Political Crossfire Forums

[bob.appleyard]

Oh dear, eco-warriors, looks like you've shot yourself in the foot with this one. Not only is biodiesel in all likelihood uneconomic, it's also hideously destructive to the environment -- even moreso than crude oil. Ooops!

Quote: When I wrote about it last year, I thought that the biggest problem caused by biodiesel was that it set up a competition for land(3). Arable land that would otherwise have been used to grow food would instead be used to grow fuel. But now I find that something even worse is happening. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.

In promoting biodiesel – as the European Union, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do – you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.

Last week, the chairman of Malaysia’s Federal Land Development Authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant(4). His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam(5). Two foreign consortia – one German, one American – are setting up rival plants in Singapore(6). All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.

“The demand for biodiesel,” the Malaysian Star reports, “will come from the European Community … This fresh demand … would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia’s crude palm oil inventories”(7). Why? Because it’s cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.

In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production. “Between 1985 and 2000,” it found, “the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia”(8). In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia.

Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orang-utan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist(9). The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.

Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they’ve cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/

This will not buy us time before oil use becomes totally uneconomic. Using less resources will. Sorry guys.

[poweRob]

Clear-cutting forest is never the correct way and true eco-minded people already know this. This article is no more than an endoresment of liberal policies of regulating corporations rather than letting them have their way at any cost.

That being said, Biodiesel plants are being built up in North Dakota right beside the vast farm fields because North Dakota if I'm not mistaken is pretty much devoid of forests and produces 90% of the United States canola oil.

As far as doing away with food sources by placing them in a tank, we already have idiotic policies in place that have corporate farms growing more than is used only to be subsidized to destroy their crops production. So that doesn't reach the mouths of the poor either.

As I've said before, biodiesel will not replace fossil fuels, it will however displace fossil fuels and increase on independence and then shift our remaining dependence from the Middle East to the likes of South America which will have the great side effect of stabilizing economies on our side of the world which will in turn assist in the immigration issue as those jobs arise.

I'll agree with the write you quoted that clear-cutting is not the answer. We need to use the arable land that we already have for farming instead or perhaps break new ground like in North Dakota where no clear-cutting is needed.

[Josh]

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

These are locally responsible methods. No one here is advocating the land usage to make biodiesel a huge resource. It's not meant to be.

We're advocating using waste oils and local distribution of biofuels to offset the percentage of use other fuels.

We can't help that flamboyant politicians tout biofuels as the future. Politicians and politics in general is too garbled and retarded to ever be sufficient in protecting the environment. What they've done has taken the details to heart instead of the substance of the message.

"Eco-Warriors" are the uneducated barking dogs of politics that push environmental issues developed by working men and women in fields of invention and science.

What people within the industry and culture of environmentalism (the culture of folks who shy away from politics) advocate local development and stronger community ties. Biofuels happens to be one of these resources as well as developing solar girds, wind vanes, wind mills, tidal mills, ecologically aware homes, hydroponics, xterrascaping, etc.

You say, biodiesel is not economically feasible in mass. I say, duh.

Read around before you be smartass.