Biofuels and rainforests

As politicians began to realise that carbon emissions from oil were problematic, or alternatively, that oil was a finite research, they began to search for non-polluting, sustainable alternatives.

Unfortunately, one of their bright ideas involved using plant fuels to run vehicles, and implementing mandatory minimum standards for biofuel content in gasoline. The idea was that the carbon came from plants, so it was carbon that they had taken out of the air, and also that plants were a renewable source. Sadly, the disadvantages of most biofuels outweigh the advantages.

In America, the most common biofuel used is corn ethanol, which may not even produce as much energy as is required to make it. And it drives up the price of food by diverting corn from food for humans to food for cars. Everyone except corn farmers and politicians agrees that this is a bad idea.

One proposed alternative is sugarcane ethanol. This is a better option than corn, in that it actually contains more energy than is needed to make it. And, say some, it wasn't going to be eaten anyway (not directly), so isn't it a good thing?

Well, no. We don't eat sugar directly, but the land we grow it on could have been used to grow other food. Or we may cut down forests to grow more sugar to power cars. Which produces carbon emissions. Which defeats the point. And you'd have to cut down a lot of forests to replace gasoline entirely.

Unfortunately, cutting down a lot of forests is exactly what people are doing in countries where palm oil is grown, and replacing them with palm oil plantations. The oil goes to make biodiesel for Europe, which has mandated that it be used in fuels. Today it was revealed that a provision to in an important treaty about the rainforests which would have slowed down this process of converting nature to gasoline substitute was removed.

Instead it allows plantations to be classified as natural forest, and countries can be rewarded for keeping forests intact. So they could be paid for deforestation. Quite possibly this was done to ensure Europe can meet it's biodiesel quotas. I fear measures to "combat global warming" which are done in bad faith, or without thinking them through. Biofuel policies are currently making things worse, not better.