Evidence is mounting about the social and environmental consequences of industrialized biofuels, aka agrofuels. A new paper from RAN concludes that we cannot grow our way out of our oil addiction. Because of agrofuels’ impacts on climate change, direct and indirect land use impacts, fossil fuel inputs, and the investments they may draw away from real solutions, agrofuels will not solve the twin crises of climate change and our dependence on oil.

The report also finds that if we don’t take action to rein in the rapid global expansion of agrofuels we will in fact be making these problems worse. Particularly when expanding in rainforest regions, the carbon debt accumulated by agrofuels will take decades or sometimes centuries to pay back.

RAN’s recommendation: rather than continuing to pursue agrofuels policies and increasing the global market place for agrofuels, we call on decision makers in the corporate and political arenas to prioritize proven, true solutions that halt the expansion of carbon-intensive industries. Policies and investments that support mass transit, bike transit, and plug in vehicles recharged by a green grid are far more efficient and cost effective means to reduce our dependence on oil. Agrofuels are not low carbon, and we can’t afford to lose any more time pursuing false solutions. It’s time for a real transportation revolution.

Read the full report at: http://ran.org/fileadmin/materials/comms/mediacontent/reports/Agrofuels_White_Paper.pdf

All too often those debating the solutions and proposed actions to tackle global warming fail to challenge the assumptions. While it’s important to deal with emissions it can be argued that the root causes of emissions lie farther upstream and can more effectively deal with the challenges we are facing. Cutting emissions is good. Investing in clean energy and cutting emissions before the fuel is readied is better. Read on.

The Carbon Logic Problem Statement | Grist. by Ken Ward

An acclaimed mountaineer, a Baptist minister and a distinguished economist were stuck in a pit. The mountain climber said, “Stand back boys, I’ll have us out in a jiffy,” but the walls of the pit were loose shale and she couldn’t gain purchase. Then the minster raised his arms high and in a deep sonorous voice called for deliverance but after an hour of prayer he too admitted defeat. Finally, the economist stood, brushed dirt of a shabby Harris tweed jacket and said, “This is easy. First, assume a ladder.”

Environmentalists are trying to get out of a deep pit too, and in our push for Waxman-Markey we are acting like the mountaineer, minister and economist. We support ACES because, well, it’s there, and we are accustomed to moving doggedly forward for the best we can get. We also hope for deliverance via a gentle greening, where fossil fuels wither away and a sustainable future of vegetable gardens, strong local communities and good jobs blossoms. Finally, we have invested in what may be termed serial delusional assumptions.

• In the beginning, we thought that Enron and others aiming to cash in on carbon trading (as they did in the sulphur market) would out-muscle fossil fuel giants.
• We believed that techno-policy crafted by tuned-in elites could be quietly slipped into place, avoiding a flat-out messy and risky political slug-fest.
• We were convinced that major corporations like BP, GE and WAL*Mart were honest in their pledge to shift away from fossil fuels and had both the means and will to do so.
• We had faith that a solid majority of the American public, properly educated, would support effective climate action, so long as we did not offend sensibilities with Chicken Little predictions.
• Finally, we now assume we can fix broken policy somewhere down the line, so anything is better than nothing. More »

Great report back from Samantha Corbin, who attended Bunge’s shareholder meeting last Friday!

“I’m more of a party crasher than someone who gets an engraved invitation. Certainly so when the party is the shareholder meeting of a billion-dollar multinational corporation like Bunge, one of the largest argribusiness and food companies in the world and a major force in the devastation of South American rainforests. I’m used to getting chucked out of these meetings for sneaking in and then challenging CEOs in front of their board and shareholders while people try not to make eye contact. Aaaawkward.

But this time was different in some surprising ways. First of all I was actually allowed to be there and participate in Bunge’s annual general meeting at the posh Sofitel Hotel in midtown Manhattan today, and while I was expecting to have to practically grab the mike and race through a statement on their destructive practices, I was able to have a ten or twelve minute open discussion with their CEO Alberto Weisser while shareholders on either side of me smiled or gave me little thumbs up. After the meeting several shareholders wanted to talk about sustainable development, and thanked me and Rainforest Action Network for bringing up these issues in the meeting.
More »

Yesterday’s Agrofuels rally at the Low Carbon Fuel Standard was, in a word, beautiful. We rode up to Sacramento in Lola, the Mexican bus (fueled by biodiesel made from recycled vege oil) and met up with students from UC Davis and allies from Rising Tide to declare our opposition to agrofuels in the Low Carbon Fuel Standard and support of the exclusion of oil from the Alberta Tarsands.

