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Biofuel targets aren't meaningful enough



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Published Date: 11 July 2008
Increase vehicles' fuel efficiency and encourage public transport use, says Duncan McLaren.
THIS week the UK transport and environment secretaries announced that biofuels may not be the environmental solution they've been previously sold as. Although Friends of the Earth Scotland tentatively welcomed this, we believe that biofuels targets s
hould be replaced with more meaningful targets, linked to reducing climate changing emissions.

EU Ministers are reconsidering the target to have ten per cent of fuel for cars and lorries coming from biofuels by 2020 and reinterpreting this to mean that ten per cent of transport needs should be met by renewable energy, which could include energy for trams and trains.

We have been concerned at the impact of biofuel production on the environment and people, and are awaiting confirmation of claims made last week that an internal World Bank study reports that diverting land from food to biofuel production has forced global food prices up 75 per cent.

Although this document is not yet in the public domain, the UK Government's recent Gallagher Review states that, "we cannot continue producing biofuels which are ultimately more environmentally and socially damaging than the fossil fuels they seek to replace".

We need to stop this rush towards fuels produced from food crops, many of which have been shown to be socially and environmentally damaging.

If we are to get energy from plants and trees, we need to ensure there is a positive social and environmental impact.

We can't use tinkering with biofuels to cover up and delay the real changes we need – increasing the fuel efficiency of vehicles and getting people on to public transport.

Closer to home, financial institutions such as the Royal Bank of Scotland need to consider how best to manage the transition that they claim they are making from financing oil and gas to financing renewable energy.

In the light of these new reports and announcements, they might want to reconsider how sustainable these investments truly are.

• Duncan McLaren is chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland





The full article contains 344 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
Page 1 of 1

  • Last Updated: 11 July 2008 8:38 AM
  • Source: Edinburgh Evening News
  • Location: Edinburgh
  • Related Topics: Environment
 
1

Unimpressed one,

11/07/2008 09:54:26
Typical greenie luddite attempting to distance hinself from a policy that his group actively promoted as a solution to 'tackling climate change'. The only reason he does so is because biofuel production looks like a technological solution, though deeply flawed, to a non problem. notice there's no words of contrition that millions are worse off now than ever before because the developed world is fixated with a theory that is pure rubbish in scientific terms.

The green groups, in common with all fundamentalist religions, suffer from adherance to blind faith regardless of the true facts or the consequences of their actions. They never have been right in the past on any predictions about environmental disasters and never will be in future. In the words of that great envirnomentalist Jeremy Clarkson when asked to defend his right to drive around in fast cars he said, "Environmentalists have given us nothing, engineers have given us everything." You can't get a much more profound startement than that.
2

The Former Mr. Angry,

Perth 11/07/2008 11:58:47
We need to stop automatically believing the utterances of FoE and Greenpeace among others like the World Bank. Now would it be possible that the actions of speculators and hedge-fund betters have caused a large proportion of this "problem" and the World Bank being part of the financial system would not want this to feature too prominently as they too soak up the profits.

The housing market having been plundered unashamedly by banks governments and investors is now switched to oil and food commodities. Greens are just hapless dupes who have got a one-shot solution for everything and make things markedly worse since reducing "emissions" also reduces economic activity inevitably. The engineers quote above is spot on. I'm not saying that renewable energy is bad, far from it in the right context. But neither is CO2 production where we take sensible precautions to minimise that and other noxious emissions - again from a common-sense and applicable perspective. There's nothing wrong with getting better fuel consumption but the public transport system has to shift up its game before people will move over to it. In rural areas it's just impractical.

Why drop financing oil and gas when these fuels cannot be supplanted yet by "renewables"? Again a sense of balance has to be achieved. On the same line you could argue why not nuclear? Without that option it is likely the lights will go out or will happen intermittently. But most of the Green utterances emanate from beliefs about things rather than hard engineering. Fine words butter no parsnips.

This government must thank its lucky stars for green taxes and being "advised" by Greens as it blunders around failing miserably to connect with real people in the real world and incurs massive deficits through 2 wars, propping up failed banks and other failures too numerous to mention. If you scratch the surface though you just uncover the word TAX. It real green intentions are non-existent.
3

Agent 99,

11/07/2008 12:54:03
[1] Good post, well the start of it anyway. While what Clarkson said might be true, why did you have to spoil a 10/10 post by mentioning him?
4

Agent 99,

11/07/2008 12:58:15
[2] "We need to stop automatically believing the utterances of FoE and Greenpeace..."

Who's this "we"? I never believed these self important holier than thou slime. The problem lies, does it not, with the blind regurgitation of their ideas by the press; so oft repeated that it becomes a de facto truth?

What we need is muzzling of so called environmental correspondents.
5

The Former Mr. Angry,

Perth 11/07/2008 16:35:15
#4

OK a bit of a generalisation, but the presumption is that the majority of readers and watchers are to be taken in by these self-appointed environmental muppets. Repetition as you say is the means by which they hope the dictum "what I tell you 3 times is true" will be accepted.

Unquestioned emissions by Greenies need to be cut down as they're a lot more dangerous than the preposterous assumptions given by them.
6

Ian down under,

Kawerau 11/07/2008 22:47:02
One thing about Clarkson that you can never say about a fundamentalist greenie..............he is funny.
There is documented evidence that the major cuase of global warming is environmentalists, greenies and their ilk plus associated UN numpties flying around the world to the neverending environment conferences. Then there's all the hot air they spout and the smoke they produce from their obsession with wacky baccy.
If you don't believe me, sorry, it is true I read it somewhere I think it was a few lines up the page.
7

henrymanchester,

UK 13/07/2008 18:08:14
If we don't stop listening to these "Environmental activists" the whole world will starve.

Enough is enough.

 

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