Y2Kyoto: The Great Biofuels Con

Little Known Facts 24 Comments

[A] 2006 report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had already suggested that for the EU to meet its 10 per cent target from home-grown biofuels would require a staggering 70 per cent of arable land to be taken out of food production… Yet, in attempting to show that enough acreage would be available to meet the new biofuels target, the officials indulged in “Enron accounting”, using the same areas of land three times.

(h/t to reader Harry B.)

24 Replies to “Y2Kyoto: The Great Biofuels Con”

  1. And still, the high priests preach our sins (carbon) and our salvation (tax).
    And still, the media clap and applaud the wisdom of the environmental crowd.
    And still, the lefties (read useful idiots) are perplexed and “scared” that people dare question their religion.

  2. And still, it’s getting colder overall around the world…For the remainder of Aug., for example here in SW Ontario, the Weather Network is forecasting below average temp.
    But now it’s “climate change”, sorry I forgot. Every creek that floods a basement, hail that breaks a window or wind that uproots a tree is reported with gloomy, scary words only slightly short of associating it to the “planet has a fever” Gorology (Unless they have an environut looney tune willing to say it’s associated with CC in their report. Credentials an asset but not required of course)

  3. yet Al Gore , the messiah of AGW and his disciple the Naturist Naturalist Dr. Mengele Suzuki have remained strangely silent.having condemned the poor to starvation whilst they drive their SUVs and carbon offset megabusses even the MSM have had to take notice of the hypocrisy of thier over the top lifestyles. Dr. Fruitfly may have a pechant for wearing fig leaves and pretending he is Atlas , but an invitation to his 7 million dollar ecoparadise home along kitsalano in vancouver would show he can buy better clothes.

  6. Environmentalism is causing global warming.
    Christian Ruckstuhl and 12 coauthors found that of the 1C rise in temperature in Europe over the last three decades, “at least half of the warming” is attributable to a reduction of aerosols, such as sulphur dioxide and black soot particles. As Europeans have cleaned up their smokestacks and tailpipes, and as dirty old Soviet-era East European plants have been modernized to Western standards, more sunlight has penetrated the continent’s atmosphere and warmed things up a bit.
    In other words, environmentalism is causing global warming. As ecoadvocates have won tighter clean-air regulations, their efforts have been rewarded with brighter days (a good thing), but also warmer temperatures.
    http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=c92b9ede-0b8c-47dd-9d8a-4dcc4b75a392

  7. dinosaur, the unintended consequences of another ill thought out scheme. These people care about themselves only, I call them, the me people. Selfish reality hicks where ideology rules and others be damned.

  8. Many, many people knew biofuels was a sham right from the begining.
    So why did it get so far ?
    Because the media dumbs-down the news. Those in charge of media organizations are either really, really dumb or they have an agenda.
    The media is doing a big number on the common folk, the ones they say they want to help. The commoners will surely be left holding the “green” investment bag as the article below shows.
    The article was written a year and a half ago. The big players have been busy unloading (shorting) their flaky biofuel holdings onto those watching ‘Biz-Tip’ TV shows.
    —————
    Citadel, Shaw, Tudor Shun Global Warming as Short Sales Climb
    By Daniel Hauck and Michael Tsang
    Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) — The smartest money in global warming stocks may be scurrying to the exit just when the enthusiasm for alternative-energy companies is at an all-time high.
    While SunPower Corp. and Theolia SA are among more than 180 companies whose shares have surged as much as 240 percent this year — buoyed by efforts to curtail the observed increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans –the market’s nimblest investors already are hedging their bets.
    D.E. Shaw & Co., Tudor Investment Corp., Citadel Investment Group LLC, Caxton Associates LLC, SAC Capital Advisors LLC and Pequot Capital Management Inc. reduced their stakes in solar- power and ethanol producers in the fourth quarter, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The hedge funds manage about $86 billion.
    “As an investment play,” global warming is “a bubble” and “social short-term craze,” said Ken Fisher, who oversees $35 billion as chairman of Fisher Investments Inc. in Woodside, California.
    Anyone looking for corroboration of that assessment may find it in the so-called short selling of U.S. alternative-energy stocks last month, which climbed 45 times faster than the average for Standard & Poor’s 500 Index members.
    ————–
    Watch for a three part series on The National:
    * How the Investment Community Took Us For A Ride In The Green Car *

  9. I’m agnostic so I don’t throw the word “immoral” around lightly, but it goes without saying that using food for fuel is just that.
    The unfortunate reality is nobody will shoulder any of the responsibility for the damage that’s been and is being done in the name of AGW and conserving fossil fuels.

  10. Kate, I think this time you are talking nonsense. From a recently published study about Miscanthus, a giant (12 ft high) grass used for cellulosic ethanol:
    “The report found that using corn or switchgrass to meet a current White House goal of offsetting 20% of gasoline use would take 25% of the current U.S. cropland out of food production. The same amount of ethanol derived from Miscanthus would only require 9.3% of current agricultural acreage.”
    http://www.canadiandriver.com/thenews/2008/07/31/new-ethanol-study-shows-grass-outperforms-corn.htm

  12. I agree with “Manny, in Moncton”.
    Ethanol production is in it’s infancy. Corn is a short term solution but a necessary step.

