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February 13, 2008 Public pressure is forcing governments to get serious about environmental protection. One area of particular concern is the global economy’s reliance on dirty fossil fuels – a primary source of greenhouse gas emissions. With the phenomenon of “peak oil” looming in our near future, the race is on for cheap energy alternatives. In the United States and Canada, politicians, automobile manufacturers, much of the agricultural community and even some environmental groups have put their faith in biofuels (or agrifuels) as a viable and clean replacement for gasoline. Biofuels can be made from a number of organic materials like wood or straw but are frequently derived from food crops like corn or sugar cane. Proponents of the technology claim that biofuels will not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also provide a needed boost to the Canadian and American economies. But there is a lot of evidence that biofuels cannot be the one-stop solution to the global oil and gas crisis that these people hope for. The problems with the technology range from its impacts on third-world poverty, soil fertility, the cost and supply of food, water usage and deforestation, to the fact that biofuels require as much energy to grow as they eventually produce, and that in the end there is no net reduction in carbon emissions. Despite these failings, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is so confident in biofuels technology that in July 2007, he committed $1.5-billion in subsidies over the next nine years to producers of “renewable” alternatives to gasoline and diesel fuel. This will help realize the Conservative's new requirement of 5 per cent renewable content in gasoline by 2010. “With leading-edge technology and abundant supplies of grains, oilseeds, and other feedstocks, Canada is uniquely positioned to become a global leader in the production of biofuels,” said the Prime Minister, sounding much like his U.S. counterpart George W. Bush, whose 2005 U.S. Energy Policy Act set a goal of 12 billion gallons of ethanol by 2012. Bush has since called for the annual production of biofuels to reach 35 billion gallons by 2017. Not surprisingly, Harper and Bush have joined forces on the issue of biofuels through the Security and Prosperity Partnership. “Balancing our energy requirements with the stewardship of our environment is one of the greatest challenges of our time,” said Harper on August 21, in a joint statement at the end of the trilateral “Leaders Summit” in Montebello, Quebec. “We need to enhance our research into new and clean technologies, facilitate the deployment of these technologies to the market, and improve our energy efficiency.” The leaders have agreed to, “Cooperate for our mutual benefit in the development of biofuels, vehicle fuel efficiency technologies and technologies to reduce emissions.” In fact, Harper may have locked us into this plan by signing a treaty-strength Agreement on Cooperation in Energy Science and Technology, one thrust of which is the rapid deployment of new energy technologies. The problem with getting new technologies like biofuels to the market as quickly as possible is that the solutions they offer, like the problems they are trying to fix, can be themselves unsustainable. As groups like the International Forum on Globalization and the Institute for Policy Studies have argued, a truly renewable society cannot be founded on the destructive notion of constant economic growth. Growing food for gas literally feeds cars not people, they argue. To truly solve the “peak oil” crisis, we will need to consume, produce less, and at some point in the near future, to completely wean ourselves off this addiction to oil. In the meantime, we need to seriously question Harper’s and the SPP’s unreasonable and potentially destructive "renewable" energy plan, which is just an excuse to have our cake and eat it too. Further reading on biofuels The False Promise of Biofuels: A special report from the International Forum on Globalization and the Institute for Policy Studies, September 2007. The Last Straw: A new generation of biofuels turns out to be another environmental disaster, by George Monbiot, published in The Guardian, February 12, 2008.
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