The cost of BioFuels - emissions
A good writeup at
The Daily Bayonet:
Biofuel Emissions Up, Gore Credibility Down
Vice President Al Gore famously saved the ethanol industry with a tiebreaker vote in 1994. He boasted about that vote and how it saved the USA�s farms and the planet in a speech five years later:�I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress � at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it. The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be.�
Unfortunately for Al, ethanol and biofuels in general turned out to be a disaster on many levels.
The practice of diverting food crops to fuel production caused grain prices to spike at the same time food supplies to the world�s poor dropped. Poor people that could afford food could afford less of it, even the World Food Program struggled to find enough money to feed the hungry. All this human suffering happened because of a misguided effort to spare the planet a little bit of plant food, or CO2, as greens prefer to call it.
Inconveniently, it is now revealed that biofuels actually increase emissions:�Our analysis, which we think is the most comprehensive to date, shows that direct and indirect land-use changes associated with an aggressive global biofuels program have the potential to release large quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.�
and�Large greenhouse gas emissions from these indirect land-use changes are unintended consequences of a global biofuels program; consequences that add to the climate-change problem rather than helping to solve it�
Once more, the law of unintended consequences strikes the green movement.
How many more times do they have to be wrong before they are discredited for good?
The curse of the short-sighted ninnies. I know that they mean well on some level but they simply do not think through their actions...
Posted by DaveH at November 1, 2009 10:57 AM