The Energy Reader by Tom Butler

Author:Tom Butler [Butler, Tom; Lerch Daniel; Wuerthner, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780984630431
Publisher: Watershed Media

TRANSPORT FUELS

Biofuels for transportation—ethanol and biodiesel—have been enthusiastically embraced as “green” alternatives to petroleum fuels, with claims that they would reduce greenhouse gas emissions while reviving domestic fuel production. Brazil is the model country, having already made considerable progress toward replacing petroleum fuels with sugarcane ethanol nationwide. In the United States, ethanol from corn is supported with generous subsidies. Mandated targets for biofuel use have been signed into law in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.

The negative impacts of this rush to biofuels are already apparent. Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry is converting vast parts of the delicate Cerrado savanna ecoregion into industrial sugar monocultures—cleared, plowed, sprayed with chemicals, and repeatedly burned over. The appalling work conditions of “sugar slaves” have also been documented. In the United States, expanding corn production for ethanol has resulted in the increased use of synthetic fertilizers (visible in the expanding dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico), former conservation lands being planted with corn, and depletion of freshwater aquifers. Increased demand for corn has also shifted U.S. production away from soybeans, causing production in Brazil and elsewhere to expand to fill the void, often at the expense of tropical rainforests. This sort of “indirect land use change” has been a topic of heated debate, and industry has fought to exclude it from consideration—because when indirect land use is taken into consideration, virtually all biofuels result in more greenhouse gas emissions than does petroleum.

The “poster child” for negative impacts from biofuel production is palm oil biodiesel. Given the recent rate of deforestation and widespread investment in oil palm plantations and biodiesel, it has been estimated that 98 percent of the forest on Borneo and Sumatra—among the most diverse on Earth—could be cut down and replaced by oil palm monocultures by 2022.1 Emissions from the conversion of Asia’s lowland peat forest into palm oil plantations are astronomical, accounting for nearly 8 percent of the global total. The expansion of palm oil is at the root of many human rights abuses in Colombia, Ecuador, and other Latin American countries, as campesinos are violently expelled from their lands or even murdered to make way for industrial plantations. Ironically, palm oil plantations are, by U.N. definitions, considered “forests” and increasingly rewarded with carbon finance intended for forest protection.2

Public opinion toward biofuels has soured over the years. This shifting attitude was aided especially by a leaked World Bank memo in 2008 that noted how the diversion of food crops into ethanol was a major factor in driving up food prices. With more than a billion people living with chronic malnourishment, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Zeigler in 2007 called the conversion of corn, soybean, cassava, wheat, vegetable oils, and other food into fuel for automobiles, a “crime against humanity.”3 In 2010, the United States nonetheless put nearly a third of its corn crop into ethanol production.

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