Biofuels are a false hope

I have long harboured concerns about biofuels. Primarily I was concerned that, being used for diesel engines, you would still see large amounts of sooty pollution particles, which having lived on a busy road with trucks passing I can tell you is less than pleasant.

George Monbiot’s book HEAT exposes very well the fallacy of bio-fuels for the UK if not the world:

1. There’s nowhere near enough agricultural land of the quality needed to produce enough bio-fuel for the UK using UK farms.
2. Thus, bio-fuel crops would need to be imported.
3. This importing wastes more energy.
4. This imported fuel harvest will come from the cheapest source, typically poor nations.
5. The poor nations will therefore experience competition for their agricultural land such that they will not be able to grow enough food for their own people, as we will inevitably be able to pay more for their grain to use as fuel than they will to feed themselves.

The last point is the killer, literally. Car driving, based on bio-fuels, will cease to become something that just wrecks the environment, but will become something that directly wrecks the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Don’t believe me? Check out this report from just a couple of days ago, into the world grain stocks and how we are now exceeding global grain supply.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the cheapest source of biofuel currently is Palm oil. The rising demand for this is already causing the destruction of vast swathes of forest in Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo. Monbiot successfully argues that biofuels, except those derived from used cooking oils, are worse than oil.

The only solution to personal transport (i.e. cars and bikes) is electric power drawn from sustainable sources. Even then we have the issue of ever increasing traffic and roadbuilding to contend with.