Saturday, 10th January 2009
Environmental Breakthrough or Green Light for Greed?
After months of tortuous debate, the European Parliament has finally approved the Climate and Energy Package. But greed instead of care has become the defining feature of our strategy for tackling climate change with the race to produce biofuels potentially threatening millions of lives.
The issue of global food security is now a reality. In the last year, many developing countries experienced riots in protest against escalating food prices. But despite an expanding world population with an extra six million people (slightly greater than the population of Scotland) being born every month, we continue to take millions of hectares out of food production every year to produce biofuels.
By 2030 the world population will have expanded by such an extent that we will require a 50% increase in food production to meet anticipated demand. By 2080, global food production will need to double. Yet production is declining rather than expanding.
Vast tracts of the Amazonian and Indonesian rain forests are being torn up to make way for biofuel crops like palm oil or to grow maize, to replace US maize converted to ethanol. This wanton destruction releases millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere and removes, permanently, the ability of the rainforest to act as a carbon sump.
In Scotland, the same destructive pattern is being pursued. Recent research by the John Muir Trust into the impacts of wind farms has confirmed the damaging effect of constructing giant wind turbines on sensitive upland habitats and, in particular, on deep peat land. The impact of such wind developments damages the environment and adds to global warming.
Like rainforests, deep peat land is a natural global sink for CO2 and disrupting these sensitive habitats with giant turbines and their associated concrete foundations, access roads, pylons, borrow pits and cabling trenches destroys the peat bog and releases vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere.
This renders the whole development CO2 negative in terms of its impact on climate change. Such developments also prevent the peat bog from continuing to function as a carbon sump, as well as destroying important habitats for wildlife.
Allowing wind farms to be built on such sites is the Scottish equivalent of cutting down rain forests in the Amazon. Scotland has a unique resource in these precious upland areas and the service they provide to the environment, both nationally and globally, should be carefully assessed before any consideration is given to allowing their disruption.
By adopting the Climate and Energy Package, the EU will achieve its targets by 2020 – a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, a 20 per cent improvement in energy efficiency and a 20 per cent share for renewables in the EU energy mix.
National targets must be achieved by member states through promoting the use of renewable energy to ensure that by 2020, it will make up at least 20% of the EU's total energy consumption.
This means that the UK must increase its target for renewable energy from 1.3% to 15% by 2020.
Biofuels, electricity and hydrogen should account for at least 10% of the EU's total fuel consumption in all forms of transport.
Fuel suppliers must reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by extraction or cultivation, including land use changes, transport and distribution, processing and combustion of transport fuels (i.e. fossil fuels like petrol, diesel, gas oil and biofuels) of up to 10% by 2020.
This package of proposals must be welcomed since any decision to move towards renewable energy must be sustainable.
But a policy of expanding biofuel production should not be rushed into without considering its effect on the environment and the consequences for developing nations. Practical solutions should be sought to meet the world’s needs rather than responding to unworkable targets.
A value must be placed on the world’s rainforests and peat bogs. They are our global air-conditioning systems.
Greedy power companies should not think the EU strategy is a green light for amassing profits at the expense of the environment.
