Tag Archives: social justice

More biofuels musings

I wrote up a little piece a bit ago on the complexities of the food-or-fuelchoice implied in the manufacture of biofuels.

 

Richard Jones at Softmachines.org wrote about biofuels a while back (Driving on sunshine). He has returned to the matter more recently. “It seems that some of the drawbacks were more easy to anticipate than others. What’s sobering about the whole episode, though, is that it does show how complicated things can get when science, politics and economics get closely coupled in situations needing urgent action in the face of major uncertainties.”

I love biofuels in principle. The idea that we could use the agricultural technology of the whole of human history to power the most modern inventions seems appropriate. But the economics are complicated. There is always switchgrass which promises to make use of otherwise useless land. And there’s algae on which I did my high school science project. There you can use huge regions of the ocean to produce energy. That won’t have unintended consequences.

In any case, I think there could be a future in biofuels. If it raises the value of agriculture, then we can see more agriculture. I think that could be a good thing for people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Traditionally, agriculture was how cultures developed themselves. That seems like a worthy subject for development. I’m not sure right now, though. Corn ethanol, for instance, barely breaks even on the energy balance.

What that means (in simplified terms) is that you burn a gallon of gasoline to grow, process, and transport a gallon of corn ethanol. Ethanol is “green” except if you burned a gallon of petrol to get it. In that case it is utterly useless in energy terms. It makes a job or two, but you might as well pay people to not grow corn. Some of you might remember the discussion of the lucrative possibilities in getting paid to not grow corn in Catch 22. More recently: “Acreage Reduction Programs (ARP) paid farmers to set aside an amount of land on which they would not grow corn.”

Anyhoo, I have a dissertation to write and a second job to pay the bills. I wish I could believe that greenwashed fuels were the solution to the energy crisis.

-Peter

Biofuels, economics and starvation – concerns for U.S. profit and conscience

I’m a chemist, and I love the idea of biofuels. America could do better on the energy production side of things, and biofuels seem like an opportunity. What we need is a replacement for petroleum, but what we have is an agricultural production capacity. Biofuels are also an opportunity for readjustment of markets. Right now, big farm production has pushed the third world out of the agricultural game – they don’t have the technology to produce cheap food. It’s cheaper to ship food from the US than it is to grow it almost anywhere else. Ironically, raising food prices and cutting US subsidies could end up really helping the poor, since they could then make a profit selling the food that they grow for themselves.

Think of it this way: cheap US food means that farming is financially useless in places without massive agribusiness infrastructure. Yet, growing food has been the way people have built their own economies since the advent of agriculture. It’s only recently with industrial farming that it has become necessary to trade factory labor for food.

Now, I hope that it is obvious that this is an oversimplification. The above implies  that it’s more complicated than simply making the choice to burn our corn instead or feed the poor. But there is some truth to that, too. The economic reality is that a price increase on food could end up being the best thing ever for poor communities. They can begin to farm their own food and supply their own needs. But if the price goes up faster than the demand can be met by local sources, then people will starve.

When people are going hungry, it is unacceptable to turn corn into fuel. It is unacceptable to be wasteful consumers of corn while our fellow humans contend with food riots. There are new projects on the books. Turning inedible plants and plant waste into liquid transportation fuels feels a lot more reasonable. Congress is investing in these options which I think is a wise move on the part of our legislators.

-Peter

Food and drink: eat the stuff you like, eat more vegetables, don’t drink bottled water

Mark Bittman’s ideas about food mirror my own. I posted about this before. He tells us all about his opinion in his TED talk. I happen to agree with the omnivorous perspective. I like all kinds of food, and I won’t give up something I enjoy in moderation for a blanket rule about what I will or won’t eat. And I’m not going to insult people who offer me something because it doesn’t fit my food rules.

There are good health reasons to eat vegetables. Eating massive quantities of meat is pretty clearly not good for people. Moreover, it’s not good for the environment. Every pound of meat represents an investment of many pounds of grain. People who are worried about food prices need not worry too much – if we cut down meat production we can raise overall food production by a great deal. That’s not a mandate for vegetarianism, it’s just good sense. ‘Less meat’ is not ‘no meat.’

Then there is bottled water. I am really irritated by bottled water. There’s a Penn and Teller’s Bullsh!t episode that sells hose water to yuppies in expensive looking bottles. They assure each other that they can ‘taste the difference.’ And there is a case to be made that the placebo effect is perfectly valid for perception of flavor – if it tastes better, it tastes better, even when it is exactly the same. But you can fool yourself into thinking it tastes better with a bit of lemon instead of burning gasoline to haul a bottle of water across the state or across the world.

Think about it: if you buy water from the French Alps, you just paid to have water shipped from the french alps. That’s insane. If you buy other, cheaper brands, you are paying to have someone re-filter your local tap water (at least they are not shipping it across the world) and put it in a bottle for you. Here’s the best part: it’s not safer. Not too far back the CocaCola company had to pull Dasani water off the shelves in Britain because it had more bromate than was allowed in tap water.

For the money we spend shipping and re-purifying drinkable water in the United States, we could afford to provide safe water to everyone in the world. According to the EPI “The United Nations Millennium Development Goal for environmental sustainability calls for halving the proportion of people lacking sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015. Meeting this goal would require doubling the $15 billion a year that the world currently spends on water supply and sanitation. While this amount may seem large, it pales in comparison to the estimated $100 billion spent each year on bottled water.” There are people whose ground water has arsenic in it. They are drinking arsenic from a local well while we are shipping fashion water from France to the U.S. where we already have water without arsenic in it to begin with. I’m in favor of free markets, but that’s tantamount to the decadence of eating the ortolan.

-Peter

P.S. via wikipedia: For centuries, a rite of passage for French gourmets has been the eating of the Ortolan. These tiny birds—captured alive, force-fed, then drowned in Armagnac—were roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, while the diner draped his head with a linen napkin to preserve the precious aromas and, some believe, to hide from God.

– The Wine Spectator