Why biofuels are not a good idea

If you have always been thinking that biofuels are not a good idea, this book by Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi will tell you exactly why.

Last year, I was engaged in a public debate on energy with a high level senior official of the Italian government - a "technocrat" if you like to use this term. When I expressed strong doubts about biofuels as a source of energy, his reaction was aggressive. He attacked me personally, hinting that I was on the payroll of the oil industry, since it is obvious that they don't like biofuels. He added that this fact was proven by the statements against biofuels issued by the Saudi ministry of petroleum. Besides, he said, speaking against biofuels is a way to prevent the poor of Brazil from reaping the goods that globalization will bring to them as soon as the biofuel world market of ethanol will be liberalized.(*)

Debates are always a learning experience, this one was no exception. One of the things I learned is that technocrats are just politicians who don't have to worry too much about their constituency. As politicians, their instinct in the debate is to go immediately for the personal attack; it is a strategy honed to perfection through thousands of years of political debate. My opponent applied it without worrying too much about the contradiction implied in accusing me of being on the payroll of the oil industry - think that I have spent the past ten years preaching the arrival of peak oil!

Another thing that I learned from that debate is how, by now, the biofuel industry has become so big that it is already politically incorrect to speak in public against biofuels. If you do that, you are bound to take plenty of flak; which is what happened to me. If you want to survive this kind of attacks, you must be very well prepared on the subject. For this purpose, you may find a lot of help in the recent book "The Biofuel Delusion" by Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi. If you are unsure about why exactly biofuels are the disaster that they are, this book will explain to you that on the basis of a rigorous analysis and plenty of data. It is unfortunate (actually, it is a scandal) that it is so expensive; almost 70 dollars for a copy. But if you are engaged in the energy debate, it is a good investment.

Biofuels are a complex matter and Giampietro and Mayumi use almost 300 pages to eviscerate it in all its aspects. The main point of their analysis is based on fundamental physics: the efficiency of photosynthesis is low and the result is that the areas needed for cultivation are large. If we are thinking of amounts of biofuels comparable to the present needs for transportation, the task is simply unthinkable: there would be no space left for food production. As the authors flatly state at page 128 of the book, "Full substitution of fossil energy with agro-biofuels is impossible."

The large area needed is only one of the problems with biofuels. More in general, agriculture is a good technology for producing food, but it is terribly expensive in terms of the resources it requires. It needs land, water, fertilizers, pesticides, mechanical work; all supplies that normally come from fossil fuels. Taking all that into account, the EROEI (energy return for energy invested) of biofuels is generally low; unless the invested energy is supplied by low cost human labor, as it is the case for Brazilian sugar cane. Apart from Brazil, the need of an energy subsidy in the form of fossil fuels makes biofuels unable to deliver their promise of being a "sustainable" technology. They can't help us in reducing our dependency on fossil fuels nor in reducing the emission of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Of course, the biofuel story is more complex than that and Giampietro and Mayumi examine the whole spectrum of possibilities in their book. Are there better biofuels? Or, perhaps, ways of using the present form of biofuels in a more effective way? Yes, of course; there is the promise of "second generation" fuels (cellulosic ethanol) and the possibility of cultivating marginal areas, unsuitable for food production. But the physical factors of the problem don't change much and, right now, biofuels and conventional agriculture are already competing for land and resources. One of consequences may be the increase increase in food prices that we have been seen during the past few years.

In the end, what do we want to do, exactly, with biofuels? Do we really think that the way to solve our energy problems is to use an inefficient technology to support an already inefficient transportation system? The only explanation I can think of for so much emphasis on biofuels is that, once a bad idea is implemented, it starts to gain momentum and then it becomes nearly impossible to stop.

