The following article highlights the problems we face in trying to become less dependent on Middle East oil and at the same time fight climate change. It adds to my conviction that we need radical action by changing the tax system to speed innovation in energy saving technologies and a new crop harvesting system so that we can use the millions of tons of crop residues in a more efficient way.
Nick Louth inThe Daily Reckoning wrote:
“Let’s get back to first principles. The carbon in the atmosphere, which causes climate change, isn’t made or destroyed but liberated or captured by physical processes. It is absorbed by plants during their growth and released when they die and rot. During their lifetime it is stored within them. We humans, like all animals, take in carbon with our food and exhale it as we breathe.
The carbon in our cells grows as we do and is released when we die. Carbon in fossil fuel is also stored, but for millennia rather than years, from the ancient algae and bacteria from which it is made. When we use our cars we liberate this ancient carbon, and do so in a microscopic fraction of the hundreds of millions of years that it took to accumulate.
“Now the economic underpinning behind biofuels can be expressed like a household budget. The idea is to avoid drawing on our inherited carbon savings (from fossil fuel reserves ) but use our carbon ‘income’ from growing crops to fund our carbon ‘spending’, e.g. motoring, aviation and industry. Clearly that only works when there is a new source of income, i.e. new crops grown, to fund the new
carbon expenditure incurred since the industrial revolution. If you merely divert existing crops into
biofuels, you do not add anything to the carbon income side of the account. We have merely been raiding the kitchen kitty.
“Leaving the world short of grain is merely causing food stocks (a different form of carbon store) to be run down and prices to rise. The US Department of Agriculture says that world grain stocks have already dropped 5% this year.
“The amount of U.S. corn being turned into bio-ethanol for vehicles has tripled in five years to 50m tonnes in 2006. Corn prices earlier this year reached ten year highs, and at $4 a bushel are 70% above year-ago levels. Wheat prices have now followed suit, reaching an 11-year high in recent days, fanned by bad weather. Because agricultural land can be switched from one crop to another, the demand for corn bio-ethanol has fed inflation right the way through the grains complex.
Soaring animal feed prices are already feeding through to higher prices for meat and milk. The same is beginning to happen in Europe, where edible oils such as rape seed for bio-diesel are the crop of choice. Brewer Heineken has already warned that acreage switched away from barley to
oils is causing prices to rise.
“But surely, for all the expense, we are lowering our reliance on Middle Eastern oils? Not really, because there isn’t enough land to allow us to do so. The OECD has calculated that it would take 70% of Europe’s farmland to supply enough biofuels to save 10% of the oil currently used in transport. The 146.7m tonnes of oil equivalent the IEA expects to be drawn from biofuels by 2030 (on the big subsidy assumption) is just 3.8% of annual global oil consumption.”
Articles like that seem to suggest that the problems are insoluble and we should just admit defeat and let our children face the consequences when, in fact, radical action now is needed.
