Monboit: Biofuels as 'Crime Against Humanity'

Be sure not to miss George Monboit's latest, thought-provoking rant against biofuels. Here's bit of it as posted on his blog:

An Agricultural Crime Against Humanity, George Monbiot, from the Guardian Nov 6: Biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war. … In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon they accumulated when they were growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon than petroleum products. The law the British government passed a fortnight ago - by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops - will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year. It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find that they cause more warming than petroleum.

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - which is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of over 80% of the world's biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels. Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%. That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change. … (footnotes omitted here)

Comments

[poetryman69]

Almost all wars and terrorism in the world can be stopped. Almost all dictators and tyrants can be rendered powerless. All we have to do is to stop paying them. An alarming amount of the money Western nations pay for oil is going into the coffers of people who are terrorists and dictators. All we have to do defund the world’s most violent criminals is to become energy independent.

In the first phase of energy independence we get as much energy as possible from resources which we own or which are in the hands of friendly, stable nations. First we build new nuclear power plants in every state. If the French can make nuclear work what excuse do we have? In addition, we drill for oil off all our coastal waters and we build new refineries and pipelines in every state. Existing energy companies are making plenty of money in the current climate of false scarcity. We will have to find away around them. Usually the way around greedy energy companies would require political will. However, almost all existing politicians are in the pocket of the energy companies. This includes democrats and republicans. So every politician currently in office needs to be thrown out. Anyone who works for or who owns an existing conventional energy company is in my view disqualified for public office. We already know from the Bush/Cheney experience that such politicians will work in a way contrary to the national security of the United States and will start pointless wars for oil.

Merely having new politicians willing to clear the legal minefields laid down by oil bought senators and congressmen might not be enough. We might have to get a little bolder. Therefore I suggest that we build terawatts of new nuclear power plans and miles of new oil refineries in Mexico and that we send the power back to the states via pipelines, power lines, hydrogen, or whatever works. This will provide work for Mexicans and energy for us. The Mexican government will have a large incentive to make the plants secure and this increased security might even spill over to the borders and make our borders more secure.

While phase one is going on we need to start on phase 2. In this phase we bring online as many green and renewable technologies as are currently viable and put as much money as is needed into producing more. I would suggest that the model cities be built in the west and south—anywhere that it does not get cold enough to snow. The idea is to build small towns or cities that will go cold turkey. There will be no fossil fuels of any kind allowed in these cities. All vehicles and houses will be powered by wind, solar and bio-mass. The best locations would be those that have year around wind, sun and enough farming in the area to produce the bio mass. These experimental towns would be off the power grid. The only way to get power to them would be to make the green and renewable technologies work. Volunteers who truly believe that the future is green would be invited to apply for residency. We would probably take engineers and farmers over other types because we would need people who were skilled in keeping the power conversion machinery going and others who don’t mind the get their hands dirty hard work of farming.

[Steven Earl Salmony]

Humanity is in danger of losing the exquisite value in one of God’s great gifts: the carefully and skillfully developed science on climate change and global warming.

Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture today is this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be ecomonically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated is true and real?

At least to me, it seems that good science is being ignored, distractions presented ubiquitously, controversy literally manufactured, or else silence allowed to prevail when reasonable and sensible scientific evidence comes into conflict with what culture prescribes as real and true. Perhaps science does present culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.

Perhaps we have before us a situation in which contrived logic, linear thinking, material obsessiveness and a mechanistic world view, that we see pervading the predominant culture on Earth in our time, could result in the children recklessly charging down a “primrose path” at our behest only to be confronted by a colossal ecologic or economic wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen.

Despite our best efforts, could it be that my not-so-great generation of elders is communicating with one another and our children as if we are living in a modern day Tower of Babel? Is our noticeable failure to communicate reasonably and sensibly about whatsoever is somehow real, and to widely share adequate understandings regarding both how the family of humanity “fits” within the natural order of living things and what are the limitations of the planet we inhabit, in evidence here and now?

It appears that the human community is indeed in a serious multifaceted predicament, but only in part because of the objective biological and physical circumstances defining our distinctly human-driven predicament. The global challenges in the offing are further complicated by our failure to communicate effectively about the potentially pernicious results that could be derived from having recklessly grown a soon to become patently unsustainable, colossal global economy, one which we have artificially designed, conveniently constructed, and relentlessly expanded without enough conscious, intelligent regard for the practical requirements of biophysical reality.

Could it be that the current gigantic scale and unchecked growth rate of the global economy is unsustainably driving increases both in adamant per human over-consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers toward the point in human history when the willful, rampant, unregulated growth of consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species precipitates the collapse of Earth’s ecology, even in these early years of Century XXI?

Your consideration is appreciated; your comments are welcome.