At this point, you may wonder how the debate with my technocratic opponent ended. Well, I was tempted to use his own tactics and accuse him to be on the payroll of the biofuel lobby. But I am not a politician and I didn't do that; also because I saw that it was not necessary. If you have some experience in speaking in public, you soon develop a sixth sense about what your audience thinks. In this case, it was clear to me: the audience was with me, not with my technocratic opponent. They just didn't buy the idea that biofuels can solve the world's fuel problem without starving anybody - to say nothing about the idea that globalization will make the Brazilian peasants rich. Did he sense that, too? I can't say. A few months later, he got an even higher level position in the new "technocratic" Monti government in Italy.



* By the way, the recent abolition of the government subsidies on corn ethanol in the US is probably a good thing, but it does not at all end the government support on biofuels, as you can read in this interesting article by Mike Sheldon on "The Oil Drum." Note, in particular, that the abolition of subsidies comes together with the abolition of the tariff on ethanol imports from Brazil and that could make ethanol cheaper than it was with subsidies! And it remains to be seen how that will affect the Brazilian peasants. 


See also: The Earthscan's page on "The Biofuel Delusion"
Mario Giampietro's page at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

The return of "The Limits to Growth"

 

The main results of the "base case" scenario of "The Limits to Growth" study, from a recent article on the New Scientist by Debora McKenzie (available upon registration)

The return of interest in "The Limits to Growth" continues. After decades of ridicule and insults, the value of the 1972 study and of its sequels is more and more recognized. The latest item in the series of revisitations is the article published by Debora McKenzie in the New Scientist on Jan 10, 2012 and titled "Boom and Doom, revisiting prophecies of collapse" (can be read on the New Scientist site after registration)

On the whole, the article by McKenzie is very well done and it summarizes all the main points of the story: how Limits never made the mistakes it was accused to have made, how the study was demonized, and how its scenarios are still relevant to our situation today. The article has been extensively researched and it cites the opinion of most of the researchers who have been working on the reappraisal of the study and of its methods, including my book, "The Limits to Growth Revisited".

A point that is less than satisfactory in the New Scientist's article is about the relation of the Limits scenarios with the present findings of climate science. It says that Limits "was too optimistic about the future impact of pollution," but I think this is not the case. The study did contain at least one scenario in which economic collapse took place because of the rapid rise in pollution. But the main point is that Limits was perhaps the first study able to identify the interaction of pollution and the industrial system that produces it. What the authors of Limits called "persistent pollution" in 1972 could later be identified with the forcing effect of greenhouse gases. It is not possible, today,  to say whether the economy will collapse because of resource depletion or because of global warming; but that the terms of the dilemma were already clarified in 1972 must be considered as a remarkable intuition!

The other point that connects "The Limits to Growth" to climate science is the demonization treatment that the study received after its publication. This point is well covered in McKenzie's article. The smear campaign set up against Limits and its authors is surprising similar to the one unleashed in our times against climate science and against climate scientists. The only difference is that the methods used nowadays against science are much more aggressive. The authors of "The Limits to Growth" were often ridiculed and insulted; occasionally they also received death threats, but the level of abuse that climate scientists have been receiving in recent times is much higher. That is, perhaps, because the consequences of global warming on our society could be much more radical and fearsome than anything that Limits had foreseen decades ago.

This said, it is clear that we can learn a lot from the story of the Limits and its demonization. Unfortunately, one of the things we learn from history is that we almost never learn from history.

Blue ice

Coming to terms with Nature,
by Antonio Turiel

A colleague of mine is occasionally engaged in oceanographic campaigns in Antarctica. A couple of years ago he found himself revisiting an area that he had seen for the first time some 20 years earlier. Coming back, he told me many stories about his travel; of how he had seen his old oceanographic ship, his colleagues on board..... After that, he became pensive and he told me, "You know, the worst is not that each year there is more free sea. 20 years ago, the icebergs were white. Now they are blue." I said, "yes," and we both remained silent.

