By Robert E. Calem, Contributor
The virtues and failings of ethanol, biodiesel and other alternative fuel and energy sources were in sharp focus last week at the fifth bi-annual State of the Planet conference in New York.
Organized by the Earth Institute at Columbia University, it featured expert speakers who either blamed these fuels for threatening the global food supply or called them progressive.
There was consensus, though, that governments around the world must do much more to address the problem of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
“The biofuels policy we have in the U.S. and in Europe is misguided,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist and director of the Earth Institute.
It is both environmentally and economically flawed, he said, noting that the U.S. will consume 25-30 percent of its corn this year in the form of ethanol.
“Only with heavy subsidies and with a big adverse effect on the poor, who have the largest proportion of their budget in food, are we doing this policy,” he declared.
Sachs also drew a connection between biofuels and an emergency alert issued March 20 by the United Nations’ World Food Programme, which blamed a $500 million funding gap on high food prices. Wheat and maize prices have doubled in the past year and stocks of these grains are at all-time lows relative to consumption rates, Sachs noted.
“If the rich are driving by putting food in the gas tank, the poor are going to end up suffering much higher food prices, and this is just a direct market linkage,” he said.
“If we put our food into the gas tank, we’ll have less food and also less land because we’ll end up pushing the margins of deforestation.”
There will be one billion cars on the planet very soon, and growth in China, India, South Africa and other developing regions means “we may well be a world of two billion cars,” said Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, co-author of Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future (Twelve, 2007).
But while this automotive population explosion does have real negative implications for oil security, climate change and local pollution, Vaitheeswaran said much good also is on the horizon.
Today, he declared, “there is more reason for optimism than in 100 years that there is a golden age of innovation arriving at the nexus of energy and automobiles, like we saw in the age of Tesla [the scientist, not the car] and Edison and Henry Ford.”
The convergence of new business models and new technologies “creates an opportunity to move the energy world much closer to a low carbon future,” he said, adding that clean cars and clean fuels – such as advanced biofuels, electricity and hydrogen – are at the leading edge of this change.
“Whatever the fuel of the future is, and we’ll probably need a portfolio of them to move beyond oil,” Vaitheeswaran said, “cars can be part of the solution if we get oil out of the equation.”
Posted by John Apr 2, 2008 3:00 pm
