More proof that the agrofuel craze poses considerable threat to the world’s peoples and their environment comes from secret European Union documents.
From Arthur Nelsen of EurActiv:
Greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels such as palm oil, soybean and rapeseed are higher than those for fossil fuels when the effects of Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) are counted, according to leaked EU data seen by EurActiv.
The default values assigned to the biofuels compare to those from Canada’s oil sands – also known as tar sands – according to the figures, which should be released along with long-awaited legislative proposals on biofuels in the spring.
A spokesperson for the European Commission said she could “not comment on leaked documents, such as impact assessments which have not been published.”
But industry and civil society sources described the data as credible and in line with other studies. One said it would sound a death knell for the biodiesel industry, if published.
“I think the science has proved clearly that because of the link to deforestation in places such as South East Asia, a lot of the biodiesels have significantly negative impacts on the climate,” Robbie Blake, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth, told EurActiv.
As regular readers know, we don’t use the term biofuel because it ignores the harsh reality that the so-called “feedstocks” used for the great majority of projects stem from crops farmed on land that might otherwise be used to feed the world’s hungry.
As we’ve repeatedly blogged, the corporate forces pushing crop-based fuels are key players in seizing communally held land in Africa and deforesting vast swatches of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
One key player, UC Berkeley’s Chris Somerville, has made a tidy pile in the corporate sector by tweaking soy genes, and he’s not the lead player at the BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute at Cal.
Somerville and other key players in the agfrofuel game have fought the use of the indirect land use measure in evaluating the crops’ impact, for reasons made clear by the EU documents.
Somerville also distorted the impacts of the Berkeley research, saying that Cal’s goal was to develop crops to be farmed on unused marginal farmland east of the Mississippi. But even before the deal was signed, his researchers had already set out for Africa and Asia, some of the green parts of the earth BP’s then chief scientist said were the company’s targets for the crops to be developed in Berkeley.
Oh, and those unused farmlands in the U.S.? They’re part of the national Conservation Reserve Program kept out of production to protect endangered farmlands from erosion.