The color of the ice is related the amount of air which remains trapped inside. As the ice is trapped in higher depths and is more compressed, the air escapes and the ices becomes more and more blue. Those icebergs seen by my colleague hadn't seen the light of the sun for a long time; perhaps centuries......


Continue reading the complete post in Spanish, or in Italian. 

Old ladies of the Appennini mountains

Mrs. Fidalma, resident in the village "Ca' di Franca" (Arezzo) in the Appennini Mountains, Italy. She has nicely agreed to have her picture taken and shown here.  Photo taken by the author on Jan 5, 2012.

Some areas of Italy have maintained the lifestyle of a hundred years ago; especially in the mountains. In small villages, people still rely on wood for heating their houses and for cooking, as their ancestors have been doing for thousands of years, before fossil fuels appeared. Old ladies in these places still dress the way they were dressing 50 years ago, as Mrs Fidalma does in the photo above. Below, another picture, this time showing Mrs. Iliana of the village of Trecciano, in the same area of the Appennini Mountains. It gives a good idea of the nice atmosphere of a house all made in stone, heated by a fireplace.

Maybe it is a world that will disappear in a few more years, or maybe it is a world that is going to return with the gradual disappearance of fossil fuels. But, what was I doing in the mountains, in a cold day of January? Well, there are some interesting windy places, there.....

Peak everything: return to segregation in Italian trains?

This post is a bit off topic, but I thought to publish a little note on this subject because it seems to me that it illustrates how so many things are changing in this world that looks more and more "post-peak". One thing that is clearly changing is the increasing unbalance in the distribution of wealth, worldwide. An effect of this change seems to appear in some recent choices made by the Italian national railways ("Trenitalia"). The company has recently introduced a new, low-cost "fourth class" in their trains. In this class, passengers are segregated; they can't access the other three classes, where the bar and the restaurant are.

That's already nasty in itself; but what the managers of Trenitalia seemed to have in mind came up from something they published on their site. There were pictures of the passengers in all the four classes; those of the first three classes were all white, whereas those in fourth class were - imagine that - black (see above). Of course, there were protests and the image has been hastily removed from the trenitalia site after the scandal erupted. You can read the whole story (in Italian) here, and here. Trenitalia has not apologized, so far.

Things are indeed changing in this post-peak world.

Losing the war against the planet

We knew we had picked up a fight we couldn't win when we tackled a whole planet, but perhaps we didn't expect that the planet would fight back so viciously and so effectively. 2011 has been a year of environmental disasters in numbers and intensity never seen before. And we ain't seen nothing yet!

Give a look of the photos of the rout of humankind at thinkprogress and also at Desdemona Despair.



(for the Desdemona link - H.T. Cristiano Bottone)

Happy new year from Cassandra

Despite all her magic spells, sometimes even Cassandra has troubles in predicting the future.

(image: painting by John Waterhouse)

Every year, during the past few years, I have been publishing a post with my predictions for the new year on my Italian blog. I think I have been rather successful in this role of mine as Cassandra, the prophetess. Sometimes, I have been surprised myself of how accurate some of my statements have been. For instance, at the beginning of 2008 I said something about a coming financial crisis and how I expected oil prices to crash (I stated that also in English, here and here). And, at the beginning of 2011, I said that I expected big troubles for the European Union (see here, in Italian). You see? I think I should be scared of what I have been doing. But, in reality, it was nothing more than common sense, good data,  and the general attitude that things never stay the same.

So, how about the coming year? I was planning to write something about what 2012 could bring but, this time, it is beyond my possibilities; I am overwhelmed. The situation is so complex, so unstable, so desperately out of control that, really, anything can happen. And most of the things that can happen are bad. War in Middle East, the breakdown of the European Union, financial collapses, the bursting up of Arctic methane, epidemics, famines, major environmental disasters..... Anything can happen, even that 2012 could be, miraculously, a quiet year.

So, all what I can say is "happy new year" to everybody and hope, just hope, that Cassandra's predicting power could make this wish true.