Is Biofuel "a crime against humanity"?

Yes!

British Journalist Christopher Booker and Blogger Richard North raised the question in a Telegraph today. Although Booker and North are figures on the British right and sometimes go off half cocked, they are both highly intelligent and creative. Both have inquisitive and skeptical minds that are disinclined to take "official answers".

They lay the source of the crime to a faith in "renewables". The leadership of the European Union endorsed this faith in 2007 by stipulating that by 2020 10% of European motor fuel was to come from renewable sources. This decision was very ill conceived on both environmental and humanitarian grounds. The even before the decision was made, enterprising businessmen were clearing rain forests in tropical countries to grow plant oil producing crops. Food crops like corn and soybeans were also diverted from human food consumption to fuel production, with staggering humanitarian consequences. Coupled with growing demand for food in the newly emerging economies of Asia, a food shortage crisis began to emerge. Now this crime cannot be laid solely at the feet of European leaders, the Bush administration and the United States Congress have surely played a role, and Brazil among other countries has been a biofuel offender.

Booker and North call attention to what can best be described as failed EU energy policy as one of componants of the crime:

"Internal European Commission documents show that, as late as January 2007, when officials were discussing that 10 per cent target, they saw it not as an answer to global warming but only as a way to increase the EU's "energy self-sufficiency". They were also aware that switching huge areas of farmland from food to fuel would drive up world food prices."

"Indeed a 2006 report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had already suggested that for the EU to meet its 10 per cent target from home-grown biofuels would require a staggering 70 per cent of arable land to be taken out of food production, necessitating a huge increase in EU food imports. Even worse, by the end of 2006 the Commission was aware that the world was about to face a food shortage."

"Yet, in attempting to show that enough acreage would be available to meet the new biofuels target, the officials indulged in "Enron accounting", using the same areas of land three times."

Booker and North call attention to a 2005 Cornell University study that suggested that far from being an major source of unique energy, biofuel production consumed 29% more energy than it yielded.

It was estimated that 55 million tons of U.S. corn was going into ethanol in 2006, nearly 1/6th of the American grain harvest. The consequence was an increase in the price of the basic food staple of the Mexico City poor, corn tortillas. In 2007 massive demonstrations against the increase of tortilla prices rocked Mexico. Food price inflation has become a world wide phenomena. "We're seeing many people being priced out of the food markets for the first time," said Josette Sheeran, who is executive director of the Rome based World Food Program. According to Mrs. Sheeran, the amount of food that her agency can afford to buy for hungry children had dropped 40% fduring the last 5 years due to food price inflation.

One would think that such a massive amount of food diverted to fuel use in the United States, that a significant amount of fuel would be produced. Yet in 2006 this was not the case. In 2006, corn ethanol produced in the United States, represented only 3% of its automotive fuel. Not enough to put a dent in the growing oil shortage, not enough to affect the subsequent gasoline price rise, and certainly not enough to justify the crime against humanity that diverting the food of the world's poor in order to satisfy the economic demands of the American farm lobby, "Green" fanatics, and clueless European political leaders.

Unfortunately Booker and North sully their otherwise excellent report by doing a song and dance in favor of global warming skepticism. Unfortunately because they have a message that needs to be heard. Biofuel is most assuredly a "crime against humanity."