Britain, like all the other capitalist countries, is dependent on burning fossil fuels as our basic energy source. It is obvious that fossil fuels must run out one day. It is also well known that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels contribute to climate change. One 'solution' put forward to this is to grow your own biofuel.

The government's policy on encouraging the use of biofuels for transport is under attack from scientists and environmentalists because the biofuels are more damaging to the environment than the fossil fuels they replace!

The UK government target, negotiated with other members of the EU, is for 5% of petrol and diesel sold at the pumps to be from biofuel sources by 2010 and 10% by 2020.  An alternative proposal debated by the EU, but then vetoed by Germany, was to require car manufacturers to improve vehicle efficiency.

 The US Government is also pursuing a similar policy, and is heavily subsidising the farming of maize for biodiesel.  But although it is publicised as a "Green" policy and touted as a way of combatting global warming by reducing CO2 emissions, it really has more to do with diversifying fuel supplies so that the developed countries are less dependent on oil supplies from the Middle East, Venezuela and the countries of the former Soviet Union.  In any case it is widely recognised that supplies of fossil fuel are being depleted rapidly and will become increasingly expensive as supplies get scarce.

In terms of their effect on  the emission of greenhouse gases, biofuels as presently produced are not simply ineffective, they are far worse than fossil fuels because forests are being cleared, by burning, to provide the land to grow biofuel crops like palms. 

More Damaging

George Monbiot has estimated that they are ten times more damaging to the environment than fossil fuels, and has called for a 5-year moratorium on their use.  This is also the view of top environmental scientists such as Renton Righelato from the World Land Trust and Roland Clift, professor of environmental technology at Surrey University.

Clift has called the government's policy a "scam" and said "We calculate that the land will need to grow biodiesel crops for 70-300 years just to compensate for the CO2 emitted in forest destruction."

Even when existing agricultural land and not virgin forest is used, it's a scam (according to Professors Pimentel and Patzek of Cornell and Berkeley Universities) because, in the US, the energy consumed by machinery in the process of growing the maize and in the conversion to bioethanol from the raw product is three times as much energy as there is in the liquid fuel you get at the end.  The massive federal and state subsidies needed to make this happen come out of the taxes paid by American workers.

Pimentel and Patzek's energy figures are contested by biofuel industry experts, who claim that for every 1 unit of fossil fuel energy used, 1.13 to 1.34 equivalent units of bioethanol are created.  So even with the most optimistic assumptions built in the gains are quite small. On these figures the USA would need more than twice the total farmland it possesses just to meet its energy needs.  Obviously the USA and Europe are going to get their main biofuel resources from elsewhere.

The resulting pressure on global land resources is driving up the price of food everywhere. For example the price of maize doubled between January 2006 and March 2007.  This leads to increased hardship for the very poorest sections of society who must spend a far greater proportion of their income on food than the well-off. 

Carbon emissions have to be cut. One reason for the acceleration of emissions being pumped out is that our economy is unplanned. Private transport, particularly the car, is the only way many people can get about. We need to take our privatized public transport back into public ownership, invest in it, and build it up as a way of travelling that is a viable alternative to the car.