We need to stop biofuel targets now

I wrote an item a while back on biofuels after reading Monbiot’s excellent book HEAT.

Monbiot has written another great article on the subject. People need to wake up and smell the deforestation and starvation.

Don’t buy the crap the governments are telling us about biofuels reducing our carbon emissions. They are completely unsustainable and will cause massive environmental and social damage:

Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The UN has just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022(10). Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn’t happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang utan in the wild. But it gets worse. As the forests are burnt, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or ten times as much as petroleum produces(11). I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes TEN TIMES as much climate change as ordinary diesel.

Source: George Monbiot: A Lethal Solution – worth reading full article