ALERT: Call on U.S. Government to Halt Ecologically Misguided Support for Large Scale Biofuel
Fuel from food and already overstressed terrestrial ecosystems is immoral and unsustainable. The Obama administration must start by rejecting the proposal to increase the corn ethanol fuel blend limit from 10-15%.
TAKE ACTION! Please support US environmental and social justice groups calling upon the new Obama administration to halt financial and policy support for large scale biofuel production [search]. In particular, the Obama government's potential support for agrofuel [search] expansion -- making of transportation fuels from food -- runs counter to their aim to urgently address climate change and threatens to cause more hunger, human rights abuses, and degradation of soil and water.
The Obama administration promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to boost renewable energy. Unfortunately, a large part of their solution involves further boosting agrofuel production, both in the US and abroad. The new administration must heed the overwhelming evidence that agrofuels worsen climate change through further deforestation and the destruction of other ecosystems; drive food prices up, forcing more and more people worldwide into hunger and malnutrition; and decimate biodiversity and ecosystems.
Rainforest Rescue and Ecological Internet are concerned with America's growing ethanol industry, and the implications it has in setting a precedent for massive agricultural industrialisation of the world's remaining rainforests and other natural wildlands. We concur with the growing ecological consensus that large-scale industrial production of transport fuels and other energy from plants such as corn, sugar cane, oil palm, soya, trees, grasses, or so-called agricultural and woodland waste threatens forests, biodiversity, food sovereignty, community-based land rights and will worsen climate change. TAKE ACTION!
Comments
Can you help us stop the mass murder and imprisonment of 33,000 wild horses and burros! The Wild Horse Foundation has a plan that offers a solution, but we need your help! Please stop this trail of carnage and public waste by contacting Ken Salazar at the Bureau of Land Management at the link below:
http://capwiz.com/madeleinepickens/issues/alert/?alertid=12943361&type=AN
Posted by: Madeleine Pickens | March 23, 2009 4:33 PM
Could you translate your mails in french.
I can't sign, I don't understand !
6000 langages in the word ! Not one !
Posted by: Royer | March 24, 2009 3:36 AM
When gasoline is $3 a gallon, and Ethanol is $2.50 a gallon into new york, the market will drive conversion of corn, (sugarcane, beets, cellulose eventually)into ethanol independent of government policy. It is, of course , not a free market, what with subsidies and import taxes on Brazilian ethanol. Like all complicated problems, there is a simple solution (like banning biofuels) which won't work. There is too much demand in the US, China, India, and the rest of the world for transportation fuel "driving"competition for resources (corn etc) to magicly be eliminated by policy changes, and too much at stake to continue to rely on fossil fuel. The US would have about as much effect by requiring everyone worldwide to drive less.
Posted by: Brian Dodge | March 24, 2009 4:42 PM
As Brian says, policy to restrict the use of biofuels is useless; it is policies protecting rainforest, natural wildlands and unique ecosystems that need to be passed to avoid the use of these areas for biofuel crop production.
As far as climate change is concerned we should be more concerned with increasing the efficiency of vehicles so each uses less fuel(resulting in less emissions)and point-of-source carbon capture of greenhouse gas emmisions from fuel processing plants.
The subject of hunger and malnutrition had never been a result of a global lack of food. There is plenty of food. This is a distribution issue which will be little affected by biofuel crop growth, especially within the US. Biofuel crop growth may even aid the economies of the countries where it is grown IF it is done responsibly.
Posted by: Julia Barrott | March 25, 2009 7:39 AM
The problem of low efficiency of corn conversion to fuel requires a little science. Growing corn requires fuel and fertilizer made from fuel. The output of fuel from corn is little more than the energy put into growing the corn once tractors, transportation, drying the corn, processing the ethanol,etc are taken into account. The conversion percentage of sugar to ethanol is much higher.
The other problems of overstimulating corn agriculture include soil and water degradation with the extreme factory farming methods used in the US midwest. Activist groups like Oxfam are a good source of info on this subject and the US Farm Bill which subsidizes grain crops heavily.
Posted by: Dave Moore | March 30, 2009 9:41 PM
Great idea, but will this work over the long run?
Posted by: Annika-Roulettes | July 31, 2009 6:01 PM