“4/11/2008, 3:57pm EST”
Time Mag catches on: Biofuels are a collossal blunder →
Despite having initial promise of mitigating global warming, biofuel production is actually increasing carbon emissions.
Because the production of biofuel crops is a carbon-intensive process, and because the particular crops being utilized are often inefficient as fuel sources, biofuels could only ever have been a marginal fix.
But now the smoke is clearing on a huge problem that scientists and policy-makers did not foresee: the economic/political structures emerging in support of the fad are driving massive carbon releases through the burning of vast amounts of carbon-sink biomass.
The chain is clear: Skyrocketing demand for biofuel has led to huge price increases for those crops; this in turn has caused farmers to clear vast swaths of land (and burn the vegetation) in order to cultivate more crops to cash in on high prices.
Why didn’t the ‘experts’ foresee this web of events? Simply put, the biofuel craze bubbled up because it represented a seemingly easy way out — a way to mitigate climate change without really transforming any of society’s destructive operating assumptions. It’s the civilization-old meme: We’ll simply use our existing thought patterns to solve problems from the safe confines of psychologically comfortable worldviews.
It’s the myopia of optimism — and ironically, perhaps also of cynicism — that has been a hallmark of our civilization.
Political leaders jumped on the biofuel bandwagon partly because they saw it as a chance to pad congressional resumes and also pander to the powerful farming lobby in this country. Society at large adopts this prescribed laziness, and a small few industrymen become enriched at the expense — wittingly or unwittingly — of a great great many and the whole biocommunity.
In December, President Bush signed a bipartisan energy bill that will dramatically increase support to the industry while mandating 36 billion gal. (136 billion L) of biofuel by 2022.
It remains unclear whether any serious remedial action will be taken to halt the madness and clean up the mess.
[And, to relate to several other recent posts, the diversion of spiralling amounts of corn and other foods towards biofuels, and the favoring of biofuel crops over non-biofuels like wheat by farmers worldwide, are a major source of food scarcity. In effect, biofuel demand is helping to drive food prices up across the board.]
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