Thursday September 14, 2006

Starving the people to feed the cars

washingtonpost.com, business-times.asia1.com.sg :

Plans for new ethanol distilleries and biodiesel refineries are announced almost daily, setting the stage for an epic competition. In a narrow sense, it is one between the world's supermarkets and its service stations. More broadly, it is a battle between the world's 800 million car owners, who want to maintain their mobility, and the world's two billion poorest people, who simply want to survive. Whenever the food value of a crop drops below its fuel value, the market will convert it into fuel. Ultimately, this dynamic risks driving up world food prices, destabilising governments in low-income nations and disrupting global economic growth.

Ours is not the first society to face a predicament of this kind. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond assesses our current civilisation against the backdrop of earlier ones, some of which recognised only too late how their future depended on safeguarding their basic resources. What salt levels, deforestation and soil erosion foretold for past societies, high oil prices could reveal about our own. Among the many environmental threats to our future - increasing CO2 levels, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, falling water tables and shrinking forests - the depletion of oil reserves may be the most immediate for our oil-based global civilisation.

Like earlier civilisations, we face a choice. When the Sumerians got into trouble on the food front, they substituted barley for wheat, which delayed but did not prevent their ultimate decline. We are similarly substituting ethanol for oil, treating the symptoms rather than the cause. The question is whether we will move quickly enough to reduce our dependence on oil, or whether we will continue with business as usual.

Lester Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of 'Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble' (Earth Policy Institute).

- Discussion of the food-vs-fuel debate and even some thoughts on societal collapse being published on Washington Post and re-printed on Business Times, Singapore? That's something.

See also :

1. Malaysian government may revoke some biodiesel licences
2. Malaysia suspends biodiesel effort
3. So much for biodiesel

(2006-09-14 13:00:13 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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