Never Give Up Hope: Stop the Biofuels Madness
Returning from the Easter break and getting back to work I had two thoughts on my mind; where is my next blog post coming from (having not read the news for four days I was short on inspiration), and how to put a more positive spin on the topic of climate change? TalkClimateChange covers a gloomy subject and occasionally needs the injection of some positive thinking..
Having scanned the headlines it seems that the world has provided answers to both my questions. First of all Thom Yorke - environmentalist and lead singer of Radiohead – provides a couple of positive words on the shift in direction which has already taken place in a relatively short space of time:
…These changes might be small, but they are in the right direction. Unlike pessimists such as James Lovelock, I don’t believe we are all doomed. It was good to hear Sir David King recently saying he was an optimist and human behaviour is changing.
As I heard George Monbiot saying not long ago, isn’t it funny how in the space of a year we went from listening to sceptics who denied this was happening to suddenly saying we’re all doomed - how interesting that both scenarios demand that we do nothing. That can’t be right.
You should never give up hope.
(read in full)
The words “Do nothing” lead nicely to the most important and positive news of the weekend – a call by UK chief environment scientist Robert Watson to delay a potentially “insane” government policy demanding mandatory inclusion of biofuels at pumps across the UK.
Biofuel is a convenient fix offered and supported by the “do nothing” crowd. Use of biofuels was seen as a politically convenient option to reduce carbon emissions without asking people to make any changes to current behaviour, and their use has been mandated by both EU and US governments in complete ignorance of the complexities involved. As Watson has said, Biofuel policy in the UK and EU may have “run ahead of the science”.
Thankfully, the negative impacts of bio-fuels are now becoming better and more widely understood – particularly their negligible impact on Co2 emissions, disastrous impact on world food supply and potential for further environmental decay through changing land use.
Hopefully we are slowly learning that tackling climate change will require complex solutions to complex problems – political, scientific, social and financial. Fortunately, mankind has excelled at these challenges throughout history.
You should never give up hope.
But many will question why energy experts promoting biofuels in the EU were allowed to go unchallenged so long by the views on biofuels of agriculture specialists or soil scientists.
This is the end of the call for delaying bio-fuels news article.
Let me tell you how it happened, the same loud know-it-all environmentalists that run around shouting about AGW and promoting bio-fuels. They drowned out any voices of concern and discredited the people making the claims, that is what they do, they have a concensus have you not heard?
Why listen to someone who has an objective opinion when you can ram a policy down the world’s throat just to put a notch in your climate change bedpost.
I just hope people wake up and realize the environmental track-record on interventions is at best dismal, more often than not a worse situation is created. They are not the ones best suited to do anything regarding AGW or really much else, so stop listening to them on policy decisions.