Soil Not Oil by Vandana Shiva

Author:Vandana Shiva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Industrial Biofuels: Green or Green™

Industrial biofuels are being promoted as a source of renewable energy and as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, there are two ecological reasons why converting crops like soy, corn, and palm into liquid fuels can actually aggravate the CO2 burden and worsen the climate crisis while also contributing to the erosion of biodiversity and the depletion of water resources.

First, deforestation caused by expanding soy and palm oil plantations is leading to increased CO2 emissions. The FAO estimates that 1.6 billion tons, or 25 to 30 percent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year, comes from deforestation.4

According to Wetlands International, destruction of Southeast Asian forests for palm oil plantations is contributing to 8 percent of global CO2 emissions.5 By 2022, biofuel plantations could destroy 98 percent of lndonesia’s rainforests.6 Every ton of palm oil used as biofuel releases 30 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, ten times as much as petroleum does.7 Ironically, this additional burden on the atmosphere is treated as beneficial and as a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) by the Kyoto Protocol. Biofuels are exacerbating the same global warming that they are supposed to reduce.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.