Biodiesel - “The Most Carbon-Intensive Fuel On Earth”?
George Monbiot strikes again - and this time his target is the world’s biodiesel industry.
You may recall that I wrote a post not too long ago about an article he wrote in the New Scientist (see Home-Scale Renewables - A Flawed Idea?).
In a recent article in The Olive Press, Monbiot refers to biodiesel as “the most carbon-intensive fuel on earth”. Needless to say, there are plenty of people either up in arms, or with their fingers in their ears when it comes to his views.
As is typically the case with authors supporting this school of thought (see Biofuel Monocultures - Does The ‘Revolution’ Add Up?), Monbiot’s issue is not so much with biodiesel itself - in fact he seems to support the idea of using waste oil for diesel production - its more to do with the practice of setting aside land for the purpose of growing oil-producing plants.
Of particular concern is the palm oil industry in the tropics - apparently this is the cheapest way to produce biodiesel, and potentially the most destructive as well.
Here is a blurb:
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. 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. 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.
Whatever your views on the matter, as I’ve stated before, I think its important to weigh all the evidence before barging forward in the name of ‘green’!
I still think the biodiesel from algae idea sounds great, but from the sounds of things that technology is still pretty new - so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Anyway, be sure to check out George Monbiot’s article: The great biodiesel con
Technorati Tags: biodiesel, biofuel, palm oil, george monbiot, green fuel, friends of the earth
Written by Bentley on October 30th, 2006 with
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#1. July 13th, 2007, at 5:57 PM.
I would like to use the picture associated with this post in a presentation. How might I obtain permission to do so?