Switching vehicles from petrol or diesel to run on biofuels like biodiesel or ethanol may help reduce global warming carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from exhaust pipes, but growing the raw materials, like rapeseed, soya and oil palm, requires huge amounts of land. Biofuels now pose another major threat to the world’s forests, particularly the tropical rainforests in Asia and South America.

Environmental commentator George Monbiot views biofuels manufacture as “the most destructive (project) on Earth” and “more damaging than the fossil-fuel burning it replaces” (Guardian 6.12.05). He cites biologist Jeffrey Dukes, who calculated in 2003 that the world’s population now burns annually 400 times more carbon from fossilised sources, like coal, gas and oil, than the planet’s decaying dead plants and animals are laying down. He then asks how so-called ecology experts can possibly believe that we can compensate for such a huge consumption of resources with extraordinarily high power densities by growing low energy density materials like soy and oil palm. He concludes that there is simply no substitute for reducing peoples’ energy needs. For George, Governments’ enthusiasm for biofuels like biodiesel, ethanol and butanol is motivated purely by the desire to:

• be seen to be doing something and
• avoid the tough, unpopular, energy-conserving, pollution- reducing lifestyle decisions (e.g. transport and housing) which must be taken

As well as being hopelessly inadequate given the world’s thirst for combustion engine fuels, biodiesel manufacture is responsible for massive environmental destruction, usually of rainforest, much of which also releases huge volumes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Taking palm oil, the cheapest crop suitable for biodiesel, as an example, George notes that “between 1985 and 2000, the development of oil-palm plantations in raijnforest areas was responsible for an estimated 87% of deforestation in Malaysia” (Friends of the Earth) and that, in Sumatra and Borneo, some four million hectares of forest have been converted to palm farms. A further six million hectares of rainforest are scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million hectares in Indonesia. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic cauldron of palm oil to fuel, mainly, European industry and transport, with the subsequent loss of rainforest and wildlife and the eviction of thousands of native people, sometimes using torture.

The European Commission and the UK Government have acknowledged all of the above in official statements, but encourage the import of palm oil nonetheless. And forgotten are the promises of New Labour to reduce or at least hold down traffic volumes.

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The UK Government’s decision to give a 100% fuel tax rebate on biodiesel shows either ignorance or dishonesty.

Back in January 2001, Associate Professor Jim Olsson and colleagues of the Department of Physical Chemistry at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg (Sweden) found that it is actually overall dirtier than ‘fossil fuel’ diesel.

The two forms of diesel take the same amount of energy to produce, and deliver the same amount of energy as it took to produce them. When they are burned, however, there is a huge difference. Burning oilseed rape methyl ester (RME - the most popular form of biodiesel) emits ten times the carcinogenic and air polluting emissions (e.g. 1-alkenes, 1.3 butadiene and benzene) as the clean fossil fuel diesel SEC1. This can be reduced by optimising engines to burn RME, but not by much. The only instance where RME is the better environmental alternative is where diesel spillage would cause severe environmental damage (e.g. on canals and farmland).

Some campaigners suspect that the UK Government’s enthusiasm for biodiesel is driven by the desire to create a market for GM oilseed rape (canola).