Police Station Bombed
SUNGAI PETANI: A Molotov cocktail, otherwise known as a petrol bomb was lobbed into a police station... It landed and exploded on a badminton court at the Merbok police station after midnight yesterday (1).
And this got me thinking... Who the hell uses a petrol bomb these days? And I thought the price of fuel has gone up...
In fact, the credit crunch is beginning to take its toll on everything else here. Just a week back, I went into the Indian mama store here to get a 10kg pack of Thai Fragrant Rice. Guess how much it costs me? £14.50!!! And 3 months ago, it was only £9! Looks like rice is not going to be my staple for long.
Sometimes I wonder, are all of these linked? Rice and oil... They don't go together, other than the fact that we use coconut oil to cook Nasi Lemak. Or so I thought... Till I read the TIME magazine at Rama's place the other day, which really opened my eyes.
The Clean Energy Scam
A tiny sliver of transitional rain forest is surrounded by hectares of soybean fields in the Mato Grosso state, Brazil.This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming.
Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class. But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it.
By diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. But the basic problem with most biofuels: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline.
Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started.
The basic problem is that the Amazon is worth more deforested than it is intact. The growing backlash against biofuels is a product of the law of unintended consequences. It may seem obvious now that when biofuels increase demand for crops, prices will rise and farms will expand into nature.
America the Bio-Foolish
The best place to see this is America's biofuel mecca: Iowa.Biofuel-pandering has become virtually mandatory for presidential contenders. John McCain was the rare candidate who vehemently opposed ethanol as an outrageous agribusiness boondoggle, which is why he skipped Iowa in 2000. But McCain learned his lesson in time for this year's caucuses. By 2006 he was calling ethanol a "vital alternative energy source."
Someone is paying to support these environmentally questionable industries: you. In December, President Bush signed a bipartisan energy bill that will dramatically increase support to the industry while mandating 36 billion gal. (136 billion L) of biofuel by 2022. This will provide a huge boost to grain markets.
Why is so much money still being poured into such a misguided enterprise? Like the scientists and environmentalists, many politicians genuinely believe biofuels can help decrease global warming. There was just one flaw in the calculation: the studies all credited fuel crops for sequestering carbon, but no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. Strange as it sounds, we're better off growing food and drilling for oil.
Everyone the author interviewed in Brazil agreed: the market drives behavior, so without incentives to prevent deforestation, the Amazon is doomed.The trouble is that even if there were enough financial incentives to keep the Amazon intact, high commodity prices would encourage deforestation elsewhere. And government mandates to increase biofuel production are going to boost commodity prices, which will only attract more investment. Until someone invents that protein chip, it's going to mean the worst of everything: higher food prices, more deforestation and more emissions (2).
Just as this article opened my eyes, I hope it will do the same for you. Take a look at it if you're interested through the references section. I sincerely hope that you'll gain a better insight into the bigger picture, and think about the world that we so dearly love and live in.
References:
Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class. But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it.
By diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. But the basic problem with most biofuels: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline.
Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started.
The basic problem is that the Amazon is worth more deforested than it is intact. The growing backlash against biofuels is a product of the law of unintended consequences. It may seem obvious now that when biofuels increase demand for crops, prices will rise and farms will expand into nature.
America the Bio-Foolish
The best place to see this is America's biofuel mecca: Iowa.Biofuel-pandering has become virtually mandatory for presidential contenders. John McCain was the rare candidate who vehemently opposed ethanol as an outrageous agribusiness boondoggle, which is why he skipped Iowa in 2000. But McCain learned his lesson in time for this year's caucuses. By 2006 he was calling ethanol a "vital alternative energy source."
Someone is paying to support these environmentally questionable industries: you. In December, President Bush signed a bipartisan energy bill that will dramatically increase support to the industry while mandating 36 billion gal. (136 billion L) of biofuel by 2022. This will provide a huge boost to grain markets.
Why is so much money still being poured into such a misguided enterprise? Like the scientists and environmentalists, many politicians genuinely believe biofuels can help decrease global warming. There was just one flaw in the calculation: the studies all credited fuel crops for sequestering carbon, but no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. Strange as it sounds, we're better off growing food and drilling for oil.
Everyone the author interviewed in Brazil agreed: the market drives behavior, so without incentives to prevent deforestation, the Amazon is doomed.The trouble is that even if there were enough financial incentives to keep the Amazon intact, high commodity prices would encourage deforestation elsewhere. And government mandates to increase biofuel production are going to boost commodity prices, which will only attract more investment. Until someone invents that protein chip, it's going to mean the worst of everything: higher food prices, more deforestation and more emissions (2).
Just as this article opened my eyes, I hope it will do the same for you. Take a look at it if you're interested through the references section. I sincerely hope that you'll gain a better insight into the bigger picture, and think about the world that we so dearly love and live in.
References:
- TheStarOnline. Police Station Bombed (2008). Online: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/9/28/nation/19016161&sec=nation [Accessed 17th May 2008].
- Michael Grunwald. TIME: The Clean Energy Scam (2008). Online: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975-1,00.html [Accessed 17th May 2008].
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