Biofuelgate

Het klimaat/duurzaamheidscomplex manipuleert er lustig op los om de burger allerlei dure energieopties aan te smeren, die de vermeende opwarming van de aarde (die maar niet wil komen) af te wenden. Inmiddels gaan noeste onderzoekers door met tegels lichten. En de ongerechtigheid die daarbij aan het licht komt, zal menig lezer van zijn/haar stoel doen vallen van verbazing. Het kán toch niet waar zijn? Helaas helaas.

Bishop Hill heeft daar weer een voortreffelijk blog over geschreven, gebaseerd op een onderzoek van de LSE ('London School of Economics') en 'Friends of the Earth'. Bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble!

Bishop Hill:

Biofuels have been attracting a minor surge of media interest recently, after Friends of the Earth published a report claiming that they probably produce more greenhouse gases than they save. Maybe it was this that caused my attention to alight on one of Sharman's papers - the one entitled "Evidence based policy or policy-based evidence gathering? Biofuels, the EU and the 10% target"...

The paper examines the EU's mandatory 10% target for biofuel use and in particular the way in which scientific advice impinged upon the decision to introduce it. It's a murky tale, which Sharman has uncovered by means of interviewing key players in the policy machinery. In 2009, when the target was introduced, it was far from clear that biofuels were a feasible approach to greenhouse gas reduction. But the 10% target was introduced nevertheless. As one of the interviewees explained:

The idea is that normally you should not propose legislation until you have evidence to justify it. But there, you had the prime ministers and heads of state signing up to a target that no-one had done any impact assessment at all ... they got them to sign up to these targets, 20% renewables and 10% biofuels, and then only later in the year did they do the impact assessment. And basically they said they didn’t need to [properly] impact-assess the 10% because it had already been approved by the heads of state! ...

As Sharman and Holmes pithily comment:

The fact that the EC was endorsing a target without having seen a full impact assessment provides the first indication that motivations other than scientific evidence related to environmental sustainability and GHG emissions reductions played a part in the policy decision to establish the 10% target. ...

There was a huge fight with the European farm lobby. The commission...was desperate to find some candies they could give to the farm lobby. Particularly they were desperate to find a way out, to all the sugar beet producers that was clear there was no future for them once they have to compete on selling sugar. And then the brilliant idea was, oh we can use this sugar for ethanol and in general we can create this subsidised market for farmers and it can allow us basically to hide within the energy policy some of these subsidies that are becoming so unpopular in the agriculture policy. That’s been the initial main driver.

Against this apparently slightly frenzied background, policymakers were confronted with conflicting scientific evidence on the viability of biofuels. Key in this debate was a paper by Searchinger et al (2008), which suggested that biofuels actually created more greenhouse gases than they saved, once indirect land-use changes were taken into account.

En zo gaat het verhaal door met saillante details hoe het EU-besluitvormingsproces werkt, waarbij deelbelangen allerlei geld weten binnen te halen ten koste van het algemeen belang. Eén niet met naam genoemde Eurocraat schijnt hierbij een beslissende rol te hebben gespeeld.

Lees verder hier.

De teneur van dit verhaal wordt bevestigd uit andere bronnen. De 'Scientific Alliance' schrijft daar het volgende over:

If biofuels are not the answer, then what is? Going back a few years, biofuels seemed to offer at least a partial solution to the dilemma which policymakers were faced with: having committed themselves to large-scale reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, how could the targets be achieved? The sensible solution seemed to be – and in principle is – to make savings across all sectors of energy generation and use, including transport. Using agricultural crops as raw material therefore had a number of attractions, as long as it did not have too much impact on food security or prices. Governments – notably the US and EU member states – were so convinced of this that they began to set escalating targets for the use of biofuels. However, what were originally a relatively few voices raised in dissent has more recently become a veritable chorus. Not only have concerns been raised by people who see nothing wrong in using as much oil as can be afforded, but the most hard-hitting attacks are being made by environmentalist groups; the very constituency who might have been expected to approve of fossil fuel replacements.

Most recently, Friends of the Earth Europe (partly funded, we should not forget, by the European Commission using taxpayers’ money) and ActionAid have produced a short media briefing: The bad business of biofuels. And the headline of their press release sums up their message as EU biofuel targets will cost €126billion without reducing emissions.

These figures come from two new reports published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the University of Cologne’s FiFo Institute for Public Economics (for the full references click on the link). En zo gaat het verhaal verder.

