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213 comments on The Limits of Biofuels

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jim burke on May 9, 2006 - 12:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Even a modest amount of biodiesel use should help raise prices for cooking oil, and pull increasing amounts of tropical oils from the tropics to the wealthy countries, to power our cars. Therefore, I would expect that the Bangladeshis and Africans would probably go (even more) hungry in the near future.

Does this bother anyone?

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odograph on May 9, 2006 - 1:26pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
sure, it bothers me.  i certainly hope that images of african and asian privation will drive a bit of conservation here.  if there is a hummer backlash now, when cost and (hard to visualize) global warming are the drivers, i sure think it would be stronger when the image becomes starving people.
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Mad Maxout on May 9, 2006 - 7:38pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yes and no. It'll depend on the complexion of the starving people, unfortunately. Do you think that closet Ku Klux Klan idiots down south are going to care about starving Africans? Worst case: David Duke. Do you think he'll care that Africans are starving so he can get a load of bio- jet fuel for his Lear Jet? Or the others who time-share that plane?

By far the most egregious wasters of energy are the corporate kingpins who exploit illegal aliens and fire them once injured on the job, especially in Texas. Are they going to care who starves - of ANY colour - so they can get a fill-up for their jet?

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odograph on May 9, 2006 - 8:58pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
we're back again to human nature, or each of our expectations of human nauture.

i notice that "doctors without borders" ...

"In 2004, MSF's worldwide income was $568 million. In the United States, nearly 380,000 private donors contributed more than $91 million to MSF-USA."

that wouldn't happen if the glass was truly empty.

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ET on May 9, 2006 - 11:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
A 'hummer backlash' today, with small-car drivers sneering at hummer owners, may someday become a 'mechanized transport backlash' with those of us walking (or lucky enough to own a mule) sneering at those gluttons with the plug-in hybrids. It's a matter of perspective here...
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odograph on May 10, 2006 - 7:25am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
shrug.  and the hybrid might be the car that stays in the garage while you walk for most trips.  It's a matter of perspective here...
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Leanan on May 9, 2006 - 2:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I don't think it will bother most Americans enough to stop them. We already take food from countries that would be better off keeping it for themselves.

A journalist friend of mine was working a big story a few years back - an expose about child slavery on cacao plantations in Africa.  Her office had been boycotting chocolate for months while they worked on the story in secret.  She thought it was going to be huge.  

Instead, it was barely noticed.  Americans didn't care if their chocolate was grown by children sold into slavery by their impoverished parents, or kidnapped off the streets by slavers.  I doubt they'll care if the fuel in their tanks takes food from the mouths of the hungry, either.  

The best hope for Africa, IMO, is for peak oil to unwind globalization.  Perhaps in the post-carbon age, it will end up being too expensive to import ethanol from Africa.  

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kvenlander on May 9, 2006 - 4:14pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I remember that story. Please thank your friend for a job well done. Unfortunately it is all too easy to close your mind on the implications of stories like that. The cognitive dissonance between "I'm a good person" / "I am funding slavery" is too painful.

I don't know if there is a solution except to keep plugging away. Is the story online somewhere?

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Leanan on May 9, 2006 - 6:19pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
There are now many web pages devoted to the topic.  There's even a Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_and_slavery

But the average American doesn't even know...or care.  There seems to be more concern in Europe, where apparently some people are making an effort to by "free trade" chocolate...enough for it to be a marketing point.  

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fleam on May 10, 2006 - 1:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'm fairly well informed and have never heard of this issue. It's a total non-issue in the US and not likely to ever become an issue (unless the slave folks get nukes). I had a chocolate bar this morning and some nice tirimisu earlier this evening, and would probably have another chocolate bar now but I'm saving that one for tomorrow. They (the chocolate bars) say "made in Belgium" see no mention of starving children or of Africa. If I were a typical American and thought about it at all I'd have visions of nice well-fed Belgians with good medical plans tending to the cocoa trees growing in the Belgian cold and wind.

