The EU-sponsored biofuels bonanza
Where were you in December 15 2007? Where were you in August 7 1991, March 21 2004 or January 3 1997?
Were you in Brazil, chopping down insect-ridden rainforest, or were you using your mechanical digger to slice off the dank, soggy top of an empty and desolate Estonian peat bog?
Were you clearing a dry and dusty Paraguayan savannah of the most stubborn of scrub or were you celebrating the decision to scrap set-aside and heading down to your local farm to plough it all up?
If you were doing any of those things before January 1, 2008, you could be in for a biofuels bonanza because biofuels produced from habitats destroyed before that date could soon be motoring to a fuel station near you.
They will be richly embossed in all shades of green, their environmental credentials trumpeted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Put them in your tank and you can drive all the miles you like and be pleased as pie to be helping the world cut carbon emissions, slow global warming and save the planet all in one.
This is the blissful picture being painted by bureaucrats in Brussels extending one arm of the EU’s plan to cut the continent’s greenhouse gases.
The trouble is their efforts are looking increasingly one-legged because biofuels being sold by law in the UK and elsewhere could be raising not lowering the emissions responsible for climate change.
Rainforest, peat bogs, savannah and grasslands all store carbon and chopping them down or digging them up releases that carbon into the air.
Chemicals sprayed on the energy crops that replace them, and the transport of those crops to processing plants and beyond, increase the emissions for which biofuels are to blame.
That means petrol and diesel could be less polluting than biofuels being sold on forecourts today. At it means that when 10 per cent of Europe’s transport fuel comes from biofuel – the target planned by the EU – that problem is going to get far, far worse.
But wait! The EU’s 61-page renewable energy directive includes includes numerous safeguards to guarantee our biofuels are truly green. The problem is they do no such thing. They are weak, limited and only effective from this year. Incredible, given that deforestation for palm oil – used for energy as well as food and cosmetics - started in Malaysia, the world’s biggest producer, more than 90 years ago.
As things stand, those selling biofuels in Europe will have to cut emissions by only 35 per cent. That figure is too low; 60 per cent should be the reduction manufacturers must prove.
Secondly, too few places will be protected. The Eifel region of western Germany is one area under siege; grasslands designated under a long-standing EU law have already been ploughed up for biofuels, and while forests and wetlands will have some protection, the areas in between will not.
That means the Cerrado scrubland straddling the Brazil/Paraguay border and hosting innumerable wildlife of all shapes and sizes, is left out. Already it is being taken for energy crops.
Finally and most damning, the EU has shifted the cut-off date for acceptable biofuel production from 1990 – the date agreed by Kyoto treaty negotiators to protect rainforests – to January 1, 2008.
So, if you spent last new year’s eve digging, draining, slashing or burning your conscience can be clear. And if you want to continue pocketing some of the EU-sponsored biofuels bonanza, just be a little more selective over the sites you choose to destroy.