Ever heard of Corporate Watchdog Radio? It’s a weekly radio show and audio/video podcast on issues that you most likely care about (since you read the Understory).
Last week the Business Ethics Network offered RAN a Commentaries spot on the Corporate Watchdog Radio show. I recorded a short piece on biofuels - a timely week for it in light of the global food crisis and riots in many countries. Listen here.
We decided to do something a little different with this greenwash of the week: video! Here’s our own Robin Beck on the Virgin Air biofuel greenwash:
There is a growing consensus that the highly touted “fuel of the future” may not be the panacea that we once that it was. Agrofuels, made from large-scale industrial crops, like palm oil, soy, sugarcane and canola, have far more social and environmental problems than benefits. But, let’s get clear on something. Agrofuels are very different than locally and sustainably produced, small-scale, biofuels. Agrofuels are not at all the same thing as the recycled veggie grease that innovative people have been using to fuel their cars, in a sincere effort to reduce their carbon footprint.
Agrofuels are being put forward as a solution to our climate crisis by agribusiness giants like ADM and Cargill, auto makers like GM, and petroleum companies like BP with their own interest and profit motive in mind. They have effectively hijacked the good intentions, true innovation, and essence of family farmers, environmentalists, and communities throughout the world that were pursuing locally produced, small-scale biofuels for local energy needs.
For this reason, Rainforest Action Network along with allies Food First, Grassroots International, Family Farm Defenders, Global Justice Ecology Project, and the Student Trade Justice Campaign, held a press conference on Tuesday (listen to it here) announcing the first official call for a U.S. moratorium on agrofuels. The call for a moratorium is part of a growing movement worldwide which recognizes that there is a need for policy makers to reevaluate the incentives and subsidies which are currently driving a global boom for agrofuels. This agrofuels boom is driving deforestation, climate change, and is linked to human rights abuses from the Gran Chaco in Paraguay to the Brazilian Amazon, to Kalimantan in Indonesia and to Papua New Guinea in the Pacific.
Civil Society groups in Europe launched a similar moratorium over a year ago, and just two weeks ago the EU environment commissioner said that the social and environmental problems caused by agrofuels are “bigger than we thought they were.” As a result, the European Union is now rethinking their agrofuels targets. And in October 2007, Jean Ziegler the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food called for a five year moratorium on agrofuels production citing the rising prices of food worldwide and the impact that this is already having on the poorest people around the world.
We believe that the growing call for a moratorium on industrial agrofuels will help refocus attention on pursuing the genuine answers to our climate crisis, and away from snake oil solutions. One thing is certain: none of the real solutions can or will come at the expense of human rights, the environment, or the world’s most marginalized people, and certainly none should make the climate worse off.
Forbes.com published an article today called “Food Vs. Fuel” which, and this isn’t too common in the financial press, addresses the fact that “concern about climate change has led to biofuels subsidies that pit hungry mouths and empty gas tanks against each other.”
No exactly what I expected to read from Forbes. The article goes on to draw connections between increased meat consumption driving up food prices and even starts out with the startling statistic that “world’s poor spend twice what they did on food just seven years ago, yet still starve in greater numbers.”
I know, it sounds bad. But don’t worry, the article goes on to point out that “investors might find some opportunity amidst the misery.”
Oh, thank goodness.
I was worried that this horrific tale of suffering and injustice might not be good for investment portfolios. Luckily many banking giants have already reaped significant profits by investing in companies like ADM and Bunge–targets of our new Rainforest Agribusiness campaign.
Maybe the problem has something to do with our collective perverse focus on the financial profits generated by industrial agriculture rather than the importance of building a just and equitable food supply.
Today, the Rainforest Action Network turned up the heat on US Agribusiness giants ADM, Bunge, and Cargill. Early this morning, when employees arrived at the Chicago Board of Trade, they were met with a massive banner, reading: “ADM, Bunge, Cargill: the ABCs of Rainforest Destruction.” Watch the banner drop here.
We’re stepping it up and we want these companies to know how serious we are. Yesterday Chicagoans opened the Tribune to find our full page ad, calling out ADM, Bunge, and Cargill for profiting from false solutions to our climate crisis. By promoting industrially produced soy and palm oil as biofuel, these companies are diverting our resources and attention away from truly renewable energy.
Our newly-launched Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign is letting these companies know that destroying the world’s rainforests for profit won’t fly. Join us. Tell the CEOs of these companies that there will be no more agribusiness as usual. Send a message to the CEOs now.
An editorial in Sunday’s edition of The Los Angeles Times provides a sobering examination of the widely-touted ethanol solution to our oil addiction.
The Times does a great job of laying out the tremendous ecological and economic costs associated with large-scale ethanol production (including a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico the size of Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined) as well as its limited capacity of satisfying our growing appetite for food and fuel. While cutting through many of the shortfalls ethanol proponents are using to tout this alternative, it becomes clear the level of insanity brewing from the lobbyist-infested halls of our Capitol.
“The ethanol craze, like so much of U.S. energy policy, is designed more to please small but politically powerful constituencies such as corn growers and Detroit automakers than to solve the nation’s energy problems.”
Think there’s a better way? Check out what RAN is doing here and get activated.
I’ve been laughing all morning over Weyerhaeuser’s new website GrowingIdeas.com. It’s comically evil—and illustrates better than we ever could just how out-of-touch they are with reality.
I clicked on “What Can a Tree Be?”, wondering why being a key part of a diverse ecosystem, like providing shelter for animals, preventing erosion and producing oxygen was evidently not good enough.
My father and I carry on a regular exchange of periodicals. For some reason my housemate has an unwanted subscription to Rolling Stone. I don’t read it, but my dad is a huge fan (it’s a generational thing). So I mail him every issue of Rolling Stone in exchange for his old issues of The Economist (their viewpoint aside, it’s an essential publication). So we each save some money and even a little bit of paper on the magazines we want to read.
When I saw the cover of the most recent issue, however, I actually had to stop and crack open the magazine before stuffing it into the envelope—to read this:
Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America’s Biggest Political Boondoggles
The article isn’t news to us here at RAN, but it might be to a lot of people like my father who might never have heard about the downside of agrifuels. Good on you, Rolling Stone. But, with all due respect, I’ll still take my sharp British economic analysis over stories about washed-up hair bands.
Oh, and don’t miss this post over at R-Squared Energy Blog (the author, an energy insider, was quoted in the article).
Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director of Food First, was recently in RAN’s offices to talk to our staff about biofuels. You can hear him talk about the issue in this interview from KPFA radio in Berkley:
“How did such a bad idea gain such incredible currency?” Listen and find out.
Also in the interview was Joe Brewer, a fellow at the Rockridge Institute, whose work I’ve mentioned before. Both of them have recently authored some pretty illuminating articles on the state of the biofuels debate in the US:
The Great Biofuel Hoax: Holt-Giménez discusses some of the myths surrounding biofuels.
The Coming Biofuels Disaster: Brewer explains how a re-framing of biofuels from the perspective of creating livable communities makes it clear that they aren’t a good idea.
Joe Brewer at the Rockridge Institute just posted an interesting analysis of the energy debate in this country. Even though one finds a lot of rhetorical similarities between conservative and progressive approaches the problem of energy, the underlaying frames — their hidden assumptions and values — differ greatly. The post correctly identifies biofuels as an extremely revealing issue in the debate: blanket support for them indicates a lack of concern for the long-term livability of the planet.