How they intend to do this is a leaf out of Victoria’s book, they want to rename palm oil plantations as forest to me EU biofuels sustainability criteria.

Dear friends,

A leaked draft EU document shows that the Commission would like to rename palm oil plantations as “forest” in order that biodiesel from palm oil plantations can still meet EU biofuels sustainability criteria.

Palm oil expansion is a major cause of tropical rainforest destruction and biodiesel from palm oil can easily cause more greenhouse gas emissions that the fossil fuel it is meant to replace. Please email the new energy and environment Commissioners and ask them to amend this document to give a clear message to member states that biodiesel from palm oil has no role to play in a sustainable EU energy mix.

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The alert can be found at http://www.rainforest-rescue.org/protestaktion.php?id=514

Many thanks.

Best regards,

Reinhard Behrend
Rettet den Regenwald e. V.
Friedhofsweg 28
22337 Hamburg
Germany
info@regenwald.org
http://www.rainforest-rescue.org

One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007.

The 2009 figures from the US Department of Agriculture shows ethanol production rising to record levels driven by farm subsidies and laws which require vehicles to use increasing amounts of biofuels “The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels,” said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington thinktank ithat conducted the analysis.

Last year 107m tonnes of grain, mostly corn, was grown by US farmers to be blended with petrol. This was nearly twice as much as in 2007, when Bush challenged farmers to increase production by 500% by 2017 to save cut oil imports and reduce carbon emissions.

More than 80 new ethanol plants have been built since then, with more expected by 2015, by which time the US will need to produce a further 5bn gallons of ethanol if it is to meet its renewable fuel standard.  According to Brown, the growing demand for US ethanol derived from grains helped to push world grain prices to record highs between late 2006 and 2008.

In 2008, the Guardian revealed a secret World Bank report that concluded that the drive for biofuels by American and European governments had pushed up food prices by 75%, in stark contrast to US claims that prices had risen only 2-3% as a result.  Since then, the number of hungry people in the world has increased to over 1 billion people according to the UN’s World Food programme.

“Continuing to divert more food to fuel, as is now mandated by the US federal government in its renewable fuel standard, will likely only reinforce the disturbing rise in world hunger. By subsidising the production of ethanol to the tune of some $6bn each year, US taxpayers are in effect subsidising rising food bills at home and around the world,” said Brown.

“The worst economic crisis since the great depression has recently brought food prices down from their peak, but they still remain well above their long-term average levels.” The US is by far the world’s leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In 2008, the UN called for a comprehensive review of biofuel production from food crops.

“There is a direct link between biofuels and food prices. The needs of the hungry must come before the needs of cars,” said Meredith Alexander, biofuels campaigner at ActionAid in London. As well as the effect on food, campaigners also argue that many scientists question whether biofuels made from food crops actually save any greenhouse gas emissions.

But ethanol producers deny that their record production means less food “Continued innovation in ethanol production and agricultural technology means that we don’t have to make a false choice between food and fuel.

We can more than meet the demand for food and livestock feed while reducing our dependence on foreign oil through the production of homegrown renewable ethanol,” said Tom Buis, the chief executive of industry group Growth Energ.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Meanwhile, sit back and proclaim you’ve achieved a monumental green victory (President Bush, anyone?) all while unleashing a dangerous spike in global food prices that’s causing a ripple effect of food shortages and rationing around the world.

Politicians need to spend less time bragging about their latest green-washing schemes and more time studying The Law of Unintended Consequences.

Because while growing fuel on cropland initially sounds like a great idea, any honest assessment of the total impact leads you to the inescapable conclusion that biofuels are largely a government-sponsored scam.

With a few exceptions, biofuels produce no net increase in energy output, and they cause food shortages while creating strong economic incentives for the destruction of the very rainforests we desperately need to stabilize the climate!

And now we’re just starting to see the early signs of the economic and social insanity that has been unleashed by this foolish pursuit of biofuels around the world: Food rationing in Sam’s Club stores in the U.S., rapidly-rising prices on bread, rice and corn, and price spikes at cafeterias and restaurants that depend on these staple ingredients. The price of rice has tripled globally, unleashing riots in Haiti and Bangladesh, and the United Nations has issued warnings that millions of people around the world now face starvation because they can’t afford to buy food. Americans are even starting to hoard food once again, after years of avoiding basic preparedness measures. (One benefit to all this, however, is that farmers are actually getting paid decent prices for their crops now, after years of operating on the verge of bankruptcy…)

One final thought: I am an advocate of the idea that Mother Nature needs to be granted legal standing. I believe that humans do not automatically “own” nature, and that we cannot simply cut down forests, bulldoze mountainsides, fish the oceans, build dams and engage in other highly disruptive activities without first getting permission and paying royalties to a global Mother Nature Authority that stands up for the rights of the planet. Nature is not ours to own or destroy. We, as the guests on this planet, have no right to simply assume ownership over other living systems on this planet and exploit them for our own financial gain. The “destroy and consume” model of free market enterprise is simply not sustainable, folks. It does not lead us to a happy future; it leads to our own destruction.

