For Europe, A Second Look At Biofuels?

Remarks made by European heads of state following the European Council’s annual Spring Summit, which was held last week in Brussels, indicate that the European Commission’s aspirations to boost the use of biofuels in European transport to 10% of total use by 2020 may well be revised to address concerns that increased biofuel production is already impacting food costs and water supplies, while accelerating deforestation and reducing the biosphere’s carbon sinks, creating a resultant intensification of man-made greenhouse gas production.

According to Euractiv, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, observed after the summit: “We’re not excluding the possibility that we’ll have to amend or revise our [biofuel] goals.” Regarding the viability of biofuels, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer-Boel stated “I know that various objections have been raised, and the Commission takes them seriously. But we believe we can answer them.”
In truth, last January was rocky for proponents of biofuel expansion in Europe. On the ninth of that month, seventeen NGOs, including Friends Of the Earth Europe and Greenpeace Europe, sent a letter to one of the European Commission’s most ardent biofuels enthusiasts, energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs, noting that the biofuels directive lacked standards to prevent the destruction of carbon sinks to create biofuel feedstocks, or to prevent social impacts:

The scramble to supply European markets [with biofuels] is already causing frequent land disputes, forced evictions… and poor working conditions.

On the fourteenth, EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas admitted in a BBC interview broadcast that “we [the Commission] have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels and also the social problems are bigger than we thought they were.”

A few days later, an unpublished working paper by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) was leaked to the media. In the document, EU scientists wrote “…the uncertainty is too great to say whether the EU 10% biofuels target will save greenhouse gas or not.” Rob Vierhout, secretary general of the European Bioethanol Fuel Association, or eBIO, retorted that “it has always been the agenda of the JRC to discredit biofuels ever since they started their Well-to-Wheel project with the oil and car industry.”

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