Stop the biofuels bandwagon 10 March 08

Enthusiasm for biofuels is misplaced. It's not too late for Gordon Brown to change his mind about them - and he must.

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This article was first published in the Guardian’s Comment is Free, on 2 March 2008. View the original here.

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The tide of public and expert opinion has been turning inexorably against biofuels in recent months. First news began to leak out about hungry Mexicans protesting about rising corn prices, as more and more of the global harvest was siphoned off for ethanol. Then studies by scientists confirmed that all current biofuels are worse – some by an order of magnitude – in greenhouse emissions terms than conventional mineral petrol and diesel.

Now the government’s chief scientist has come out strongly against biofuels, again because of the long-term threat they pose to our food supply. There’s only one problem: the UK and Europe still have targets to massively ramp up biofuel use. These targets were set prematurely, when governments enthusiastically jumped at the chance to encourage the use of so-called renewable fuels which offered the promise of allowing people to keep driving while not destroying the climate.

Unfortunately, the celebrations were premature. We now know that biofuels release far more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels because of the emissions that are caused through deforestation and agriculture in their production. We know also, as Professor Beddington emphasised in this week’s lecture, that there simply isn’t enough land space to feed a growing world population if valuable carbohydrates from staple food crops are burned in cars. The oft-repeated statistic that it takes a year’s worth of food for one person to fill the petrol tank of the average 4×4 is reason enough to abandon this failed enterprise.

Now is the time to act, before the biofuels mistakes of the past get compounded by the EU’s rush to prematurely set targets for their increased use. The case is very simple: meeting the EU’s targets on biofuels use – of 5.75% by 2010 – will dramatically worsen both carbon emissions and the food supply crisis. The targets must be abandoned immediately.

Gordon Brown should listen carefully to Professor Beddington’s advice, and act on it. The government must quickly abandon our national targets for biofuels use, and urge its EU partners to remove the target across the entirety of Europe. Much damage has already been done to the rainforests of Indonesia as a result of rising demand for palm oil as a feedstock for biodiesel. We know that there is no such thing as “sustainable” palm oil, because any rise in demand will lead to further encroachment into these unique forests.

Europe should offer Indonesia financial assistance to protect its remaining areas of tropical forest, instead of adding to the pressure for their destruction through biofuels demand. Estimates vary, but a few billion euros would go a long way to preserving what is not only the last surviving habitat of the orang-utan but also a vital store of standing carbon.

In the longer-term, European politicians need to face up to the fact that the future of road transport is far more likely to be electric than liquid fuelled. Already Israel is planning the installation of a network which will allow electric cars – charged with renewable energy from solar power – to travel the whole country.

No one is arguing that research on second-generation biofuels, which may be able to produce fuel more efficiently without harming food supplies, should be stopped. But more research is needed to study their potential ecological impacts before governments again get too enthusiastic. The lesson from the biofuels debacle is clear: look before you leap.