Zie hier.

Verder Simon Taylor op de website van de European Voice

The European Commission has rejected the advice of its scientific experts and backed away from imposing tough carbon-dioxide emissions standards on specific types of biofuel. Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for energy, and Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, are poised to propose instead a cruder environmental standard, that all biofuel sold in the European Union will have to produce carbon-dioxide savings of 50% compared with fossil fuel. The current standard, contained in the EU's renewable-energy law, is a saving of at least 35%.

Environmentalists have been urging the Commission to introduce more sophisticated measurements of the greenhouse-gas savings from biofuel. They argue that the EU has to take into account the effects of indirect land-use change (ILUC) – such as biofuel crops displacing food crops onto previously uncultivated land that might, for instance, host environmentally valuable woodland. Different types of biofuel have different ILUC effects, which means that their environmental performance varies, sometimes widely.

Reports by the International Food Policy Research Institute and the EU's Joint Research Centre have found that oilseeds, including rapeseed, soya and palm oil, have high ILUC effects, reducing the net benefits for the climate of using these crops for energy.

Only this week, a scientific committee of the European Environment Agency, an EU body charged with providing advice to the EU institutions, warned that to assume that using biomass as an energy source was carbon neutral was “a serious accounting error”. Using land for biomass meant that the land was not available to store carbon. “Legislation that encourages substitution of fossil fuels by bioenergy, irrespective of the biomass source, may even result in increased carbon emissions”, the committee warned.

Maar wat zou het resultaat kunnen zijn als de Commissie de regels zou aanscherpen?

Raffaello Garofolo, the secretary-general of the European Biodiesel Board, said that an increase in the standard for carbon savings from biofuel “would put the whole production chain under stress.” Legislation based on uncertain scientific evidence could “kill the European biodiesel industry”, to the benefit of biodiesel produced outside the EU from palm oil, he warned.

Lees verder hier.

Eerder schreef ik al dat de windmolenindustrie en de zonnecelleninsdustrie in zwaar weer zijn terecht gekomen. Nu dus ook biofuels? Dat zou het duurzame energiedebacle compleet maken.

Ten slotte 'Friends of the Earth':

Brussels/Berlin/London, February 2, 2012 – Motorists across Europe are set to pay an additional €18 billion a year for petrol and diesel as a result of EU biofuel targets that have been shown not to reduce emissions, says new research published today. [1]

New figures, commissioned by Friends of the Earth Europe and ActionAid [2], show that the planned increase in biofuels use could cost European consumers an extra €94 to €126 billion between now and 2020. This despite evidence that biofuels will actually make climate change worse and increase global hunger. [3]

Robbie Blake, biofuels campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe, said: “Europe’s squeezed consumers and taxpayers are paying the price for a flawed green policy that delivers no environmental benefits. Motorists and the environment will bear the brunt of these ill-conceived biofuel targets – with higher prices at the pump and higher CO2 emissions. “Europe must scrap its biofuel targets and subsidies and replace them with more cost-effective policies that actually reduce emissions from transport and don’t wreck the environment.”

Demand for biofuels is pushing up global food prices, and driving millions of poor people off their land and into hunger. At least 37 million hectares of land has already been grabbed globally to produce biofuels. Africa is hardest hit with 60% of land grabs for biofuel crops, depriving local communities of land and water essential for growing food. [4]

Laura Sullivan, ActionAid’s European policy and campaigns manager, said: “Biofuels are an expensive climate con. EU biofuels targets are not reducing emissions but are pushing up global food prices and driving more people into hunger. EU decision-makers must withdraw targets and subsidies for biofuels and invest in genuine solutions to cut carbon”.

Biofuels have been promoted as a ‘green’ alternative to climate-damaging fossil fuels, but studies for the European Commission confirm that that the EU’s projected use of biofuels could actually increase emissions – particularly where countries rely on biodiesel from palm oil, soy and rapeseed. [5]

Lees verder hier.

Zie ook hier:

Het is ongelooflijk dat Eurocraten van het Kremlin van Berlaymont, met instemming van de lidstaten, de samenleving dit soort maatregelen door de strot weten te duwen. Met zulke vrienden heb je geen vijanden meer nodig. Wanneer komt daar nu eens een einde aan?

Ik heb het al vaker geschreven: klimaat maakt meer kapot dan je lief is.

 

Voor mijn eerdere DDS-bijdragen, zie hier: