Biodiesel- The Disaster

Biodiesel sounds great but when the UK government announced their plans for biofuel targets, they claimed that 5% of biofuel used in road transport fuel means 5% less greenhouse gas emissions, yet there is no scientific basis for such a claim. Indeed, it seems more likely that if the biofuel market is allowed to grow without constraints, this will almost certainly lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

How has this happened?  It seems that in the interests of economics (and making a fast buck) much of the scientific evidence has been ignored and certain crucial factors have been left out of the figures used to calculate the merits of biofuels.

So what got left out?  Firstly, the release of CO2 as a direct result of ploughing prior to planting annual crops (like oilseed rape). As the soil is turned (by plough or with a spade in your garden) soil humus is exposed to oxygen and breaks down (burns) giving off CO2. Also, many of the billions of micro organisms (creatures of the dark side) are killed by the light and break down with similar consequences. Plough agriculture has been estimated to produce 3 tons of CO2 per hectare in temperate soils.

Secondly, the use of nitrogen fertilisers was removed from the equation. Nitrogen fertilisers produce CO2 both during manufacture and also in use.  In particular, high emissions of the potent and long-lasting greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, which is released by microbes when nitrogen fertilisers are applied to soils.

The International Panel on Climate Change stated in their Third Assessment Report that increasing nitrogen in the soil through fertiliser use increases the emission of N2O from the soils. They pointed to evidence of a faster-than-linear feedback in such soil emissions as more fertiliser is applied. N2O is 310 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 and remains in the atmosphere for 110-120 years. If those figures are taken into account, greenhouse gas savings for biofuels drop from 53% to just 7%.  If fertiliser is applied to tropical soils, N2O emissions are 10-100 times higher.  This is crucial as many biofuel crops that will end up as fuels for Europe and the US are already being grown in the tropics, displacing tropical rainforest that can absorb more CO2 that the fuels will save.

Thirdly, the figures arrived at and now used by various governments to develop policy (including the US and UK) assume that all by-products of biofuels would be used for animal feed and would displace an equivalent amount of existing animal fodder production, such as soy meal. There is no guarantee that this is happening.

A further extremely worrying trend is already noticeable in the US, as farmers who had previously grown grain and corn switch to biofuel crops, mainly because they can get a higher return. This has the effect of reducing the amount of staple foods grown in the world and that is likely to push up world prices for staple foods and destabilise the global economy, as well as threatening with starvation many people who are already living borderline existences.

Lastlyas an example of how much land is required for biofuels, if all 5.6 million hectares of set-asides in the 15 ‘long-standing’ EU nations were intensively farmed for biofuel crops, we could save 1.3-1.5% of road transport emissions, or around 0.3% of total emissions from those 15 countries. Not a lot really and certainly not enough.

So what's to be done?  Well, in my humble(ish) opinion, what is required is a general purpose strategy to develop sustainable lifestyles, societies and environments.  That is to say, an integral solution rather than a piecemeal approach that gives inappropriate weighting to economic interests. My first choice here at the moment (and for the last twenty years, as nothing better has yet evolved) is permaculture design.

Permaculture design offers a holistic or integral perspective to sustainable development/evolution using three axis, namely environment, community and self.  Master Wilbur's four axis AQAL perspective offers greater precision but (at the moment) I still find permaculture design a much more practical, hands on system for actively creating solutions at a grass roots level. Its notable that the UK (and European) model of sustainable development replaces the self with the economy, hence the gross imbalances and failures that arise at present.

I'm not going to go into the permaculture design strategy in detail here (see my web site www.konsk.co.uk or the UK national charity www.permaculture.org.uk for more details and links) but will just make a few points to close this chunk off.

One study found that a hectare of land in Brazil grows enough sugar cane to make ethanol which saves 13 tonnes of CO2 every year, by replacing petrol or diesel. If, however, natural forests were allowed to regenerate on the same hectare of land, the trees would absorb 20 tonnes of CO2 every year. Tropical rainforest can absorb up to 26 tonnes per hectare annually and even in the UK, natural regeneration is guesstimated to absorb upwards of 3 tonnes per hectare per year.

It seems to me that if we paid attention to our lifestyles, developing a "stay at home" culture that minimises our use of transport, those 5.6 million acres of set aside could be allowed to regenerate as natural forest systems. If we manage these according to permaculture ethics and principles we would find them to be both stuffed full of resources for us and a haven for bio diversity. They'd also be pretty cool places to live, especially if we took yet more carbon out of the cycle by building all the millions of new homes we apparently need out of timber.

[Sorry about the long entry but the subject merits it.  Many of the facts and figures used here came form the excellent web site here http://www.greenfuels.org/biodiesel/]