It appears that the promise of biofuels for curbing carbon dioxide emissions and weaning America off of its dependence on foreign oil has some complications. Many of these complications have to do with the the interdependencies of a globalized world, and they have to do with the hard lesson that solutions to one problem often create other kinds of problems, or simply shift the original problem somewhere else.
Biofuels - fuels derived from plant products such as corn, soy or palm oil - have a lot going for them on the face of it. With minimal processing, most vehicles can run on gasoline or diesel that has some proportion of vegetable-derived fuel, such as ethanol. Ethanol has been particularly important as a replacement for the fuel additive MTBE, which while increasing fuel efficiency and reducing air pollution, has the annoying habit of contaminating vast areas of surface and groundwater. MTBE was itself originally a replacement for lead in gasoline. Lead is bad. Of course, lead itself was originally added to gasoline in order to increase octane and reduce engine knocking, and interestingly, to help gasoline compete with ethanol as a viable fuel! That's another story (see "The Secret History of Lead," The Nation Mar 2000), but it brings us back to ethanol.
The initial (and ongoing) excitement around the potential for biofuels led the U.S. Congress to pass The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which, among many other things, requires a dramatic increase in the mixing of biofuels with gasoline sold in the U.S., and a tripling of domestic production of biofuels by 2012. The European Union (EU) similarly set a target of getting 10% of Europe's road fuels from plants. For both the EU and the U.S., biofuels offer a way of reducing dependence on foreign oil, reducing air pollution, and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (which contributes to global climate change).
A number of things have turned up to dampen some of the initial enthusiasm for biofuels as panacea. Recent studies by leading academics and scientific organizations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have found that increasing production of biofuels may actually contribute more to the release of carbon dioxide and lead to worsening environmental damage. Specifically, if one takes into account the full energy-intensive process of modern agriculture, refining of the fuel, and transport, then biofuels may be no better, and in some cases, even worse, than conventional fuels. At the same time, incentives to grow more crops for biofuel production mean that more land must be brought into production. Bringing new land into farm production often means habitat loss, and habitat loss is second only to climate change as a leading environmental concern (see "Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat," NYT Feb 8, 2008).
What's particularly interesting to me, however, is the way increased production of biofuels ramifies throughout the world. The push to produce biofuels has greatly increased the value of the crops used to produce biofuels, many of which are also food crops. This may be good for farmers, both here and abroad, because it means more income for a commodity in higher demand. However, the farmer's gain may be the consumer's loss. Higher food prices are particularly hard on poor people who must inevitably spend a greater proportion of their income on food than the more privileged. This is what is known as a 'regressive' economic impact. Increased food prices are a serious reality (see "A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill," NYT Mar 9, 2008; also see "Surging costs of groceries hit home," Boston Globe Mar 9, 2008).
The relationship between biofuel production and food is particularly striking in less developed countries. The soaring price of palm oil has hit the poor in places like India, Malaysia, and Indonesia particularly hard. Palm oil is a significant source of calories and nutrients for the less wealthy in tropical parts of the world, and it is one of the most costly. Palm oil is also one of the most sought after sources of biofuel and the most productive. An acre of palms produces 8 times as much oil as an acre of soy. Palm oil prices have increased by 70% over the last year. The increased price and the resulting diversion of palm oil from food to fuel has meant higher prices and less availability. The economic incentive of palm oil production has also encouraged growers to bring more land into production, which has meant an accelerated rate of deforestation in tropical parts of the world (see "A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories," NYT Jan 19, 2008). Loss of tropical forest threatens wildlife, such as Orangutans in Borneo (watch "Palm oil demand threatening wildlife," BBC Mar 2006).
Environmental changes in tropical parts of the world are not just a threat to the non-human environment; they also threaten the livelihoods of people dependent on natural resources. Human rights and environmental advocacy groups issued reports showing that indigenous groups in Indonesia are being negatively impacted by the expansion of palm oil farms, both through loss of forest and expropriation of land (see "Biofuel demand leading to human rights abuses, report claims," The Guardian Feb 11, 2008). The EU has taken both environmental and human rights issues surrounding biofuel production quite seriously. It is seeking to encourage the use of "sustainable" biofuel production (see "EU promises sustainable plant fuel," BBC News Jan 14, 2008).
To be fair, the negative news about biofuel does not necessarily mean that it is a lost cause. In fact, there is considerable room for improvement through increased technological efficiencies as well as decisions about which plant products to use (e.g., non-food plants). Clearly, however, biofuels are not a panacea, because there is no such thing as a panacea. On a more positive note, however, the negative attention to biofuels has highlighted global interdependencies, which involve not just markets, and environmental conditions, but also social conditions and issues of justice. These are the things with which a more globalized, and globally aware, world must contend.
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