Food Worries Scare Europe From Biodiesels

PARIS -- European legislators said Thursday that government goals for using biofuels should be pared back, prompting the fledgling industry to fire back with a campaign warning that alternatives may be no cleaner.

European governments pledged last year to increase the use of biofuels to 10 percent of all transport fuel by 2020, amid expectations that energy derived from crops would provide a low-carbon alternative.

On Thursday, the European Parliament's influential Industry Committee endorsed the general 10 percent target -- but added a number of modifications meant to move away from traditional biofuels made from grains or other crops toward other, renewable energy sources.

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Comments

[hoopesaz]

As it should!

[arunachala]

im glad this whole bio-diesel shtick never got off the ground it just doesn't really help other than making the situation worse

[research]

Big Bio-diesel = starvation.

Only "waste" should be used for fuel making.

[patianneb]

Why does Europe always "get it" so much faster than we do?
I know unbridled greed is part of it...
That greed thing is a two way street though: The consumer (a dirty word when carried to the extremes we do) wants Lots Cheap....
The stockholders want profit.
So damn the consequences.

[marleysghost]

This is as irrational as you can get. First generate fears that rising oil prices will bankrupt drivers and then claim an international food crises will be created if we move over to biofuels. We throw away more food daily in Western industrialized nations than the rest of the world can eat. Use food waste and other bio waste to create natural gas. The energy crisis is a matter of the intelligent use of our resources and creating new ways to deliver efficient energy to power what we need.

[KillTheMessenger]

This is not about wasted food. This is about wasting large agricultural areas in Europe which can be used to grow food for the generation of irrelevant amounts of biofuels.

"We throw away more food daily in Western industrialized nations than the rest of the world can eat."

Hardly. The main waste is due to our mostly meat based diet.

That biofuels are a loser can be easily seen by the following back of the envelope calculation:

A human being needs approx. 2500kCal/day in chemical energy. That's equivalent to 10.5MJ/day. In terms of power we are looking at (10.5MJ/day)/(86400s/day)=121W, not much more than a single light bulb.

In comparison a US citizen consumes roughly 10kW of continuous power a day, i.e. 100 times as much as we need in terms of food. A European will consume about half as much, but still 50 times the amount of food energy. So even if we take all the losses into account and we convert all of our agricultural areas to biofuel, we still can't satisfy more than probably 10% of our current energy demand.

A 10% solution that comes at an impossibly high price is not a solution.

[pmag88]

"A human being needs approx. 2500kCal/day in chemical energy"

I'm over 50, weight about 235, work out maybe once a week.

I eat about 1800 calories a day and can do about 65 pushups.

[MGhamma]

As they should.

[noneIn2008]

About time. The world has been warned for over 5 years about the damages to the food supply and the damages to the environment caused by biofuels. There were reports in 2003 showing food shortages and increased costs to the poor, especially in developing nations. Biofuels are madness.

[tempting]

SACRAMENTO -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president, has urged Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto a fee on cargo containers going through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, setting off a wave of criticism from California environmentalists.

Palin's letter to Schwarzenegger is dated Aug. 28 -- one day before presidential candidate and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced that he had picked her as his running mate. The letter argues that both consumers and the economy in California and Alaska would suffer as a result of the fee.

PASS THIS ON!!!!!!!!!!