Following Brazil's example, other countries which
used a lot of fossil fuels decided that they too would join the biofuel revolution.
Biofuels are, in principle, carbon
neutral so growing plants to make fuels sounds like a great idea. Sadly,
it isn't. There are big problems:
- to grow enough plants to fuel
all the world's cars, ships, planes and power stations would need more land
than there already is!
- many biofuels, like ethanol,
are made from plants which used to be grown for food only. This means there's
a serious conflict of interests: is it more important to feed people or to
make fuels? Hundreds of millions of people around the world are already nearly
starving and climate change is going to make things much worse. The world's
population is 6.7 billion people, growing all the time, so more farmland will
be needed to grow more food
- tropical rainforests are being
destroyed on a massive scale to be replaced with palm
oil plantations . This destruction releases vast amounts of greenhouse
gas (mostly CO2) which is exactly what the palm oil plantations are supposed
to be stopping. Worse: the plantations destroy forests which once teemed with
all kinds of living things. Because their habitat is cut and burned, the plants
and animals - orang utans in Indonesia are the best known animals - die or
become extinct
- growing some food crops to convert
into fuel is very inefficient, using almost as much energy overall (from fossil
fuels burned in machines to farm and process them, for example) as is actually
produced