Biofuels And Security: Shedding My Western-Centric Worldview (Opinion)
Editor’s Note: I was in Houston, TX, last week, celebrating the International Year of the Planet at the first ever joint meeting between the American societies of Soil Science, Geology, Crop Science and Agronomy. With a significant focus on biofuels, this conference was rife with interesting materials.
In what could be my biggest personal revelation since diving into the world of alternative energy, it dawned on me last week that the “western” biofuel players are certainly the loudest kids on the block, but not really the most important.
I spent a large part of my time at the conference just trying to sort out which of the dozens of excellent forums on biofuels, energy, and environmental quality I should attend. The rest of my time was taken up with trying to keep my head together enough to make sense of it all so I could convey it in a way that’s meaningful to you, my readers.
But, while running around like a kid in a candy store, I became aware that my understanding of biofuels was decidedly myopic. Up until last week, I was squarely focused on U.S., E.U., and, to a smaller extent, Brazilian policies — quite naturally and unapologetically, I might add. After all, I am a U.S. citizen and I have a profound connection to my country and it’s cultural peers.
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In the western world we focus on issues of energy independence, price stability, and national security when talking about biofuel policy. Those are really the main drivers of the change we’re witnessing now. As much as I wish it were the opposite, issues such as greenhouse gas reduction and making agriculture truly valuable again are just along for the ride — kind of an icing on the cake.
But in the rest of the world (I’m just gonna guess roughly 90% of the world population) biofuels are driving changes that are much more profound than energy independence. They’re causing a reinvigoration of the agricultural sector. They’re empowering impoverished nations to find cheap and plentiful sources of energy that they can produce themselves.
Whereas before, impoverished nations were told to attract western tourists to provide income, they’re now getting the idea that biofuels can provide a much larger income than tourism ever did and at the same time stabilize the political landscape.
You know what’s funny? A stable political climate will probably do more to increase tourism than building the tourism infrastructure itself ever did.
In the end, the world-changing outcome of the biofuel revolution will not be that the U.S. has a steady source of it’s own fuel (although that’s huge in-and-of-itself), but that previously impoverished countries worldwide can provide their own fuel and pump money into their agricultural sector at the same time.
As a western citizen, this is a very comforting thought, because the more stability and wealth the impoverished governments of this world have, the less the western world has to worry about security threats.
Other Posts From the Joint Meeting in Houston:
- How Much Oil is Actually Left On This Planet? Should We Care?
- Biofuels are Here To Stay: What To Do About Food Supply?
- Pro-Poor Biofuel Crops: Sweet Sorghum and Cassava
Image Credit: Picture of farmer and sweet sorghum crop from a talk by Dr. Mark Winslow
Congratulations, Nick
You have finally realized the true potential of biofuels. It is not that the United States can become energy independent using corn based ethanol or soybean based biodiesel. It is that we will import ethanol and biodiesel from places that right now are some of the poorest on earth but as we start shifting our energy purchases there, that will change.
Right now the corn based ethanol is getting the infrastructure in place so that we will be able to use ethanol from any source. Even if we were to be so foolish that we never imported ethanol, the cars and trucks we will be producing that can run on ethanol mixes will enable countries that make ethanol from sugar cane to develop and improve their quality of life without the economic and environmental costs of importing petroleum products.
One of the really nice things about producing ethanol from sugar cane as opposed to drilling oil is that it requires a higher standard of governance. In places like Nigeria, they hire a relatively few foreigners to drill and pump the oil and then the people in government and their relatives keep all the revenue. With sugar cane you have to have decent roads to deliver the sugar cane to the plants during harvest time, the government can’t just steal the farmer’s land or profits or he won’t bother working and the government has to keep a lid on banditry and corruption at least to the level that land can be farmed and the cane can be made into fuel.
And there is the nice byproduct that the bagasse is burned to produce electricity.
Environmentally cleaner and it improves the standard of living for some of the poorest people on earth. What is not to like about this?
What’s not to like about this? Hmmm, let’s see.
1) Massive requirement for fresh water in regions of the world that are increasingly water-stressed
2) Massive deforestation as a result of increased demand for cropland, including destruction of the tropical rainforest, some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, at a rate of 1,200 acres of forest every 20 minutes.
3) Massive increase in C02 emissions as a result of #2, above. Current deforestation accounts for 20% of ALL C02 emissions. You want a global climate disruption tipping point? You want runaway global weirding? I don’t.
Biofuels can be part of the energy-climate-crises solution. They are not THE solution. Where they make sense (in existing cropland, that is not being used for food (eg Brazil) they should continue to be used. Where they don’t make sense (e.g. Iowa) they should never be tried.
It would be a terrible tragedy if we escaped the clutches of Big Oil only to be ensnared in the grasp of Big Ag. Please stop and consider your articles more thoroughly before posting them. This is a much more complicated problem than you recognize.