The Biofuels Deception. Okbazghi Yohannes

pellets, wood pulp, bio-based goods and bioplastics, could affect the biochemical cycles in ways that would impact climate and hydrology. Through reactive nitrogen mobilization to make fertilizer, for example, we change the nitrogen cycle by generating nitrous oxide, which contributes to the thickening of atmospheric greenhouse gases and results in climate change since nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat.

      The crucial point here is that the global physical system is thermodynamically closed in the sense that the global environment exchanges energy in the form of solar radiation but does not exchange matter with the solar system. However, the economy is open as a subsystem of the global environment, exchanging both energy and matter. The economy continuously receives throughput from the environment on one end of the loop and exports waste to the environment on the other end of the loop. As environmental economist Charles Perrings put it, the first interaction entails extractions from the environment in terms of depletion of virgin resources, and the second interaction involves general degradation of natural resources or insertions of pollution into the ecological system.¹⁶ Since the economy entails continuous material transformations, it thus stands to reason that ecological sustainability becomes a function of the difference between ecological capacity to provide goods and services and the quantity of insertions of high entropic wastes into the environment. This epistemological position is sound when considering how the hyperacceleration of capitalist growth in the last half-century gutted the biocapacity of the earth. Jeffrey Sachs¹⁷ recently calculated that the gross products the world is poised to produce by 2050 could be between $380 and $420 trillion compared to the $67 trillion produced in 2007 or to the $5 trillion produced in 1950. The global ghg emissions could be equally staggering, growing from 36 billion metric tons in 2007 to 87 billion metric tons by 2050. Sachs’s computation bears a powerful validation, supported by empirical evidence from China and India. The Chinese economy grew by 1,400 percent between 1980 and 2006 reaching $4.4 trillion by devouring massive quantities of virgin resources. At the same time, China’s emissions of CO₂ from burning fossil fuels went up from 407 million metric tons in 1980 to 1,665 million metric tons in 2006. Similarly, India’s GDP grew by 600 percent to $1.2 trillion over the same period, while its output of ghg emission increased from 95 million metric tons in 1980 to 411 million metric tons in 2006.¹⁸

      What emerges from the preceding discussion are three cardinal principles for observing the laws of evolutionary biology and thermodynamics: sustainable scale, allocative efficiency, and social justice, which together define the organic compatibility between nature’s biocapacity and human needs. A violation of any of these principles will throw the relationship into fundamental disequilibrium, eventually resulting in an ecological system crash. How sheepherders in Iceland resolved a potential tragedy of the commons that was destroying their livelihoods should illuminate the point.

      Several hundred years ago, the herders saw that grassland was on the verge of total collapse due to overgrazing by too many sheep. To save their collective welfare from utter destruction, the sheep owners took a decisive action to limit the number of the sheep by assigning quotas to all sheep herders in what they considered was compatible with the grassland’s carrying capacity. The grassland was restored to its previous state; so were the sheep wool and wool goods industry, with each sheep owner handsomely benefiting from the result.¹⁹ This is a vivid illustration of how a given mode of production to meet human needs must come to congruity with nature’s capacity to provide the needed throughputs and sinks if potential collapse of the system is to be averted. However, in the capitalist mode of production an unresolvable dilemma is that comporting with the natural order of things is as antithetical to capital’s endless growth mandate as it is beyond the moral scope of owners of capital.

      The fundamental question that arises here is the extent to which the substitution of biofuels for fossil fuels could either halt or simply accelerate the metabolic transformation of natural resources and hence entropic degradation. This question invokes a note of caution in that the role of biofuels in the ecological balance is not monocausal, but rather additive to the causes of ecological depletion, degradation, and pollution from all sectors of the system. So giving material basis to the answer to the question requires situating the drive for biofuels in the ecological relations of production. As sociologist Lakshman Yapa correctly points out, the proper point of departure in the ontological recognition of the primacy of the environment begins with a focus on the ecological relations of production. Ecological relations of production are dynamic and complex relationships that exist between humans and nature, mandating a clear understanding of nature as a self-organizing, self-directing, and self-regulating living system, on the one hand, and as a “transformation of material into use values through the application of information, energy, and labor,” on the other. Furthermore, “Production uses the ecosystem not only as a source of energy and matter but also as a repository of waste products, thus continually defining a myriad of interactions within the biophysical environment.”²⁰

      Thus the imperative to understand and protect the biophysical conditions of production becomes the first order of importance, as preservation of the biophysical conditions are central to the ecology’s continuous regeneration through self-fertilization, biological control of natural enemies, and self-cleansing, following the dictates of its own natural rhythm of temporal and spatial evolution. If collective human demands on the ecology for throughputs and sinks overwhelm and undermine its biocapacity to regenerate and self-cleanse in accord with the laws of evolutionary biology and thermodynamics, the result is the degradation of the biophysical conditions of production as has happened in the past. The reason for the demise of the Mayan civilization was the overuse of natural resources, leading to the complete deforestation and disintegration of their life-supporting ecology. To the same degree, the reason for the decay of the Sumerian civilization, the grain basket of antiquity, was the mismanagement of the irrigation system, which was once the envy of the world.²¹ The unfortunate thing is that we do not seem to have learned from the experiences of ancient civilizations. As Herman Daly²² poignantly notes, the resource depletion-driven decay of ancient civilizations had little or no long-term impacts in terms of global environmental destruction and atmospheric deterioration, because those civilizations were largely local. Furthermore, there was still ecological room for people to move elsewhere, giving their original biosocial spheres ample time for natural restoration. But humans have long crossed the Rubicon from the empty world to the full world where every aspect of the ecological relations of production is adversely affected by the ever-growing wants for throughputs and sinks. The interpenetration of ecological spaces and the hydrometeorological conditions makes the full world a single unit, where the effect of one ecological component reverberates in other components of the living system. When Brazil cuts down Amazon forests to make wood pellets for electricity and heat generation in Great Britain, the consequent deforestation disrupts the carbon balance, eroding the Amazon forest ecology’s capacity to sequester carbon dioxide and regulate the climate, hence increasing global warming. When Indonesia converts millions of hectares of peatland into oil palm plantations in order to satisfy European demand for biodiesel, an inordinate amount of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere that affects every nation. When Ecuador converts tens of thousands of mangrove forests into industrial fish farms to raise shrimp for export to North America, the liquidation of the mangrove forests entails subtraction of invaluable natural assets from the global stock of forests that provide crucial ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, shoreline stabilization, coastal protection against erosion, and critical habitat and food for a galaxy of species.

      During the second half of the twentieth century, demography and the hyperacceleration of the capitalist transformation of use value into exchange value conspired to break up the homeostatic interactions between human societies and nature. Demographically, when Thomas Robert Malthus revised his essay in 1825 on the relationship between population and food supply, the number of humans on the planet barely graced the one billion mark; one hundred years later that number doubled; today we have crossed the 7 billion threshold, projected to reach over 9 billion by 2050. This means that the aggregate demands that humans are making on the ecology of the already full world to meet our nutritional needs and dispose of our waste have exponentially grown, undermining nature’s biocapacity for regeneration and self-cleansing. For example, at the turn of the nineteenth century, forests had covered 5 billion hectares, which dropped to less than