Apparently the Europeans are finally realizing that in the push to start using more biofuels they may be endangering the rainforests.
In a word: d'uh!
Ok, maybe I'm being too hasty here, but most certainly the Europeans are finding that there are always unintended consequences. Moving to biofuels means they will need to have the bio materials to generate the fuels from. Where to get the bio materials? From renewable resources - plants being the most likely and best resource. Ok, but where to grow those plants? Ooops.
The land for growing the plant life that would be turned into fuels is a finite amount. Or at least it would be if we weren't felling more of the trees in the tropical rainforests and in turn expanding into agricultural uses of that land.
So, the Europeans have noticed this potential problem and are working towards trying to put in restrictions that would keep away these unintended consequences. Good for them. But then again, they are also running into the issue of serious competition for the agricultural produce from the finite amount of agricultural use lands in the world. Meaning: humans need food, our food needs food, and much of that food is fruit or vegetable plant life. We grow corn to feed to cattle, chicken, and other live stock. We grow corn to eat ourselves. We grow corn to turn into mazola oil. And now we're trying to grow corn to turn into ethanol. All of these things are competing for the corn that is being grown, running up costs, and using up the harvests everywhere, which in turn leads countries to trying to expand their farm lands, which in turn could lead back to the rainforests being encroached upon to be turned into more standard farm lands.
Vicious cycle for sure.
As the article I'll be linking for reference (and inspiration for these comments) notes, we (society) are trying to be careful to start using other materials for these potential biofuels, but the amount of energy that is gained is, at least currently, not enough to make these other things worth using. We expend more energy to turn these other bio items into fuel than we get back, or almost more energy than we get back, from the eventual output. What sense does that make?
I'm glad to see biofuels becoming hot topics for research and development, but again I hope we proceed cautiously and in ways that don't screw up other areas of the environment as we try to combat global warming, and try to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, coal, and other "dirty" sources of energy.
Original article that inspired these thoughts: Europe's move to biofuels threatens rainforest (from Financial Times and MSNBC)
