Smug biofuel stickers don’t look so clever now

Those biodiesel car stickers are unutterably smug. Yes, this may be a wholly unnecessary car journey, they purr, but at least my tank’s full of nothing more harmful than sweetcorn.

Now, gratifyingly, the OECD has come out and said what many suspected all along. The biofuels revolution is actually a con. Filling up with recycled chip fat is damaging to the environment, reduces CO2 emissions little if at all and increases the cost of basic foodstuffs for some of the world’s poorest people.
A dirty truth about biofuels is that it makes most economic sense to produce them in tropical regions. Unfortunately that’s where the world’s most vulnerable natural ecosystems are but few of its cars. Another secret is that biofuels have been used to buy off mid-western farmers with ne’er a glance at the ecological impact. Unless you’re using Brazilian sugar-cane, there’s little evidence that biofuels reduce greenhouse gases and the US government ensures that tariffs keep the South American stuff out. The main reason that biofuels continue to be promoted as a plausible solution to global warming and energy security is that everyone hopes a second generation of technologies will ride to the rescue. The hope is that residual materials like plant stalks and crops that can be grown on land that’s no good for food production will increase the output of alternative fuels without an escalation in the unfolding fuel versus food war.

The biofuels industry is what happens when protectionism and subsidy collides with a desire to do something positive without thinking it through.

The Daily Telegraph (London) (scroll down)