[Steve Salmony]

Please understand that I am concerned my generation of elders could be "selling a bill of goods" to our young people today; but we have no intention of fulfilling our promises and will fail to deliver the goods. In part, these unfortunate circumstances result from my generation's unbridled over-consumption of Earth's finite capacity to sustain life as well as from our reckless and unrestrained dissipation of limited natural resources bound up in the huge scale and growth rate of economic globalization.

My not-so-great generation appears to be mortgaging and threatening the future of its children by remaining religiously focused upon the endless accumulation of material wealth, the unchecked increase in per capita consumption of scarce resources, and the continuous consolidation of political/military power. Despite all our high-minded rhetoric to the contrary, we need not look far to see that money, power and privilege for ourselves, for our bought-and-paid-for politicians, and for our newly-made rich minions in the mass media are the primary objects of our desire. Regardless of the human-driven calamities that might befall coming generations, the leadership in my generation advises all of us to live long, and live large, in a patently unsustainable world of idle comforts, effortless ease, conspicuous consumption, secret handshakes, exclusive clubs, exotic hideaways and thousands of McMansions and private jets, having abandoned our regard for the less fortunate among us, for the maintenance of life as we know it, and for the preservation of the integrity of Earth. Please, now, recognize the single-minded pursuit of dollars, political power and privileges to profligately consume, and to magnificently ignore the practical requirements of biophysical reality, as our raison d'etre, come what may for the children.

When my not-so-great generation completes its unsavory 'mission' on Earth, I fear young people will look back in anger and utter disbelief at the things we have done and failed to do.....all things we proclaim loudly now as evidence of our many virtues.

Yes, of course, there is an ecological debt but, please, let us get real for a moment and understand what my generation does not want its children to know: your elders are determined to let the ecological debt and threats of human and environmental health, for which we are clearly responsible, fall into your lap, come what may.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population

[Steve Salmony]

Dear Friends,

If the rich and famous people among us do not start expressing their concern for something other than their riches and privileges soon, then approaching global challenges, to be found in the offing, could serve the purpose of helping them refocus their attention and change their behavior.

There can be no functioning manmade global economy without adequate natural resources and global ecosystem services that only the Earth can provide. To believe that business-as-usual economic globalization can continue to expand much longer, let alone endlessly, in our relatively small, evidently finite and noticeably frangible planetary home is magical and wishful thinking of the first order. Such thinking is an embarrassment to anyone who values good science, sound reasoning and common sense.

The failure of the wealthy and politically powerful people in my not-so-great generation of elders to respond ably to the requirements of practical reality will soon be seen by our children as the worst example of a gross dereliction of duty in human history.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steve Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

[Steve Salmony]

Dear Friends,

Of course, yes, definitely yes, the family of humanity can save what is precious if humankind chooses to do what is clearly within its power: save itself, other creatures and Earth from itself.

Humanity could soon be confronted with a huge challenge that takes its astounding shape from continuously skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers as well as from unbridled economic globalization and unrestrained per-capita consumption of limited resources by the human species.

Perhaps it will become dangerous to life as know it on Earth for the human community much longer to pursue the prized "business as usual" course of the predominant culture: unbridled overproduction, unrestrained overconsumption and unchecked overpopulation because, when these distinctly human activities are taken together, an overpowering force of nature exists that could become unsustainable on the relatively small, evident finite, noticeably frangible planet God blesses us to inhabit and steward, and surely not to overwhelm.

Always, with thanks to all,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

[Steve Salmony]

Humanity has been warned repeatedly about the threat to humanity, to life as we know it, to the viability of recognizably frangible global ecosystems and to the integrity of Earth and its limited resources that could be posed to humankind by the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers. Because we want human beings to be fed and to have jobs so they can feed themselves and their families, the growth of human numbers has lead great thinkers and scientists to regularly remind the human community of the impacts of unregulated human propagation, unrestrained consumption and rampantly expanding production activities in our planetary home.

Every possible bias, rhetorical device and "spin" appears to have been employed to deny the mounting evidence of the potential for impending ecological calamities and economic disasters from the near exponential growth of human numbers worldwide. Recently, good science about the way the world works has been systematically discredited; leading elders of the political economy have consciously conspired to mislead the public by misrepresenting the science and by turning climate science into a "political football" of sorts; ideological groups sponsored by super-rich, large-scale corporate 'citizens' have spread uncertainty and confusion in discussions about the nature of the biophysical world in which we live; and controversy has been manufactured where none would have otherwise existed.

The illusion of meaningful debate has been foisted upon the public by leaders who are evidently intent on "poisoning the well" of public discourse by knowingly and selfishly fostering disinformation campaigns for the purpose of enhancing their own financial interests........come what may for our children, coming generations, global biodiversity, the environment, and the Earth as a fit place for human habitation.

