The Biofuels Deception. Okbazghi Yohannes

to greater economic growth, job creation, and foreign exchange earnings. Indeed, they never run out of rationalizations to justify biofuels. For example, when the 2007–08 global financial crisis drove home the ripple effects of the competition between food, feed, and biofuels, nearly simultaneous price hikes for staple food grains and oil seeds were enacted due to the diversion of substantial quantities of food crops to biofuels.

      For the fossil resources industrial agriculture depends on for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil fuels, the biofuel peddlers and their intellectual minions refined their arguments. First, even though they partially conceded that there could be a conflict between food and fuel, they quickly adjusted their contention that such a problem could be one of management rather than scarcity. It was at this point that they brought on board the biotechnology gurus to supply more bio-rationalizations in defense of the supposed sustainability of biofuels. For the biotech companies, the “food versus fuel” debate now became a heaven-sent opportunity to penetrate the global food ecology. Presumably, genetic engineering of crops and plants could endlessly supply grains and plants that could satisfy the demand for food and green fuels without any impact on the global food ecology and global grain market. Second, when the evidence began to show the adverse relationship between food and biofuels, proponents began to argue in favor of second-generation biofuels, derived from agricultural and forest residues, nonedible plants such as eucalyptus, pines, poplars, and willows, and a vast mix of grasses. Although this book will cover their rationalizations in full in later chapters, several points must be clarified at this juncture.

      First, the drive for biofuel production has already led to the ferocious expansion of giant monoculture plantations of soybeans, oil palm, sugarcane, jatropha, corn, cassava, sweet sorghum, sweet potato, and related bioenergy crops and plants, displacing tens of millions of subsistence farmers and indigenous peoples in the tropics and subtropics. The escalation of industrial monoculture has brought with it the urgency to convert forests, savannahs, and grasslands into arable land. Second, even though biotechnology corporations exuberantly and falsely try to reassure the public that biofuels derived from GE (genetically engineered) crops and GE trees would not only make the “food versus fuel” debate a non-issue but also contribute to the solution of global hunger, fuel shortage, and climate change, the recourse to GM of crops and plants under the mask of increasing production will likely be dangerous in the long run from the standpoint of both public health and biodiversity preservation. The commercial genetic manipulation of food crops aims at the homogenization of crops to make them responsive to inputs supplied by the same companies. Moreover, the use of genetically engineered trees for biofuel production and wood pellets is likely to lead to genetic contamination of native vegetation.⁵⁵

      In summary, analysis of the ecological relations of production clearly indicates that biofuel production and pyrolysis-driven electricity generation are unsustainable. Limitless growth requires limitless supply of throughputs, but the earth’s capacity to supply them is limited. Concomitant with the geometric progression of industrial production during the twentieth century, the appropriation of biomass increased by a factor of 3.6 per year, the extraction of ores and minerals grew by 27, fossil fuels by 12, and construction materials grew by a factor of 34. Annual natural resource extraction and use soared from 5 billion metric tons in 1900 to 55 billion metric tons in 2000, and it is projected to increase to 100 billion by 2030 and 140 billion metric tons by 2050 as developing countries continue to play catch-up with advanced countries, in an effort to eradicate hunger and alleviate poverty. The commercial appropriation of natural resources and consumption have grown in parallel with the widening and deepening of neoliberal globalization, as seen in the fact that the global trade of raw materials grew from 5.4 billion metric tons in 1970 to 19 billion metric tons in 2005. The appropriation of natural throughputs in the quantities described above not only undermines the regenerative capacity of nature but also its waste absorption capacity, because the release of waste is proportional to the natural resources processed into goods and services. For example, the extraction and consumption of 140 billion metric tons of natural resources is projected to lead to the quadrupling of carbon emissions. Note that although the total global biocapacity in 2010 was 12 billion hectares, the world’s ecological footprint was 18.1 billion hectares, overshooting the ecology’s capacity to regenerate, much less to supply all the throughput demanded. This means that the world has been using the equivalent of the biocapacity of 1.5 planet Earths. By the turn of the twentieth century, three of the nine planetary boundaries requisite for a fully regenerative planet—biodiversity loss, climate change, and nitrogen cycle—were considered already crossed. And while the world today needs 1.5 Earths to meet the demands that the world is currently making on the only planet we have, three or four planets will be needed by 2050 to meet the projected increases in demand for natural resources.⁵⁶ So the deployment of overaccumulated capital to bioenergy crop and plant production to generate liquid biofuels and wood pellets could potentially push nature to a tipping point. The huge investments in large-scale industrial agriculture and monoculture tree plantations have already begun to erode the global forest ecology. The long-term effect of the loss of vast tropical forests relates to their impact on ecosystem dynamics, climate, carbon sequestration, and hydrologic cycle. The interpenetration of geo-ecological spaces and meteorological conditions amplifies the negative consequences of unrestrained expansion of natural resource exploitation into virtually all components of nature. It matters little whether the harm is done in any particular country; the effects will be felt throughout the biosphere. The complex interpenetration of geo-ecological spaces and hydrometeorological conditions is such that even the Amazon and Congo basin rainforests are interconnected through biogeochemical cycles and other bio-hemispheric processes, with profound implications for climatic conditions and precipitation regimes not only on each other but also on other regions. The two tropical regions are connected by the natural back and forth oscillation of atmospheric movements across the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, heavy rainfall and floods in the Congo basin coincide with droughts in the Amazon basin and vice-versa. Moreover, these precipitation patterns affect the climate and hydrology of other regions. For example, recent observations of these weather patterns indicate the annual deforestation of the Congo basin by 1.5 million hectares resulted in rainfall decrease in the Great Lakes region of the United States by between 5 and 15 percent; a similar impact had been discerned in Ukraine and some parts of Russia.⁵⁷

      The invaluable extrapolation made from this record supports the conclusion that the 200 million hectares of tropical rainforests lost between 1950 and 1990 and the 427 million hectares of additional tropical forests that underwent significant degradation have had important bearings on local, regional, and global climate and rainfall patterns. To fully appreciate the centrality of tropical forests to climate regulation and carbon sequestration, it is useful to remember that, of the 670 billion metric tons of carbon stored in terrestrial vegetation, 86 percent is securely sequestered in the tropics and subtropics. When 100-year-old tropical trees are burned for energy or to make way for farms, they release their heavy loads of CO₂ rapidly. It will take 100 years to fully recapture the emitted carbon by growing their replacement. In the meantime, the CO₂ will still be in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, worsening climate change.⁵⁸

      It is in conjunction with these ecological relations of production that we must assess the contributions of ecological economists to the consequences of the addition of biofuel production to the capital accumulation process. Contemporary ecological economists have certainly dented the neoclassical hold on the research community in the industrial countries in four critical ways. First, ecological economists have rightly pointed out that the earth is a thermodynamically closed system in that it cannot import matter from outer space nor can it export its waste material to outer space. In this sense, our planet is physically bounded. It thus stands to reason that ecological resources become the constraining factor in an economy that is a subsystem of the ecological system. The economy has no luxury to import low-entropy throughput from outer space or to export its high-entropy wastes outside its own sphere. This supposes that the thermodynamic and biological operations of our physical world can be sustained only when there is a correspondence between the levels of available physical stocks and levels of a population whose needs must be reasonably met. In Herman Daly’s formulation, long-term sustainability can be had only under steady-state conditions, in which the economy reflects the total available stocks of material wealth and the total population, all held constant