Environment
Don’t put wildlife in your tank - The RSPB urges caution in thinking bio fuels as the green solution
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| Skylark on fence post with barbed wire. Picture: Chris Gomersall (rspb-images.com) |
A WELL-KNOWN oil company once exhorted us to "put a tiger in your tank". From April 15 this year, you will be able to fill your tank not only with tigers but with elephants, birds, butterflies and monkeys. How? In a word: biofuels.
As the saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Biofuels - liquid fuels made from plants - look like a get-out-of-jail-free card in the climate change game. They seem to offer a guilt-free way to run cars and even planes on fuel made naturally from sunshine and water. What could be better?
The idea has received enthusiastic support from political leaders, keen to trumpet their green credentials. From April, all petrol and diesel sold on UK forecourts will be mixed with 2.5 per cent biofuel, rising to 5 per cent later. European leaders are considering more than doubling the biofuels target to 10 per cent across Europe. America has been subsidising the production of biofuels for years.
But there is a problem, which is that this silver bullet is beginning to look a little, well, tarnished. New research is spelling out the evidence: biofuels ain't all they're cracked up to be.
When biofuels are burnt, they release the carbon that the crops they were made from absorbed from the atmosphere while growing. That's the good, carbon-neutral bit, comparing favourably with fossil fuels, which release carbon which would otherwise have stayed safely locked up in the world's oil or peat reserves for millions more years.
But biofuel crops need fertiliser, the soil needs to be ploughed and the plants need to be harvested and processed. All this releases greenhouse gases - in many cases more than the fossil fuel equivalent. Particularly damaging is nitrous oxide, the greenhouse gas released from fertiliser. Nitrous oxide is incredibly powerful, having 114 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. A little goes a long way.
Biofuels are land-hungry, and if you're using land to grow fuel, you won't be using it to grow food. In a week in which we've seen wheat reach its highest price ever, the implications are clear. Experts say that about 30 per cent of the global wheat price rise is caused by biofuels competing with food (the rest is due to poor global harvests last year and changing diets in China and India). We know that the world's population is growing, and that for every degree the climate warms, the potential harvest drops.
How is it sensible, then, to burn food? International experts from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation have warned that the world's poorest people are likely to suffer most as biofuels force up food prices.
And then there's the question of where energy crops are grown. Producing enough biofuel to meet the UK's target would take up a third of our arable land, although it is more likely that we will import biofuels from abroad. The dash for biofuels is wiping out wildlife habitats around the world. Species-rich grassland in Germany is being ploughed up to plant corn for biogas. The Cerrado in South America, a wildlife-rich savannah with more than 550 bird species and, incredibly, 90,000 types of insect, is disappearing under soya and sugar cane farms at such a rate that it will be gone by 2030. Rainforest in Amazonia, Africa and Southeast Asia is being cleared to plant oil palm, used in food, cosmetics and, increasingly, in biofuel. Between 1994 and 2001, the number of rainforest bird species threatened with extinction in Sumatra rocketed from 45 to 119, as the island's forests were destroyed to make way for plantations.
At home, set-aside land is vanishing, abolished by the EU to make way for more crops. These patches of farmland, scattered across the countryside and left free of food crops, have become home to finches and buntings in winter, because of the ample seeds in stubbles that are now so rare on farmland elsewhere.
In spring, set-aside has been the choice nesting site for skylarks, which need open fields and can't nest in the tall, thick growth of modern autumn-planted cereals. Set-aside was always earmarked for phasing out, but the eagerness to make way for crops was so great that despite their promises, politicians have so far failed to put in place measures to replicate set-aside's environmental benefits.
There is no denying that the climate change challenge is enormous and we must do everything we can to meet it. But these unsustainable biofuels aren't the answer. The Government's biofuels' target, if it works at all, will cut our carbon emissions from transport by one or two percent. We could get the same saving by enforcing speed limits. Even making cars more efficient, using existing technology, would dwarf these savings and reduce emissions by a massive 30 per cent. And maybe we could drive less, walk and cycle more, helping both the planet and ourselves get healthier.
The RSPB ran an advert in the national press, asking everyone who was concerned to write to Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, urging her not to force them to buy unsustainable biofuel from April. More than 14,000 people did so in less than a week.
The picture is clear: we don't want to put wildlife in our tanks.
To find out more about what you can do to help wildlife on your land visit www.farmwildlife. info/ where you can submit questions to a panel of experts or read about the work other land-holders are already doing.
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