Everything in Starbucks doesn't have chocolate in it, but almost everything does. In fact, I'm not much of a chocolate eater (these 3 little chocolate bars I got at trader joe's are 3 of maybe 6 a year I eat), but overall Americans are chocoholics.

And this issue is utterly unknown in the US.

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smekhovo on May 10, 2006 - 3:59am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
If the perpetrators of these crimes were Muslims, we would be hearing a lot more about them.
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tappel on May 10, 2006 - 12:07pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The fair trade movement is actually pretty big in Europe, although fair trade chocolate is not as widely available as fair trade coffee and various kinds of fruit. I, as well as many of my friends, only buy bananas if they are fair trade.

The growth of the movement is one of the very few really encouraging developments in the recent years.

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fleam on May 9, 2006 - 5:17pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yes, all! Good posts! Thsi is my point. India is wise, and wise through experience, in banning human food oils to be used for biodiesel. They can well imagine the starving, boney, peasants toiling by hand so the local moghul can tour around in his biodiesel Mercedes, while the peasants' childrens' hair falls out due to lack of proteins and oils.

And no, this shit doesn't bother Americans at all. Biodiesel creeps me out more day by day. I mean, the idea of a biodiesel industry. We're already overstraining Mother Earth to make food, now we're supposed to start stripping, essentially, the surface of Mother Earth to come up with gas for our cars? All those calories of fuel we were getting from oil stored up over millions of years, millions of years ago, becomes uneconomic so we're supposed to strip the biomass from the surface to make up for it? I find it scary as hell that there are people working on this.

I saw somewhere, a calculation of how many thousands of years of sun and biomass we use a year in the form of oil. It's like a savings account - you can put in $5 a a day and you save and save and save, and then after 50 years or something you decide to start binging at $50 a day. This is what modern "civilization" is doing with the Earth's oil savings account.

And no, Americans don't care about children dying in slave labor camps so Starbucks will have chocolate bars for sale, or likewise children dying in labor camps so "coltan" (columbium-tantalum ore) can be dug up, by hand, to make the tantalum capacitors in our electronic products, or any of this stuff.  I'm typing away on a computer just full of tantalum caps and eating a chocolate bar while I'm doing it. I'm a good Amurrikan I don't care. So, this is why it all needs to come crashing down. The crashier the better as far as mother earth, living things, and little children (better to not be born or die quickly than die slowly in a labor camp) everywhere.

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Magnus Redin on May 9, 2006 - 5:54pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Odd, I have the same kind of reasoning in reverse. I partly see ethanol and biodiesel as a way of slowing down the outcompeting of Swedish farming and maintaining a higher local foodstuff production then the local food needs. We then get the emergency option of eating the local car fuel.
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Mad Maxout on May 9, 2006 - 7:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Don't forget there is one last point against biofuel. When an animal eats a plant, the animal emissions come out as all 3 phases of matter, solid (feces), liquid (urine), and gas (CO2). A goose fertilises as it makes CO2 during flight. A plane burning biofuel only creates CO2. (not including the insignificant "blue ice" droppings)

The animal makes fertiliser while making the CO2, and the plants recycle it all with solar power. By using too much biofuel, you screw up that balance, depleting topsoil. If you use algae > biofuel, you screw up the seas the same way.

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Johnny Buffalkill on May 9, 2006 - 11:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
All those calories of fuel we were getting from oil stored up over millions of years, millions of years ago, becomes uneconomic so we're supposed to strip the biomass from the surface to make up for it?

Good point.  A gallon of gasoline has what, 30,000 calories?  Are we really going to grow fifteen times everyone's nutritional needs in biofuels just for the morning commute?

The prospect of a low energy future isn't what scares me.  The fact is we could live quite comfortably on far less energy than we do.  What scares me is how a low energy future will be managed.  Will we live in low energy eco-villages, or will "they" starve so we can drive (or maybe the other way around)?

