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Seems Andris has made a value judgment in favor of net CO2 emissions. These emissions may seem to be a greater threat to him than running an energy inefficient vehicle.
I do agree that your options, primarily electric vehicles, in my opinion are far more favorable than a bio-fuel driven car -- for a number of reasons not the least of which is a phenomenal efficiency.
As a Yankee, I wonder if competitive electric vehicles are available to the European market.
Cheers and good luck with Andris!
No, he's made a judgment in favour of net EU emissions.
Extra EU demand for biofuels will lead to decreased emissions in the EU, but increased emissions in developing countries as they clear their forests to grow the stuff. Of course, he may respond that EU policy will try to protect those forests, but how well has that worked for world demand for timber? They just dodge or corrupt the system.
Already 17.5% of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation. Biofuels will only make it worse. Of course, they'll make it worse outside the EU, so he probably doesn't care.
As I describe here, even if the whole world ate minimum rations of grain, ate no grainfed meat or dairy, consumed no fruit, sugar or vegetables or vegetable oil, and if all this was done with a Magical Energy Fairy so that producing the biofuels cost us no biofuels at all, we still only get a single barrel of biofuel per person annually. This compares to current crude consumption of 4.7bbl each, 3.2bbl of which goes on transport.
Developed nations use about 7-15bbl, developing 2-7bbl, and impoverished countries 0-2bbl. So the single barrel of biofuel ain't gonna do much.
On the other hand, a single barrel of biofuel each for the world's population could be about 6bbl for everyone in the US, EU and Japan, and zilch for the rest. Which is probably what our erstwhile EU commissioner has in mind. Rather colonial of him.
Or more likely he's just never sat down to do the arithmetic to figure out how much biofuels could be produced by the world, and compared it to how much fuel we consume today.
I commented, let's see if it passes through.