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213 comments on The Limits of Biofuels

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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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