Biofuels, Birds, and the Planet
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Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle Aug 27, 2008 |
For a little while, I thought that biofuels—fuels like ethanol made from corn, were at least part of the solution to dwindling fossil fuel reserves and a steadily rising cost of oil. Wouldn’t it be great if we could grow renewable fuel? I guess I should have known better. It looks like we’d need another planet just to grow the stuff in order to make that work.
Now, crops that were previously grown for food are grown for biofuel or replaced with biofuel crops, tens of thousands of acres of wetlands are slated to go under the plow in Africa to grow sugar cane, farmers in the US are growing corn on land previously set aside for conservation, deforestation in South America continues at an alarming rate, Indonesia is being replanted with palms, and on it goes. Birds and other wildlife, already huge victims of our gluttonous energy consumption, are losing more habitat, food prices are rising, people will starve.
We can’t continue using food for fuel, and we can’t continue destroying the Earth. Clearly, the rush to biofuel production has to be reined in. I’ve read about grasses that can provide both biofuel and prairie habitat, and biofuel-producing algae that can be grown in vats. Perhaps we should be focusing on the technology needed to bring these into production—but, lest we make the same mistakes again, that focus also needs to look at the probable unintended consequences. Is there any hope for biofuels?
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