Worse Than Fossil Fuel  

George Monbiot has never been too optimistic about biofuels and his latest column is fairly damning on the whole idea.

I've tended to flip-flop a bit on the whole biofuel issue. While I've got little enthusiasm for or faith in a traditional methods of producing biodiesel or ethanol, I still tend to think that there is some useful biofuel production that can be done - using waste biomass (as in some of the cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel production processes I've linked to in the last 6 months) or more adventurous techniques like biodiesel from algae (take 2) (take 3).

Biofuels won't replace oil but they could help to miigate the effects of depletion. The real problem raised by Monbiot is that rich car drivers may crowd out poor hungry people in the competition for biofuel inputs if the output of vast tracts of cropland is used exclusively for biofuel production - and I'm not so sure that problem can be resolved.

Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic.

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44×10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.” In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy – and the extraordinary power densities it gives us – with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states – such as ours – which seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one of them is worse than the fossil fuel burning it replaces.

The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent by the supporters of the Iraq war. The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they’re not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel’s destructive impact.

Before I go any further, I should make it clear that turning used chip fat into motor fuel is a good thing. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth are perfoming a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet one 380th of our demand for road transport fuel. Beyond that, the trouble begins.

When I wrote about it last year, I thought that the biggest problem caused by biodiesel was that it set up a competition for land. Arable land that would otherwise have been used to grow food would instead be used to grow fuel. But now I find that something even worse is happening. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.

In promoting biodiesel – as the European Union, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do – you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.

Last week, the chairman of Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant. His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam. Two foreign consortia – one German, one American – are setting up rival plants in Singapore. All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.

“The demand for biodiesel,” the Malaysian Star reports, “will come from the European Community … This fresh demand … would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia’s crude palm oil inventories”. Why? Because it’s cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.

This story illustrates how the free market is often the worst arbiter imaginable when it comes to decisions regarding the environment: the market often leads individuals acting in their own self-interest to undertake actions that are suicidal for humanity as a whole. It illustrates as well how reckless and destructive our collective behavior is likely to become as world oil/gas production peaks and starts to decline. Rising fuel prices will make biosphere destruction an increasingly profitable business. And it illustrates how so-called free trade agreements have handcuffed nations at just the wrong time in history. England cannot ban the importation of palm oil biodiesel because that would be an unfair restriction of trade under GATT.

The fundamental problem with letting the market make large-scale environmental decisions is that environmental costs are not reflected in the prices for anything, so decisions made on the basis of price are necessarily faulty. By insisting on an unregulated pursuit of profit, we dig our own graves.