  13. Harper is most likely right about biofuels, and they probably are not only viable but somewhat inevitable. For the most part, only North America and Europe have targets for developing biofuel industries, so when did it become North America and Europe’s burden to ensure the entire developing world gets fed cheap enough, especially when for the most part we have only one growing season to their two? Will it still be up to the west to ensure that the entire world has enough dirt cheap food when the global population reaches 15 billion?
    Most likely the world rice shortage has less to do with George Bush or biofuels than it does the fact that millions of Chinese laborers have been lured from their farms to work in new manufacturing sectors. Globally, much less land is currently being used to produce biofuels than for producing non-food or non-nutritional products like tea, coffee, Christmas trees, cut flowers, potted plants, cut flowers, sod, drugs, vegetable oils for cooking and furniture polish etc., so maybe the UN should learn to prioritize, or at least start by admitting that socialism in developing countries isn’t working, and stop always blaming all the world’s problems on the west. Further, why would anyone believe the UN, WTO, the World Bank or especially the MSM on the subject of biofuels?

  14. I have been told that hemp (no,not pot) is an excellent biofuel option, and being quite hardy, could be grown where other crops are not viable.
    Anyway, that’s what I’ve been told by informed sources. Any comments?

  15. Henry Ford originally designed the Ford Model T to run completely on hemp derived biofuel, Rudolf Diesel, the German inventor of the Diesel engine, designed it to run on peanut oil, and Nikolaus August Otto, the German inventor of the internal combustion engine, conceived his invention to run on ethanol. Oil was just discovered to be a cheap and abundant form of biofuel that already existed and temporarily took the place of man made varieties. Further, alcohol as biofuel came into use in a big way during the oil shortages of the Second World War, with the Germans mixing alcohol fermented from potatoes into gasoline, and the British doing the same with grain alcohol. Biofuels are nothing new, and like it or not they will be in use long after the last oil well has run dry.

  16. The interesting thing here is the potential opportunity for synergies that would benefit everybody.
    If the EU goes to big-time ethanol production, why not drop all the agricultural barriers and allow those African farmers to supply produce to Europe with no restrictions?
    You just know European farmers won’t permit it…

  17. Shamrock, I have no idea about hemp, but jatropha shows promise in warmer climes:
    Amy Yee, India may have solved cheap energy question
    Unlike biofuels made from crops such as soybeans and maize, jatropha… is inedible, grows on non-arable land and needs little water or care. “It has good potential, no doubt about it,” says Suhas Wani, principal scientist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, near Hyderabad…
    If 10 per cent of India’s estimated 60m hectares (148m acres) of non-arable land is cultivated for jatropha or other biofuels, the country could produce 4m-5m tonnes of biodiesel a year, or about 10 per cent of current diesel demand, says Winrock, an Indian non-governmental organisation.

  18. It has never made any sense to me that we take land out of food production to grow crops to essentially make Whiskey so we can burn it in our cars.
    Food is food and we need more, why contaminate our land with producing fuel to run cars….
    Read Potashcorps website… the world is only 2 months away from famine…
    Hey but even though we may be starving we’ll be able to run our cars….
    LAND SHOULD BE FOR FOOD.

  20. “It has never made any sense to me that we take land out of food production to grow crops to essentially make Whiskey so we can burn it in our cars.”
    It seems perfectly ok to use land to make whiskey and beer so that some people can get drunk and play on the internets, without bothering to have an original thought. Why is it the UN’s or anyone’s business if I decide to pour some of my whiskey into my fuel tank?
    Agriculture is a very fuel intensive industry so without inexpensive fuel there is no inexpensive food. Why would taking away biofuels which are the only foreseeable competition for petroleum based fuel help that situation? Go into a supermarket, there is no shortage of food, there is a shortage of dirt cheap food that can feed someone living in a socialist developing country for a dollar a day. The best way to fix that problem is not to empower the UN by subsidizing food so that they can help socialist tyrants like Mugabe to use it as a weapon, but to end socialism in developing nations so that people living in the third world can earn more than a dollar a day and therefore can afford food. If biofuel industries ultimately prove not to be viable then they will fail, what is the problem?

  21. ” If biofuel industries ultimately prove not to be viable then they will fail, what is the problem? ”
    The huge taxpayer’s subsidies to biofuels is the problem.

  22. Interfering in markets seems to be a bad habit that our governments can’t seem to break, and I would call that a separate problem. Sorry to break it to you but taxpayers already heavily subsidize many of our agricultural industries, as well as the startup of most of our industries. I definitely agree with you however that after the original startup help that all new industries get, biofuel industries should have to make it on there own merits. Any further subsidies should be for developing hardier sources of organic biomass grown on marginal land that is not currently used for agriculture.

  23. “Read Potashcorps website… the world is only 2 months away from famine…”
    The world has the currently capacity to produce enough food for 10 billion people. There is no food shortage, it is politics. The earths population will drop significantly by 2050 alleviating the pressures on the food supply and other resources. We will be fine!

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