Biofuels Face Teenage Sustainability Angst
Hands up anyone who’s read JD Salinger’s classic “The Catcher In The Rye”. Lawks, but there’s a lot of you.
OK: hands up anyone who hasn’t read it. Ah … that’s a much more manageable number.
The book is a modern classic. It starts with the expulsion of an angst ridden boy from a private school for lack of academic application, and ends with his vow to work harder at his next school.
In between there’s a tale of anxiety, angst and alienation, all of which is finally overcome by the protagonist’s realisation that he is not an island but part of an interdependent network of people who rely upon one another to make their dreams come true.
Biofuels are going through a similar process of adolescent maturity. Once lauded as the answer to oil they fell from grace spectacularly after the World Bank estimated that biofuels have increased food prices by up to 75%.
However redemption may be in sight. The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, based in the Energy Centre of the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, has launched version zero of a biofuel sustainability standard and is calling for interested stakeholders to participate.
They will find that environmental concerns cannot be easily brushed aside. Aside from the possible effect upon food prices, other concerns include the perennial issues of workers’ rights and the degradation of over-farmed land.
In addition, biofuels are now considered an anathema by the public, making any attempt to rehabilitate them doubly difficult.
What do you think? Can biofuels be rescued from their estrangement and if so what should a common standard entail? Or are biofuels beyond redemption; we should forget them and concentrate upon other alternatives to our oil-fueled lifestyles?
I would love to hear your opinions. Please add a comment below or start a debate on the Green Options Discussion Forum.
Related posts on biofuels:
American Ingenuity Leads to Biodiesel Breakthrough
Biodiesel Alliance Requests Your Input on the Future of Biofuel Sustainability
Biofuels Will Not Solve Global Warming: IPCC’s Report Sparks Protest
Original Source: Roundtable Reviews International Biofuel Standard
Photo Credit: “Biofuels” by jurvetson on flickr
There are two kinds of biofuels: the discredited that use crop land (and sometimes food crops), and the still viable (IMHO) that take material that would otherwise go into the waste stream (e.g., biodiesel from fast-food waste oil). While of course, we still have to address pollution issues, those are the ones that make sense to me–NOT taking land away from farm production.
I’m undecided on switchgrass. I’ve heard but not verified that it grows on marginal land where corn, etc. would not be workable.
Shel Horowitz, award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and founder of the Business Ethics Pledge (which includes an environmental component): http://www.business-ethics-pledge.org
Hi Shel, Thank you very much for dropping by and commenting: very much appreciated!
Part of the debate, I think, has to have sustainability at the sharp end. This means that human activity has to have a little waste as possible in it, so looking at things like fast food oil waste first makes very good sense.
I know there are far greater brains at work on this than mine, but I remain sceptical about anything which is grown and then harvested. I have yet to see any cradle-to-cradle analyses of these solutions and would like to hear comments from anyone who has.
Chris.
Bio Fuels is a broad category that encompasses more than just two kinds. Biodiesel has the advantage of being able to power current diesel engines without modification. Biodiesel made from oil squeezed from algae has the additional advantage of being produced without impacting current food crop production. This is probably the most sustainable of all the bio fuels.
Ethanol is the fuel with the most impact on food crop production and should be relegated to a short term fuel to help us get to the next generation of fuels. Another fuel that almost no one talks about is methanol. Methanol is not produced from food crops and is currently used to power certain types of race cars. The drawback to methanol is its toxicity.
To read more about my thoughts on bio fuels read the Energy forum at http://earthprotect.com