"Biofuels can be good," says UN; scientists not so sure

Please, can you be a bit more objective?

The group of "scientists" you are referring to is not independent. In fact is a group known very well for its ties to the oil industry. Ask any scientist working on bioenergy. Patzek and Pimentel have been discredited many times in the past.

What is more, their letter to the IPCC was explicitly sponsored by the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association.

So please, Greenpeace, if you want to play a role in this debate, then at least know what you're saying.

Moreover, these petro-sponsored people are not in touch with the scientific community, because they stick to old solutions, whereas we have already entered the era of negative emissions fuels and carbon-negative bioenergy and biofuels.

Why doesn't Greenpeace take climate change serious?

The concept of carbon capture may have been demonstrated technically, but whether it's commercially viable is another matter and no one has proven that yet.

Gordon Brown's speech earlier this week made reference to a project that will "explore options for demonstrating CCS with coal fired power generation in China". Note that he was talking about merely exploring options, not actually building a CCS system.

That and "a competition to build in Britain one of the world's first commercial CCS coal projects, demonstrating the full chain of CO2 capture, transport and storage" means that it hasn't been done yet. Betting our future on technology we don't even have yet (at least, not in a form any commercial operation will use) is just daft.

I'm not disputing the theory of carbon-negative biofuels, but at the moment it's just that - a theory. And surely the scale of operations needed to make a real dint in CO2 levels would bring you back to the problem of available land, deforestation and food security.

Why twiddle our thumbs waiting for a techno-fix to become viable when there are practical fixes (energy efficiency, combined heat and power etc etc) that we can implement right now to cut our emissions? It just creates the illusion that we can pretty much carry on as we are with business as usual when we need fundamental, wholesale changes to the way we live.

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It's a bit of a false way of putting things. The vast majority of scientists think biofuels offer one of the only ways of both cutting emissions as ensuring energy security. Achim Steiner is a scientist. Only a handful, sponsored by the oil industry, (see their recent letter to the IPCC, written at the request of the National Refiners Association), has been ordered to put biofuels down. Greenpeace is risking making itself irrelevant by its permanent, unfounded, and dumb war against biofuels. Greenpeace has never mentioned carbon-negative biofuels. Unlike solar, nuclear or wind, - they are merely carbon neutral - , carbon negative biofuels actually take emissions ouf of the atmosphere. These negative emissions fuels are obtained by coupling bioenergy/biofuels production to carbon capture and storage. (Google: "BECS + bioenergy" or "carbon-negative biofuels"). Why doesn't Greenpeace ever mention this? It probably doesn't because its entire war effort against biofuels would collapse. And it doesn't because it doesn't really want solutions to climate change, because that would put it out of its panic-generating business. Moreover, the FAO, the UNIDO, the IEA, the World Bank, the Worldwatch institute and many scientists have said biofuels offer a historic chance for poverty alleviation in the Global South. They have even said biofuels can help tackle global hunger. Likewise, no word about this from Greenpeace, because it is a colonialist organisation that wants to keep the poor in eternal poverty and wants to dictate them how to develop (I'm sure Greenpeace wants the hungry to start farming organic tomatos and remain vegetarian, so they can save the planet, and also die quicker). It's time for Greenpeace to try to engage in a more mature way in the biofuels debate. Otherwise it makes itself entirely irrelevant. And that would be sad, because even an NGO that uses non-scientific arguments could offer a useful contribution to it.

Readers who want to learn more about carbon-negative bioenergy and negative emissions, please search http://scholar.google.com for "negative emissions IEA" or "emissions BECS" or "carbon negative biomass". You will find several studies that take the entire lifecycle emissions into account (growing, harvesting crops, transporting and processing them in to carbon-negative energy and fuels). You will then see that you can produce electricity with A starting point could be: Climate change mitigation by biomass gasification combined with CO 2 capture and storage http://uregina.ca/ghgt7/PDF/papers/peer/440.pdf But there is much more out there. Carbon capture and storage is proven technology, and in case leakage of the CO2 would occur, there would be no net contribution to the atmosphere because the CO2 is biogenic. It would be nice if an organisation like Greenpeace takes the most radical climate change mitigation option into account. The question is: why doesn't it do so?

Interesting stuff on the source of the letter, thanks for pointing that out. I was referencing the BBC's story and hadn't gone to the trouble of looking further into the credentials of Patzek et al but here's an example of some of his earlier work. Sloppy on my part so I've also made a strikeout on the story above. Dubious motives aside, the point about biofuels not being viable in the long term is, I think, still valid - at least, not on the scale being proposed. The commitments by various nations to biofuel targets (10 per cent in the EU and 15 per cent in China by 2020) are going to put more pressure on developing economies to turn over cheap land (eg rainforests and peatlands) over to agriculture; in fact, it's already happening - see our report, Cooking the Climate. But if there's evidence around suggesting that biofuel crops can ease poverty and (I'm not sure how this works) hunger, can you provide links to the research? I'd also question the carbon negative idea. Carbon capture and storage is unproven technology even on the coal-fired power stations it's normally associated with, and if it works it won't capture the emissions generated by the use of agrochemicals, transporting the harvested crops, refining them and transporting the fuel to the point of sale. Unless, that is, renewable or sustainable energy is used at every step of the way. But we're not anti-biofuels per se; what we don't want to see is a rush to use them en masse on the basis that they'll allow us to continue using cars and other transport at the same levels we do now while reducing our carbon emissions. A limited use of properly-regulated biofuels can make a small contribution to emissions reductions, but they're not the magic green bullet they're being made out to be. But do watch the assumptions you make: your suggestion that I or anyone else at Greenpeace wants to keep people in poverty and help them "die quicker" is misguided at best, gob-smackingly offensive at worst. web editor gpuk