Say no to biofuels 19 August 08

Biofuels can never be used sustainably on a large scale to power transport. The only solution is to shift rapidly to electricity.

Beware simplistic solutions to complex problems. Humanity is in a fix: for over a century our advanced industrial civilisation has been almost entirely fuelled by fossil hydrocarbons – oil, coal and gas – extracted from geological reserves under the Earth’s surface. We have known for years that the combustion of these fuels releases carbon dioxide, enhancing the planet’s natural greenhouse effect and condemning us all to a fiery future unless we leave the majority of remaining reserves under the ground. What to do? Biofuels are an obvious solution: replace ‘mineral’ petrol and diesel from fossil reserves with biological fuels extracted from plants and the result will be no net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. This is because the carbon released in combustion was originally sucked out of the air when the plants grew using energy from the sun. So once enough cars run on biodiesel or ethanol, humanity will effectively have switched to a solar energy economy and the problem will be solved.

Or will it? Perhaps the strongest argument against biofuels is that they simply replace one ecological problem with another. Humanity is already exerting tremendous pressure on the planet, largely because of agriculture. The UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a landmark report authored by thousands of experts, found that over the last 50 years humanity has changed the planet’s ecosystems “more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history”. This has already led to a major loss of biodiversity, and at least 60% of the Earth’s ‘ecosystem services’ (things like freshwater, air purification, fisheries and so on) are being degraded or used unsustainably. In other words, humanity is already living far beyond its means – we are hitting the ecological buffers in many other areas apart from just global warming.

Perhaps the strongest argument against biofuels is that they simply replace one ecological problem with another.

A large-scale shift towards biofuels – extracting fuel from the biosphere rather than underground – can only worsen the human agricultural pressure on ecosystems, as we shift from producing not just food but also fuel from increasingly scarce cultivable land. Some of the worst examples of biofuels causing the destruction of valuable ecosystems – such as the conversion of Indonesian tropical forests to palm oil plantations – are already well-known, thanks to vociferous campaigns by groups like Friends of the Earth and Biofuelwatch. Using palm oil for biodiesel production is little short of madness, even from a strictly climate change perspective – far more carbon is released when the forests are cleared (particularly when the peat underlying them is drained and burned) than will ever be clawed back through the replacement of fossil fuels. A similar equation applies on Amazonia, where the expansion of soya production (soya is another biodiesel feedstock) is also driving deforestation. Indonesia and Brazil are amongst the top ten carbon emitters in the world due to the degradation and destruction of their forests, thanks increasingly to biofuels.

But there are other less visible problems too. Most farmers apply nitrogen-based fertilisers to their crops to stimulate production. Most of this nitrogen isn’t captured by the plants, but runs off into rivers and lakes, causing algal blooms which kill fish and deplete oxygen levels. Whole areas of the ocean are now classified as ‘dead zones’, because of this agricultural runoff. Indeed, the planet’s natural nitrogen cycle has been even more dramatically altered by humans than the carbon cycle, although this is gets much less attention than the issue of climate change. But the two issues are interlinked: fertilisers also degrade on land to produce nitrous oxide, a very powerful greenhouse gas. A recent scientific analysis by a team led by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen found that biofuels can “contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O [nitrous oxide] emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings”.

These two issues – nitrous oxide and emissions from land-use change – should by themselves be enough to rule out a large-scale shift to biofuels. But the ecological concerns raised by biofuels run even deeper than this. With more than six billion people on the planet, humanity has already run short of agricultural land for food production, and the conversion of virgin forests and grasslands into farmland monoculture can only worsen the current extinction crisis. Some charismatic species like the orang-utan in Borneo and Sumatra are directly threatened by biofuels production, but there are countless other less visible victims of agricultural expansion: in total, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, a third of all amphibians and 70% of plants are currently threatened by human activity, according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), whose director Julia Marton-Lefevre now talks of a “global extinction crisis”. These species are important not just for economic or aesthetic reasons, but because the whole earth system – air, oceans and climate – depends vitally on living organisms: biology is as much a part of our Earth as chemistry and physics. If we wipe out biodiversity, we risk triggering escalating impacts which will eventually rebound on human societies too.

Biofuels are currently only a small part of this equation, but any increase in agricultural production can only intensify the extinction crisis. Some of this comes about through a displacement effect: even if biofuel feedstocks, whether corn, sugar cane, soya or palm oil, come from supposedly ‘sustainable’ sources, the gap in food supplies caused by their use will necessarily drive further deforestation and agricultural expansion in other areas. But some of the damage is much more direct. For example, 20,000 acres of Kenya’s Tana River wetlands – home to 350 species of birds, as well as hippos, elephants, rare sharks, reptiles and primates – are currently slated by the country’s government for destruction to produce sugarcane for ethanol, to be exported to the west for use in cars. In Cote d’Ivoire another wetland, the Tanoe Swamps Forest – a last refuge for three highly endangered primates – is due to be converted into palm oil, again for biofuels production.

if ‘cellulosic ethanol’ were ever to take off in a big way, it might present an even greater threat than today’s generation of biofuels

Biofuels supporters frequently advocate the use of plants like the oilseed-producing drought-tolerant shrub jatropha, which they argue can be grown in ‘marginal’ areas in poorer countries without reducing food production. However, these ‘marginal’ areas are often precisely the places where a semblance of biodiversity still clings on. In addition, if crops like jatropha become successful, they will doubtless be expanded into food-producing areas and forests alike: unless strict laws are in place, economic incentives will always trump humanitarian or ecological concerns. Similarly, so-called ‘second-generation’ biofuels are also touted as a radical improvement on current fuel production from food crops. By brewing ethanol from crop waste or wood, the argument goes, biofuels production can be ramped up without driving up food prices and starving the poor. But if this ‘cellulosic ethanol’ were ever to take off in a big way, it might present an even greater threat than today’s generation of biofuels. Entire forests would likely be liquified in order to produce petrol and diesel for motorists – not just in rich countries, but increasingly in rapidly-industrialising nations like India and China. If world oil prices continue to rise, pressure to find substitutes like biofuels can only escalate.

That is not to say that all biofuels are bad. Burning old chip fat in car engines is beneficial, but only on a tiny scale and because it uses waste oil. Biogas produced from human sewage could be used to replace natural gas from underground. And biomass – from coppice woodland, for example – can be a good way to produce heat and power, but again only on a limited scale. So with biofuels largely out of the equation, how should we tackle global warming? The best way to reduce emissions from vehicles is not to find new sources of liquid fuels, but to shift rapidly to the production of electric cars and trucks, which can plug into the grid to recharge. This electricity in turn must come from wholly renewable sources, which means wind, solar and wave or tidal power. A 100% renewable economy may sound like a pipe-dream, but it is technologically entirely feasible, and economically represents an enormous opportunity for growth in jobs and manufacturing, as Germany has already begun to discover. Over the century ahead humanity has to learn how to supply its energy needs in ways which do not destroy the capacity of the planet to support life. Neither biofuels nor fossil fuels meet this test – but luckily there are plenty of energy sources that do.

A shortened version of this article was published by the Independent on 18 August 2008