During the rally filled with chants like “No agrofuels no oil, we don’t want the world to boil” and a long list of speakers, an enormous banner that read “Agrofuels are not Low-Carbon” unfurled from the parking structure across the street. Speakers included Altacir Bunde from the Brazilian Popular Movement of Small Farmers (MCP), Brazilian documentary film maker and human rights activist Maria Luisa Mendoca, Jeff Conant from Food and Water Watch, Eric Holt Jimenez from Food First, RAN’s agrofuel program mangager Andrea Samulon, Tar sands campaigner Brant Olsen, our ED Mike Brune and others.

Afterwards we all went into the Low Carbon Fuel Standard hearing itself, with our t-shirts the read “Agrofuels are not Low Carbon”. When a representative from the ethanol industry from Brazil spoke about how clean and green ethanol from sugar cane is, many of us got up, showed our shirts and walked out. Before leaving, Maria Mendoca shouted out “He’s a liar, he’s a liar, the expansion of sugar cane for ethanol is destroying the rainforests in Brazil!”

A number of folks from our group stayed to speak, including Altacir Bunde who told the California Air Resources Board:

“The idea that the ethanol produced in Brazil is clean is not true, because in order to produce ethanol you have to burn sugar cane fields, use  toxic chemicals, dry up our ground water, clear-cut forests, and pollute what water is left with residues from the ethanol processing.   Also the production of ethanol uses more slaves than any other industry in Brazil.  Fuel production is replacing food production, and destroying communities of small farmers. Our food crisis is getting worse with the expansion of agrofuels, not only in Brazil, but around the world. Agrofuels is not a solution. We say yes to food sovereignty and no to agrofuels!”

Brant Olsen stayed back to speak  to CARB about the tar sands. He pointed out that Low Carbon Fuel standard will help keep dirty oil from Canada’s tar out of California by imposing a penalty on importers, which is great because:

a)it means California will set a global example by resisting short-sighted industry plans to dig us deeper into oil addiction

b)less tar sands should also mean less localized pollution from oil refineries down the road, since processing tar sands produces more pollution than conventional oil.

Check out our local television coverage,

our press release

our flicker site to see more photos

more online media

and an article in the Sacramento Bee

Hear Altacir Bunde and Maria Luisa Mendoca speak:

Monday April 27, 7-8:30 at UC Berkeley, 159 Mulford Hall

Tuesday April 28, 6:30-8:00 at San Francisco State, Room HSS 259

Go rock the vote!

This is democracy at its finest people – you choose the fool and then we’ll all go challenge them to stop their ridiculous and destructive fantasies of converting land for fuel.

This is no April fools joke. If you haven’t heard, biofuels are naaaasty. People are already being displaced by big agribusiness to grow crops for fuel. And, biofuels won’t get us off of fossil fuels anyway. Replacing just 10 percent of world demand for diesel for road transport with biodiesel would require 75 percent of the world’s existing soy, oil palm and rapeseed crops. Even current government mandates for these so-called renewable fuels will create enough demand for biofuels to cause food shortages and human rights and environmental catastrophes around the world.

So go vote! www.biofoolsday.org

Nominees include:

• Linda Cook, Executive Director, Shell Oil. She says that Shell will no longer invest in wind and solar energy and focus their energy solely on liquid fuels, hugely increasing the oil giants investment in biofuels.
• Hugh Grant, CEO, Monsanto. The global biofuels rush has provided a perfect new market for Monsanto’s genetically modified plants, an inevitable ingredient of biofuel feedstocks. The agribusiness giant dismisses evidence that biofuels are harmful for the environment or have anything to do with food price spikes and shortages.
• Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). He says biofuels are “contributing to a cleaner environment,” ignoring the scientific evidence that biofuel production is contributing to the rapid destruction of rainforests abroad and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico here at home.
• Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-SD). She’s trying to separate federal forest protections from biofuels policy, claiming that prohibiting the clear-cutting of our federal forests for biofuel production keeps us dependent on foreign oil. (Is she forgetting that we are dependent on food and the planet’s biodiversity too?)
• Sen. John Thune (R-SD). A longtime proponent of biofuels, he wants to increase the amount of biofuels that can be blended into gasoline, remove forest protections and the global warming standards in biofuels policy.
• Patricia Woertz, CEO, Archer Daniels Midland. A former Chevron executive before coming to ADM, Woertz is leading the agroenergy charge. ADM is a leading importer of palm oil, a popular biofuel feedstock and a leading cause of deforestation in Southeast Asia.

A new study released in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution finds that while palm oil may pose the most direct threat to the highest number of endangered species on earth, most people are unaware of the danger. Palm oil producers are adopting the tried and true techniques of coal and oil producers to greenwash the damage their products are doing.

“Why have efforts by conservationists failed to halt the expansion of oil palm plantations at the expense of tropical forests? We contend that part of the reason could be the aggressive public relations campaigns undertaken by the oil palm industry to promote public acceptance of palm oil and to dismiss the concerns of conservation biologists and environmentalists,” Koh and Wilcove write. “It is not unlike the campaign that some energy companies waged against efforts to curb global climate change.”