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jim burke on May 9, 2006 - 2:23pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
THanks for the feedback.

In answer to my own question, I'd like to share a story from the latest Earth Day.

A friend of mine that was watching the biofuels booth wandereed off, and a sudden gust of wind was blowing the booth down and scattering the literature. I staked it back up and collected the pamphlets, when a nice looking, middle class couple came up to ask me about biofuels.

Since I was the only one around, I gave them my own schtick, that you can buy a "cracker," or biofuels refinery, for $4 - 7K through REal Goods, and get all the used cooking oil you wanted from Burger King. But once other people started to get into the act, Burger King would start to charge for their waste oil.

Then I said that in the longer run, biofuel markets would buy up the cooking oils from the third world, and they'd really start to starve.

After a pause, ne of them looked at the other and said "I'm glad we hung onto that diesel Volkswagen."

The other smiled and nodded, and they walked off, looking quite contented -- even happy.

It was like being in a Dilbert cartoon. Perhaps this is a parable for our age.

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fleam on May 9, 2006 - 5:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Sad.

Yes, like what someone wrote here about a week ago, making a joke based on Soylent Green, "You mean this fuel's made of people? Like brown people? Whay-hey! Fill 'er up, Jack!"

This kind of behavior started with the Agricultural Revolution, people are ugly but they got REALLY ugly when farming was invented. That's when you got feast/famine cycles, desertification, and killing off every man woman and child of the other tribe because their noses are a slightly different shape (hutu-tutsi) but really because there's not enough food to go around.

And yes, the solution for Africa and for everywhere, is to localize. The sooner we hit real depletion and hopefully things really do collapse, the better. Cheap oil is what feeds the IMF, the UN, oil-for-food programs, all the various tentacles of beast. The modern international trade system makes it possible for people to exploit others who are thousands of miles away, and they're out of sight, out of mind.

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Magnus Redin on May 9, 2006 - 5:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Around here in europe "natural" famines went away with railways and steam powered ships. Long range trade is a blessing.
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NC on May 9, 2006 - 4:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It is not as simple as us vs them.

Remember that a lot more food lipid is already produced outside Africa and Asia.  Increasing supply there for food, but increasing supply even more in EU and US for food and fuel can improve food intake everywhere.  It's just that most of the biodiesel will be in the wealthy countries.  The way most of the oil and gasoline is in wealthy countries today.

We haven't been able to distribute food equally around the globe when we have had cheap oil for 100 years.  Why expect this to change when oil is scarce?  This is not a technical problem.  It is a political one, without technical solution.

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light299 on May 9, 2006 - 5:27pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It bothers me, but alot of things bother me. In fact, I'll tell you what bothers me more.

Awhile back I was in a store, and I saw a young man and his wife. She was beautiful, and he was about 25, with huge sholders, arms as thick as my legs, and generally someone who looked like they could take on the world. They were buying a T-shirt with a picture of Bush and a gas pump on it that had the quote "Taking it up the gass". They seemed like nice people, and but when they made a joke about the shirt there were undertones of real suffering. As they walked away from the counter I noticed the man had one leg.

Now as I see my friends go off to war, as I see the suffering in Darfur I think, "all for oil". Yet every week I'm at the pump, filling up.

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fleam on May 9, 2006 - 5:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
This is one reason why The Powers The Be would love to fight this thing with mercenary forces, and already are to as great a degree as they can get away with. Protests agains the war will go way down in the US as long as Amurrikans aren't being hurt. If we can pay others to go out and do the real fighting and dying, and your brother or son or best friend's duty over there consists of sitting in an air-conditioned building looking in a radar screen or something safe, and no more Americans are coming home with one leg. the war won't be seen as such a bad thing.

The huge casualties among mostly innocent, women and children and the old, etc., and things like the leveling of Falluja don't bother Americans.

This is probably why the big permenant bases are being built and the HUGE embassy. Nice safe places for Americans to work, and from which to issue orders to the mercenaries.

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