environment magazine

Ban Bio Fuels

By Jason Drew, Author of The Protein Crunch – Civilization on the brink. www.theproteincrunch.com

Bio fuels are a man made eco-disaster waiting to happen and should be banned. Bio-fuels are like an addictive drug that eases the symptoms not the causes of the problem and has disastrous side effects that worsen the addiction. Let me explain.

The real issue is the addiction to the combustion engine and cheap fuel – it is yesterdays technology – a product of the industrial revolution and as out of date as slavery.

If the true cost, including the environmental damage of combustion engines and their fuel, was included in the retail fuel price, America and the world would suffer a material price shock. 

As the old Industrial Revolution era is replaced with the era of the Sustainability Revolution – personal transport will be based on an electric motor powered by renewable sources. Biofuels were originally touted as an ecologically, sound means of combating climate change. The substitution of these crops for food was a major factor in the 2007-2008 rise in commodity and food prices as land was diverted away from food production to subsidised bio-fuel crop production. As a result – food price riots that hit over 30 countries. In the last six months food prices have risen sharply again – causing turmoil in the middle east – further fuelling oil price rises - and making bio-fuels more attractive. The addiction to fuel , with bio-fuel as the false hope will lead to more oil price rises as the food shortages they create cause unrest in the very regions that produce the oil. This is the madness and cruelty of any addiction.

In the United States an understandable political imperative is to reduce dependence on foreign oil supply. In 2008 some 18% of grain production was devoted to biofuels, over the 2007 and 2008 seasons. This could otherwise have fed 250 million people with their average grain requirements. In 2009 more than a quarter of the grain production was used in bio-fuels. Without this diversion of land to  bio-fuel production – food prices would have been lower and the world a safer place for all of us.

The principal bio-fuels are ethanol from sugar cane and agridiesel from palm oil. Current ethanol production in Brazil takes up six million hectares of land, but the target is 30 million hectares producing 100 trillion litres of ethanol per year. Malaysia and Indonesia are the primary producers palm oil, where six million hectares is already under cultivation in Indonesia and a further 18 million hectares of forest have been cleared for expansion, with yet a further 20 million hectares under threat. All this adds to the destructive effect on a country that has already lost 72% of its ancient forests.

London based investment firms and hedge funds have been investing heavily in land in Africa to produce bio-fuel. One of these firms Crest Global Green Energy has acquired some 900,000 hectares of farmland in central Africa to grow bio-fuel crops. In the UK less than one third of bio-fuel used comes from sources that meet the voluntary sustainability guidelines designed to protect water supplies, soil quality and forests in the source country.

None of us expect to be driving polluting combustion engine cars in the future so lets agree that the age of the polluting combustion engine is over – lets get on and ban bio-fuels by 2030 and combustion engines for personal transport by the same time.

Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame and a notorious petrol head said of the US made Tesla electric car – it was ‘electrifying and biblically quick’.  Electric cars are our future and technology is advancing rapidly.  Mandating zero emission vehicles will create a massive boom and investment in the sustainability revolution that the planet needs to survive. Good planets are hard to come by, lets not ruin ours.

Let’s get busy repairing the future.

Jason is an international businessman and serial entrepreneur who, having retired early after two heart attacks became a passionate environmentalist and visionary. He has held leadership roles in a number of international businesses from General Electric to BUPA and Egg before leading the start-up of Africa’s leading outsourced services provider with over 3,000 staff. He studied at the European Business School in London and has lived and worked in Europe the Middle East and Africa.

His latest venture www.agriprotein.com  in collaboration with South Africa's University of Stellenbosch and a team of international scientists has developed a renewable and natural source of protein. Using fly larvae to recycle existing waste nutrients, the company has developed and tested a natural animal feed. Instead of polluting the environment with abattoir waste, the larvae are turned into high quality protein that can replace fishmeal in industrial farming and save the seas.