Biofuels Are a Poison Pill

TomPaine.com - Biofuel Backfire

With Congress still wrestling behind closed doors over energy legislation, people are starting to take a closer look at the issue. And what they're seeing isn't pretty.


Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, has stalled formal Senate and House negotiations on energy in part out of concern than more ethanol use could further drive up animal feed prices.


She's far from the only one concerned. The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that more use of biofuels could drive food prices 20-40 percent higher between now and 2020.


"Fuel made from food is a dumb idea, to put it succinctly," observed Ronald Steenblik, research director at the International Institute for Sustainable Development's Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) in Geneva, Switzerland, who has studied Europe's experience with biofuels.


A follow-up analysis, released this week by my friends with the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force, ought to give everyone pause.


These researchers took an unbiased look at the European Union's effort to ramp up biofuels use. That mandate was driven primarily by farm policy (just like in the U.S., though we pretend otherwise), to create new markets for agricultural and forestry products.


But the Task Force found that the mandate "exacerbated some of the very problems it was designed to solve, driving up food prices, leading to increased deforestation in tropical countries, worsening global warming, and increasing imports of bio-oils."


Though reduced global warming emissions was supposed to be a side benefit of the mandate, the Task Force concluded that it actually led to the draining, clearing and burning of peat lands in Southeast Asia—making Indonesia the third largest source of global warming pollution after the U.S. and China.


Even biofuels produced within Europe didn't produce such great results. New analyses are suggesting that increased use of nitrogen-based fertilizers and deforestation could erase any global warming gains.