Biofuels: The Internationalization of Genocide?

Jeff Berg

posted Tuesday, April 10, 2007

In the article I've appended below Fidel Castro argues that the math on biofuels adds up to a zero sum existential game between the car owning public and the 5.9 billion or so of us who live a more modest existence.  Having read Greg Pahl's "Biodiesel", and the Technical Feasibility Study for a Billion Ton Supply from the U.S. Dept of Agriculture http://tinyurl.com/2w2er7 , having interviewed Brian Foody of Iogen, a world leader in cellulosic ethanol technology, having read Darley and Heinberg's analysis of the limits to biofuels, and essentially every word George Monbiot has published on the subject, I strongly suspect that Castro is precisely correct in his analysis. 

In fact many pre-existing input, production and distribution constraints are today leading to severe and rapidly increasing pressures on the size of the human population and many of these problems are in no way new.  For example it was in April, 2001 that the UN Special Rapporteur on Hunger wrote «In a world overflowing with riches, it is a outrageous scandal that more than 826  million people suffer hunger and malnutrition and that every year over 36 million die of starvation and related causes . We must take urgent action now.»   ~ Jean Ziegler.  The difference today is that what has been until now largely a political and economic problem born from concentrated land ownership, Economic, Agricultural and Aid policies is slowly morphing into a problem that is much more strictly bounded by basic fundamental limits nowhere near as amenable to human manipulation.  i.e. As resistant as our political and economic elite are to change they are at least, unlike the laws of physics and chemistry, not immutable or eternal. 

I will not at this time go into all of the various planetary limits that have already been surpassed as a result of human activity but I would like to pass on a few bits of datum concerning a liquid that has always been far more important to human health and wealth than oil: Water. 

Today this sine qua non to all life is increasingly referred to as "The new oil" as the pressures for its commodification increases in direct relation to its increasing scarcity and the massive profits that will accrue to whoever gains the right to its distribution as it is privatized.

In the Ingenuity Gap (pg 345) Thomas Homer-Dixon examines the facts about per capita water needs and the relationship of water availability to health and wealth. There he states that leading water experts believe 1000 cubic meters of water per year per person is a useful benchmark and that when countries fall below this rate quality of life declines.

2) “A typical meat-eating, car driving Westerner consumes as much as a hundred times their own weight in water every day,” ~ Fred Pearce, former New Scientist news editor and author of When the River Runs Dry.  Which means that we in North America are consuming on average about 2500 cubic meters of water per person per year.

3) "It takes 25 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of wheat but 2,500 gallons to produce 1 pound of meat (NAVS, Gardella 1999, Robbins). If you pass up one hamburger, you'll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle (Ayres 1999) or as much water as it takes to maintain a typical household for an entire month (NAVS)." ~ Megan Nutting.

4) It takes a 1,000 tons of water to grow one ton of wheat.

5) It takes 450,000 litres of water to make a small car.

6) It takes somewhere on the order of 100 million gallons of water every day to keep the tarsands flowing.

7) Today the once mighty Colorado river no longer reaches the ocean.

8) The water for the tarsands, much of the prairies and many of Canada's western cities is glacier fed.  These glaciers are receding at a rapid rate and there is no indication that this trend will be reversed in time to avert the extinction of many of these water sources within a few decades. Urgent study is needed if we are going to meet this challenge intelligently and with minimal negative impact.  This problem, as bad as it may prove to be for Canadians, is far worse in many parts of the rest of the world. 

Given that this is just one of the many limits that are now jumping up to tell us that our current economic system is wholly unsustainable, introducing a worldwide push to biofuels at this time merely to keep our current economic model going for a little while longer would I suspect be exactly what Castro describes:

The Internationalization of Genocide.   

Where Have All the Bees Gone?

And Other Reflections on the Internationalization of Genocide

By Fidel Castro

04/-8/-7 " ICH " T he Camp David meeting has just come to an end. All of us followed the press conference offered by the presidents of the United States and Brazil attentively, as we did the news surrounding the meeting and the opinions voiced in this connection. continue reading

Jeff Berg is an environmental and human rights activist and a member of Post Carbon Toronto .
Other articles by Jeff Berg are found here