Biofuels: Not One Drop
Friday, January 23rd, 2009On January 15th, the Global Justice Ecology Project published an open letter on development of biofuels. The Oil Drum picked up the story the following day and opened a discussion on the subject. Gail the Actuary’s comments offer a good summary:
I personally agree with many of the agrifuel issues mentioned in this letter, but I do not agree with the solutions. The authors seem to want to eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear, substituting wind and solar. This is not possible, in my view.
To me, this means the biofuels issues we’ve discussed here at Seattle Peak Oil are finally coming into wider acceptance in the peak oil and sustainability communities. Unfortunately, this usually means that the public will still pursue the current, misguided policy objectives until they catch up with the vanguard thinking, which usually takes several years.
What it comes down to is the fact that we don’t “need” 21 million barrels of oil per day. The best evidence for this is the fact that the rest of the world makes do with so much less. And not just “a lot” less: embarrassingly less. Because I’m aware of this fact, I’m often stunned into silence when I hear people say that America “needs” biofuels. They obviously haven’t ever seen a chart like the one below.
If you chunk up the rest of the world into United-States-sized population groups, each chunk of 300 million people only uses 3.5% of the world’s oil output. The 300 million Americans, however, use around 25% of the world’s oil.
The point of the exercise is this: if we cut back to zero imports tomorrow, American domestic oil production would still supply us with 7% of the world’s energy. We would still have twice as much energy wealth, per capita, as the average of the rest of the world lives on right now.
Perhaps the exhausting debates between “continued oil” vs. “no more oil” could be cut usefully short by simply asking Americans to live on domestic oil only, as a start. This would be an environmental win, a fiscal win and a humanitarian win also. And we’d still have more oil than most of the world’s people. And it might actually be achievable!
Of course, I’m not suggesting that anyone take up with such a plan: Americans would rather court a collapse than accept “socialism”, and that is probably what they will get. I only pose these ideas to illustrate my point. It helps to see the numbers and think about things differently. Then, when we talk about how we “need” biofuels so we can avoid being merely twice as rich as the rest of the world, the biofuels project starts to sound exactly as absurd as it is.
But not quite.
The full scope of the absurdity doesn’t really come to the fore until we realize that we’re considering exchanging our secure supplies of food and water because we’re not content to be twice as energy rich as the rest of the world. We’re so used to a century of indoor plumbing that it is very hard for people to understand how water can become so scarce that we might fight wars over it in the future.
The water issue has not been covered well yet, and not often either. But that is changing. A recent article in the Times Online actually raises the war-for-water issue. Again, the public won’t be coming around to thinking about this properly for some time, but it is fantastic to see the realities faced in small corners of the media, and not just blogs and citizen-run websites like ours.
What it comes down to is that we need water and food much, much more than we need growing industrial economies and 150 horsepower cars at our disposal. The sooner we figure that out, the better off my kids will be in the future.
Let’s face it: We don’t need a single drop of biofuels. Ever.
-Robert
Yet, many alternative energy advocates still insist that we will “need” biofuels in the future. Actually, the U.S. is still the third largest producer of oil in the world, so we believe that terms like “need” are inappropriate in this context. Without imports, the U.S. would still be incredibly wealthy among nations, but we might have to return to oppressive and humiliating habits like walking once in a while.
Other advocates for biofuels focus on the common belief that these fuels are “green”. While there are many raging debates about food-vs-fuel, whether biofuels really are carbon neutral, or how much energy they return, there is almost no debate on the question of whether they are actually green in the first place, or what that would mean. The idea that biofuels are “green” has become so widely agreed upon that it isn’t even questioned anymore.
