Biofuels bonanza facing 'crash' - BBC

Source: BBC News

Last Updated: Thursday, 15 November 2007, 16:09 GMT

Biofuels bonanza facing 'crash'
By Roger Harrabin
Environment Analyst, BBC News, Valencia

The biofuels bonanza will crash unless producers can
guarantee their crops have been produced responsibly,
the UN's environment agency chief has said.

Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme (Unep)
said there was an urgent need for standards to make
sure rainforests weren't being destroyed.

Biofuel makers also had to show their products did not
produce more CO2 than they negated, he told BBC News.

-snip-

Mr Steiner implied that because of Indonesia's inability
to police its land use, biofuels from palm oil grown
by the nation might never be deemed to be sustainable.

-snip-

Mr Steiner urged investors not to turn their backs on
developing second or third generation fuels that would
use non-food crops and burnable waste.

-snip-

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7096819.stm

bio-fuels are like eating our seed stock.

biofuels are a crime against humanity.

plant materials are typically returned to the land. (There are many way to do this, from direct return of the green-"waste"; to composting and then returning; to use as feed/food and then returning the animal-waste (perhaps composted/decomposed*). Leaving fields fallow, crop rotation, and the use of "fertilizer" crops also play roles.) And in nature, old plant material typically falls in the immediate vicinity of the producing plants to be "recycled" in some way (minus what's carried away, of course).

Ignoring the issues of diverting feed, food and land to biofuel use, there's still the issue of the loss of this plant material to the producing areas. Indeed, even if biofuel production-processes produce a "waste" material suitable for return to the land (or as feed in an intermediate step), there's still the issue of the transportation required. And where non-crop lands (like forests) are involved (at least), it's hard to foresee much interest on the part of the producers in returning "waste" product to the producing land.

More generally, it's necessary to take a broad context (in time, inputs, outputs, costs, etc) to well-evaluate many things.

*: Like with biogas.

get used to it