The elder guarantors of a good enough future for the children appear to be leading our kids down a "primrose path" along which the children could unexpectedly be confronted with sudden, potentially colossal threats to human and environmental health that appear to be derived from human-driven, converging global challenges such as pernicious impacts of global warming and climate change, pollution of the air, water and land from microscopic particulates and solid waste, and the reckless dissipation of scarce natural resources. All the while, these leading elders remain in denial of the fulminating ecological degradation by willfully declining to acknowledge, much less begin to address, humanity's emerging, human-induced predicament. One day, perhaps sooner rather than later, our children could have extraordinary difficulties responding ably to that with which they could soon come face to face; that is to say, because their leaders have so adamantly refused to acknowlege God's great gift of the good science of biological and physical reality, our kids will not even know what "hit" them, much less why it is happening.

Please note the concerns I am trying to communicate are expressed much better yesterday by Cameron Smith at the following link.

http://www.thestar.com/Article/297574

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

[Steve Salmony]

Somehow, perhaps sooner rather than later, Nature needs to be preserved and actively protected from overwhelming human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities now overspreading the surface of Earth.

What if ideology and selfish interests are “blinding” denialists to the virtual mountains of good scientific evidence of global warming and climate change?

The astounding, clearly visible, pernicious impacts of human overconsumption and overproduction activities of 6 billion (soon to become 9 billion) human beings upon Earth’s environment and its body of resources are overpowering and soon to be patently unsustainable, I suppose.

How much longer can the relatively small planet we inhabit withstand the colossal ravage being dealt to it in our time by human hands?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

[Steve Salmony]

Without a doubt, we need new thinking and new leadership and, yes, we need both now.

Hmmm…... ok…... for just a moment let us consider that at least one way to realistically address the challenges posed by global warming and global warming could be by limiting the rate of increase in the unbridled growth of the global economy.

Perhaps we could follow what we already know from good science, sound reasoning and common sense. We can choose to respond ably and differently, in a more reality-oriented way, to the emergent global challenges looming before humanity, the ones that we can certainly manage because these challenges can be seen so clearly now to be spectacularly induced by the unrestrained global growth of human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities now threatening to ravage the Earth.

Of course, it is fair to ask what the family of humanity could choose to do “ably and differently, in a more reality-oriented way.” Here are several ideas that come to mind.

1. Implement a universal, voluntary, humane program of family planning and health education that teaches people the need for setting a limit on the number of offspring at one child per family.

2. Establish an upper limit on the growth of the individual human footprint.

3. Restrict the reckless dissipation of limited natural resources so that the Earth is given time to replenish them for human benefit.

4. Substitute clean, renewable sources of energy, through the use of substantial economic incentives, for the fossil fuels we rely upon now.

5. Recognize that everything human beings do on the surface of our planetary home utterly depends on the finite resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth. Perhaps the time is nearly at hand when an endlessly expanding, gigantesque global economy on a relatively small planet of the size and make-up of Earth becomes patently unsustainable.

[Steve Salmony]

Are many too many leaders of the global political economy spurning their moral obligations by turning a blind eye to human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that can be seen recklessly dissipating the natural resources and drastically degrading the environs of our planetary home? The Earth is being ravaged; but it appears too many politicians, CEOs and institutional executives are willfully refusing to acknowledge what is happening.

Because the emerging global challenges that could soon be confronted by humanity appear to so many responsible, able and courageous scientists to be human-induced, many of our political leaders and economic powerbrokers have evidently been eschewing unwelcome responsibilities and unexpected duties which must be assumed now if life as we know it and the integrity of Earth are to be preserved for our children and coming generations.

[Steven Earl Salmony]

Dear George Monbiot,

It appears that the family of humanity is beginning to come face to face with a myriad of growing global challenges -- air pollution, sea and land contamination, global warming, peak oil, diminishing global supplies of grain, overfishing, the dissipation of Earth's scarce resources, desertification, deforestation, urban sprawl and autoban congestion are examples -- the sum of which could soon become unsustainable, given a finite planet with the relatively small size and make-up of Earth. What people generally appear not yet to see clearly enough is that these looming threats to human wellbeing and environmental health can be directly related to the current huge scale and anticipated growth of skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers.

That is to say, the unrestrained increase of per-capita consumption of limited resources, the unbridled global expansion of human production/distribution capabilities, and the rapid rise of numbers of Homo sapiens worldwide are occurring synergistically and could be fast approaching a point in history when these distinctly human, global "over-growth" activities are patently unsustainable.

What do you think about this view of the ominous, human-forced predicament that, at least to me, appears to be looming on the far horizon? What additions, deletions other changes would you make to this admittedly brief and general description of humankind's forbidding global circumstances?

How would you describe what has been elsewhere called the "world problematique"?

Always,

Steve

[my biofuel forum]

I don't buy it. I love to debate the premise and promises of biofuel. Like most things there are pros and cons but overall I'm for biofuel. Check out my forum if you want to discuss further!