All of this is even more problematic since the new Obama administration has jumped on the agrofuels bandwagon – and plans to double our nation’s investment in so-called biofuels as part of his overall environmental strategy. Agrofuels are one of the major forces driving the increased production of palm oil in Southeast Asia and in Latin America. We need new policies limiting agrofuels and their negative environmental and social consequences, not policies requiring more of them.

Read more here.

While watching the presidential debates last night, the first thing I noticed was that Stephen Colbert is right: John McCain sticks out his tongue more often than a lizard on a hot Arizona day.

The second thing I noticed was that McCain said some interesting things about biofuels (or, as we call them, agrofuels):

“Government spending has gone completely out of control… I know how to eliminate programs. I have fought against – well, one of them would be… a number of subsidies for ethanol. I oppose subsidies for ethanol because I thought it distorted the market and created inflation. Senator Obama supported those subsidies. I would eliminate the tariff on sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil.”

Now, I’m fairly used to routinely disagreeing with McCain on just about every issue. (After all, this is the guy who voted against making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday and consistently opposes increases in the Federal minimum wage.) But on this one, I have to admit that I agree with the guy. Kinda.

In the 2006 State of the Union Address, President Bush said that the U.S. should replace 75% of imported oil with alternative fuels – including corn-based ethanol – by 2025. Many environmentalists thought that supporting this was a no-brainer – after all, burning agrofuels is less polluting, and agrofuels don’t require any nasty wars for us to get them out of the ground and into our gas tanks.

The problem was that lots of people were only really thinking about the environmental cost of burning agrofuels, and weren’t thinking about the cost of producing them.

One of the big problems with corn-based ethanol is that U.S. agriculture is incredibly mechanized – and, thus, that producing corn for ethanol in the U.S. actually costs more in terms of carbon emissions than it saves. According to a research study by two top ecologists, a liter of corn-based ethanol contains 5,100 kilocalories of energy – but it takes 6,600 kilocalories worth of fossil fuels (diesel for the farm machinery, petroleum to make fertilizers and pesticides, etc.) to produce enough corn for that liter of ethanol. The idea that corn-based ethanol saves fossil fuels is a complete boondoggle: you’re actually using less fossil fuels if you just put gas straight into your gas tank, rather than using it even more petroleum to make the same amount corn-based ethanol.

In fact – as Old Man Grumpus pointed out in last night’s debates – corn-based ethanol production in the U.S. would be totally financially impossible if it weren’t for massive government subsidies. Already in 2006, the U.S. government handed out $5.1 billion in ethanol subsidies; rather than going to small family farmers throughout the Midwest, however, these subsidies are going to a handful of massive U.S. agribusinesses. Archer Daniels Midland alone made up 28% of the U.S. ethanol market in 2006. And as ethanol subsidies skyrocket, a handful of corporations are reaping the profits: ADM’s profits increased a whopping 107% between 2005 and 2007, while agribusiness giant Cargill’s profits increased 156% between 2006 and 2008.

So, as McCain suggested, why not just shift agrofuels production to countries in the Global South – where agriculture doesn’t use as much fossil fuels, and where you can grow crops (like sugarcane) that are more fuel-efficient?

Well, it’s not quite that simple.

The biggest problem with agrofuels isn’t that they cost a lot, or that they suck up more fossil fuels than they save. It’s that producing enough agrofuels to power our planet’s gas-guzzlers takes a heck of a lot of farmland – which results both in massive deforestation, and in displacing subsistence crops that people need in order to feed their families.

And we’ve seen this happening a lot in the last few years. Much like the U.S., the EU has decided that 10% of transport fuel needs to be made up of “renewable fuels” by 2020. But in order to produce this much agrofuels, Europe would have to convert more than half of its existing farmland to agrofuels production – which is, needless to say, impossible. So, instead, the Europeans are buying palm oil from Southeast Asia – which is fueling massive deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia. (Thus, the Indonesian palm oil industry plans on expanding palm oil plantations by 40,000 square miles by 2020 – an amount of rainforest the size of Kentucky.)

And if the land being used to grow agrofuels doesn’t come from burning forests, it usually comes from displacing crops that people need in order to eat. Rising global food prices have been sparking riots and protests by poor people across the world – and yet, while the Bush Administration blames food prices on rising oil costs and China, a leaked World Bank report in July 2008 found that increased agrofuels consumption in the U.S. and Europe has caused global food prices to rise 75%. As the UK’s former chief government science adviser put it, “all we are doing by supporting [agrofuels] is subsidizing higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change.” 

The fuel to fill our SUVs with agrofuels is coming out of the bellies of poor people in the Global South (figuratively, not literally).

And that points to the part of McCain’s argument that I disagree with. It’s not a matter of switching corn-based ethanol for sugarcane-based ethanol, or palm oil-based ethanol. It’s a matter of recognizing, once and for all, that agrofuels are a false solution.

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.