain prices rise, agricultural subsidies can be reduced and crop surpluses can be devoted to the production of clean domestic biofuels, rather than being dumped on developing world markets. This could help farmers in the developing world build and strengthen their businesses and, in turn, their national economies.

The future is even brighter and better with next-generation biofuels. Crop science will ensure that corn yields continue to increase (and with fewer inputs of chemicals, petroleum and water) and that ethanol technology continues to improve. As well, large-scale cellulose ethanol plants will soon be built to make use of such biomass as agricultural residues (wheat and barley straw, corn stover, etc.), forestry wastes (wood chips, sawdust, etc.), dedicated energy crops (switchgrass, algae, etc.) and municipal solid wastes (food and yard waste, recycled newsprint, etc.). This will help diversify our energy supply and build a better renewable future.

Overall, a strong domestic biofuels industry is good news for Canadian farmers and rural communities, good news for our environment and air quality, good news for consumers and motorists, for the Canadian economy, and for the developing world.

-The CRFA, http://www.greenfuels.org/

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We need to reduce our fuel consumption.  We need to allow local economy to flourish all over the world.  We need to make smart consumer choices for all things including food (think food miles, choosing local, choosing organic, turning wasted space into productive community gardens...).  And we NEED to make careful, conscious choices about populating our fragile planet.

Let's keep exploring the options with clear, open minds.

- Rhiannon Webb, Eco Bambini Planet

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