Or, put another way, over the last hundred years or so, mankind has committed countless acts of violence against nature. It has pursued a policy of committing atrocities against Mother Nature — a kind of genocide against anything non-human (animals, plants, fish, etc.). Humans have proven themselves to be, by far, the most violent and destructive life forms to ever exist on this planet. And yet paired with that violence, humans are an infant species, with little or no foresight, with virtually no ability to see the future implications of their own actions. We are, in a sense, the dumbest intelligent creatures ever to walk the face of this Earth.

We can land a man on the moon, but we can’t even prevent our own rainforests from being clear-cut by soybean farmers and cattle ranchers. We can develop high-tech medicines, but we can’t even openly recognize the more powerful medicines found in a simple dandelion plant. We can create amazing computers and televisions and internet technologies the beam information across the globe at the speed of light, but we pollute those information pathways with corporate ads for useless stuff and dangerous medicines that only make our fellow humans beings less enlightened. We are capable of so much, and yet we have accomplished so little. We are, by any honest assessment, a race of little children, running around the planet with far too much power and not nearly enough maturity. We’re like a band of infants with flamethrowers.

Frankly, we don’t deserve this planet, and Mother Nature is about to take it away from us. It’s time for us to either grow up, or perish. And all these people who say “we have to protect the economy, not the environment” should probably just be rounded up and shipped off to Mars where they can play with the Martian dust all they want until they finally get the picture.

http://www.naturalnews.com/023091.html

As a result, it’s suddenly becoming obvious to nearly everyone that the pursuit of biofuels, as currently structured, is a grand green-wash hoax. It doesn’t produce more fuel than it consumes, and it drives up food prices to boot!

Now, there are biofuels programs that really do work. The growing and harvesting of sugar cane in Brazil, for example, provides an 8-to-1 return on energy investment. But even that pursuit is tarnished by claims of unsafe work environments and massive environmental pollution (the sugar cane fields are burned before being harvested, a process that releases massive amounts of CO2 into the environment).

The only truly promising biofuels technology available today is based on micro-algae. Feed CO2 to a vat of algae, and you can produce biofuels cheaply and responsibly, without destroying the environment. But these programs are only in experimental phases. Nobody is producing biofuels on a large scale from algae farms (not yet, anyway). And that leaves the great American breadbasket: The corn and wheat fields.

It is here that food is now being displaced by crops grown for biofuel processing. So where a farmer used to grow corn as a food source, he’s now growing it to sell to a biofuel processing facility which turns the corn into ethanol. Obviously, the laws of economics come into play here, meaning that every bushel of corn used for biofuels production means one less bushel of corn available for food. Factor in the laws of supply and demand, and you can see that the more crops we use for biofuels, the higher the prices will rise for food.

Politicians, it seems, have no understanding of economics. They need to study the basics as they are presented in Henry Hazlitt’s Book, Economics in One Lesson, which is a Libertarian-oriented guide that explains basic economics to anyone willing to learn. Economics is focused on the study of human behaviour, or more precisely, consumer choice. Now, it seems, consumers are about to be faced with a choice they never wanted to have to make: Should I buy fuel, or food? In other words: Do I want to drive my car, or do I want to eat?

You can have fuel or food, but not both Under a biofuels-focused agricultural policy, the same limited resources (soil, sunlight and water, essentially) can be used for only one thing at a time. You can’t use the corn twice, obviously (you can’t eat the corn and process it for biofuels at the same time), so you’ve got to make a choice: Will you grow the corn for fuel, or for food? The more you grow for fuel, of course, the less food you have, and that drives up food prices. But if you swing back the other way and grow more corn for food to ease food prices, the fuel prices go up. Trying to solve both problems at once is a bit like trying to pick up a wet watermelon seed with your fingers: It keeps slipping to the side.

One thing that has become abundantly clear in all this is that the era of cheap food and cheap fuel is over. I’ve written about this on Natural News, where I use the term “food bubble” to describe the most recent era of cheap food. As it turns out, cheap food is only made possible by cheap oil, and with oil now approaching $120 a barrel (a price that virtually no one thought possible just two years ago), food prices are simultaneously skyrocketing. (Modern farming practices use a lot of fossil fuel. So does transporting food across the country or around the world. Eat local, folks!)

Add to this the fact that global climate change is already underway, altering weather patterns and creating floods, droughts and other agricultural calamities, and you start to get the picture of just how bad things might get. That’s not even to mention the very serious problem of collapsing honeybee populations due to a mysterious condition called colony collapse disorder that’s devastating honeybee populations across North America right this minute. Honeybees, in case you didn’t know, pollinate plants that represent about 30% of all the calories consumed by Americans. That’s about one out of every three bites of your dinner, and it all depends on the “free” work performed by honeybees — bees who are apparently going on strike by refusing to keep working for us.