Admit it: Environmentalists were right about biofuels 15 February 08

Environmentalists have been voicing their concerns about biofuels for ages – it’s about time the EU and other governments started to listen

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This article was first published by the Guardian. For the original, see here.

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Why is it that no one ever gives environmentalists any credit for being right? When the prospect of large-scale use of biofuels as a response to climate change was first mooted, many green campaigners and writers – including Greenpeace and the Guardian’s George Monbiot – raised concerns about the impacts on land-use, food supply and biodiversity. They were ignored, as both the US and the EU rushed to adopt biofuel targets as a supposedly pain-free way to reduce carbon emissions from cars and trucks.

Many writers, including myself, also questioned whether biofuels could even do any better in a straightforward calculation of greenhouse gas emissions. It seemed to me that once pollution from fertilisers, farming, land clearance and transporting fuels was added to the equation, biofuels would not be any better for the climate – and indeed might even be worse – than conventional mineral diesel and petrol. Some scientists were also concerned: in the US, Cornell University’s Professor David Pimentel published studies concluding that ethanol was a “net energy loser” when compared to conventional fuels. Producing ethanol, in other words, uses more energy than the resulting fuel generates on combustion. Once again these warnings were ignored and marginalised.

Even powerful interests were beginning to voice concerns: in May 2007 the chief executive of the agricultural commodities giant Cargill warned of “unintended consequences”, and argued that food should come first, and fuel second. But Cargill’s competitor Archer Daniels Midland remained gung-ho for agrofuels, and the Swiss agricultural behemoth Syngenta reported massive profit rises, thanks in part to global demand for biodiesel. In the UK, Tesco has been leading the biofuels revolution, taking a 25% stake in Greenergy, which runs a biofuels refinery at Immingham on the east coast of England. Tesco now sells a bioethanol/petrol mix at hundreds of its petrol stations, claiming that this fuel is “responsible for 4.5% less CO2”.

Two new studies published in the world’s leading scientific journal Science show that the claims made on behalf of biofuels by its proponents are at best mistaken and at worst utterly fraudulent. Greenergy, for example, claims that its “GlobalDiesel” fuel saved as much CO2 in a year as would be equivalent to taking 117,000 family cars off the road over the same period. The company bases this claim on analysis which supposedly takes into account all the carbon released during the manufacturing and processing of its product. But two critical factors are missed out, and these are the ones considered specifically by the two new papers in Science: the displacement effect of burning crops for fuel, and the carbon released by ploughing up grassland or removing forest for crops.

When these factors are considered, biofuels are responsible for releasing far more greenhouse gases than they mop up – as the environmental lobby has long argued. There are some small exceptions, like perennials planted on abandoned agricultural land and the use of waste vegetable oil in cars, but these are only ever going to be marginal. Overall, destroying forests for palm oil plantations – which later produce biodiesel for European cars – releases hundreds of times more carbon dioxide than using these fuels will save every year, according to one of the two papers in Science. No wonder the campaigners at Biofuelwatch label the fuel “deforestation diesel”. You are far better off buying the normal stuff from Shell.

The European Union, stung by criticisms that its policy on biofuels is increasing deforestation worldwide, has promised only to buy fuel from “sustainable sources” – palm oil plantations or soya fields which are not grown on recently-deforested land. But the second paper in Science puts paid to this notion too: because of the displacement effect, farmers will simply deforest more land in order to make up for the feedstock diverted from the more “sustainable” sources. In other words, fuel from a “sustainable” plantation or farm will be exported to the European Union, while the gap this leaves on world markets will simply be filled with palm oil or soya grown on destroyed forest land.

There is no avoiding this equation: any use of biofuels will raise demand on world markets for agricultural products, competing with the food market and leading to the clearance of more land. Because forests and grasslands are the key remaining wild-land habitats, this onslaught – supposedly in the interests of reducing climate change – is having disastrous impacts on biodiversity. In Borneo and Sumatra the orang-utan is now endangered because of forest clearance, much of it for palm oil.

The upshot of all this is obvious. The EU and other governments must admit they’ve got it wrong, and ditch biofuels targets. Yes, road transport must be de-carbonised, but the future is far more likely to be in electric cars powered by renewably-charged batteries than in any other competing technology. The myth that biofuels can reduce greenhouse gases has been exploded, and policies need to shift accordingly. Given the disastrous rates of deforestation in tropical countries like Indonesia and Brazil, the EU must urgently find ways to pay these countries to keep their forests standing, and to pay for some of the damage that has been done through the calamitous biofuels mistake.

And it would be nice if, just this once, those who so trumpeted the virtues of biofuels could admit that the green hand-wringers were right all along.