EU Referendum


Energy: EU deception on biofuels


17/09/2012



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Reuters is getting terribly excited about a claimed major shift in biofuel policy, reporting that the EU commission has announced that it plans to limit crop-based biofuels to five percent of transport fuel.

Strangely, this does not appear to be a routine or even planned announcement. Rather, it source seems to be a written statement by EU commissioners Günther Oettinger (Energy) and Connie Hedegaard (Climate Action), delivered to EurActiv.com in response to an Oxfam report calling for the scrapping of EU "biofuel mandates".

Oxfam, of course, is madly in love with the idea of climate change, but has taken against biofuels – which are currently produced supposedly as a means of reducing the global carbon signature. It claims that, if the land used to produce biofuels for the EU in 2008 had been used to produce wheat and maize instead, it could have fed 127 million people for the entire year.

It is completely unacceptable, says this campaigning group, that we are burning food in our petrol tanks while poor families go hungry. EU governments have it within their power to make a difference to the lives of millions of hungry people. It's time to scrap EU biofuel mandates.

The current commission statement declared in response to this states that, "It is wrong to believe that we are pushing food-based biofuels", adding the commission is proposing to limit them to the current consumption level – five percent up to 2020.

Post-2020, the commission's "clear preference" is that biofuels should be produced from non-food feedstocks, like waste or agricultural residues such as straw, which are not in competition with food and do not require additional land.

Interestingly, there is nothing new about this. The commission's intention was actually leaked a week ago, and nothing has changed since. Change will require the approval of member states, and since a formal proposal has still not been published, this cannot yet be given.

Thus, this has all the hallmarks of a publicity coup by Oxfam, which has had the Guardian hyping its report all day. Ironically, this includes an attack on the use of jatropha, so admired by climate guru Rajendra Pachauri, with his $9.4 million stake in biofuels made from this crop. 

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But all this misses the real story, which Booker and I highlighted in July 2008 (above), when it was already known that the biofuels target was extremely damaging.

Then, more than four years ago, a United Nations official was describing the rush for biofuels as a "a crime against humanity", while the British Government, published a review urging a slowdown in the move to biofuels.

A key recommendation of this Gallagher Report, however, was that, beyond five percent, biofuel after 2013-14 should only be agreed by governments if the fuels were demonstrated as sustainable, including avoiding indirect effects such as change in land use.

Thus, right on cue, the EU commission is about to propose precisely that which was suggested those four years ago, dressing it up as a response to the current Oxfam report. The 10 percent target for 2020, agreed in 2007, is to remain, and the amount of land given over to biofuels (much of it in developing countries) is not to be reduced.

To call this "smoke and mirrors" would be too restrained. This is government by deception.