Will biofuel trend be a big mistake?

3:45pm Friday 18th April 2008

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It's a thought-provoking coincidence that the week when oil companies were told to aim for all forecourt petrol to include 2.5 per cent derived from biofuel (ie from plants) was also the week that the heads of both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank warned about a world food shortage.

If you boost the one, you deny the other. That's obvious surely? The more land is turned over to the growing of oilseed rape or maize to be converted into fuel for cars, lorries and planes, the less land there is devoted to feeding the planet's growing population.

Add that to other factors - crop failure in some countries, soaring demand in increasingly affluent China and India - and price rises are the obvious consequence. In rich countries, people have to cut back on their consumption. In poor countries they starve.

In the United States, where the aim is to reduce dependence on oil imports while maintaining an oil-rich lifestyle, government subsidies have led to 20 per cent of all maize being grown in that country being distilled into ethanol biofuel.

The justification given for this is that biofuel is supposed to be "carbon neutral", giving off only as many greenhouse gases as the plants absorbed when they were growing.

That, though, doesn't take account of the gases produced in harvesting, transporting and processing the crops. Nor does it allow for the damage done through the felling of forests in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia to produce palm oil to be turned into fuel.

In Britain, a 2.5 per cent biofuel content in diesel will come at considerable environmental cost. US subsidies mean that it's cheaper to take the stuff from Europe to the US to have it mixed with ordinary diesel then ship it back over the Atlantic. How much greenhouse gas does that process produce?

Many people have reservations about the wisdom of this global rush to biofuels. I'm one of them. It could turn out to be one of those Big Mistakes that mankind makes from time to time.

The aim should instead be to do more to exploit wind, wave and solar power and cut down drastically on fuel consumption - walk rather than ride, boost bus and train travel, buy foodstuffs produced as locally as possibly, in fact change our lifestyles radically to spend more time staying put rather than being constantly on the move.

Less and dearer food leading to starvation is too high a price to pay for the right to continue driving around in gas-guzzling cars and jetting off around the world on holiday.

Sarah back in the groove!

There was an odd little story in a national Sunday newspaper last weekend. It claimed that contributions to a BBC website noticeboard which repeatedly criticised Radio 2 presenter Sarah Kennedy had been stopped by a moderator on the grounds of "online harassment".

One of the main criticisms of her was that she talks over records, interrupting the music. Another was that she gives her own opinions more prominence than she should.

Now personally I have no problem at all with Sarah Kennedy stating her opinions. I find a lot of her chatter quite entertaining. But when she bursts into a record I'm enjoying to pass on a thought which has just occurred to her, it's extremely irritating.

I said as much last year on this page and in an e-mail to her personally (I wouldn't care to get involved in a web noticeboard witch hunt).

It didn't make a blind bit of difference. She still interrupted. But I noted on Monday that she seemed to have mended her ways somewhat. Maybe a spot of online harassment had worked where a polite e-mail couldn't.

Alas, come Tuesday she'd slipped back into her old ways, interrupting Brenda Lee in full song to tell us that Ivana Trump had got married.

While I'm sure listeners were very happy for Ivana, couldn't the news have waited until Brenda had finished singing?

Casualty of the pitiless jobsworths

Don't you just hate rules when they fly in the face of compassion and common sense?

In the case of Laura Leake, jobsworths at The Human Tissue Authority decided to play it by the rules and deny her sick mother Rachel one of her dead daughter's kidneys, even though Laura - an exact tissue match - had made it clear that she was willing to be a living donor.

The authority's rules say that they, not the donor's expressed wishes or the donor's family, must decide who gets any organs from a dead donor.

Yes, it might well have meant Rachel jumping the queue if she had been given the kidney she so desperately needs to restore her health. But how much comfort would she have been able to take from knowing that part of her daughter lived on inside her as she cared for her daughter's child? Surely that should take precedence over rules?

Thanks to The Human Tissue Authority's dictatorial stance, I'll bet more people are now having doubts about signing up to be organ donors.

Not tragic but almost as infuriating are the rules which have prompted Bradford Council planners to tell Eileen Waddington, of Clayton, that the new sash windows she had installed in her cottage a decade ago must be removed and the tall chimney she had removed because it was unsafe must be replaced.

The cottage is "listed", you see, and consequently has to remain looking forever as it did when it was built. What a nonsense! Mrs Waddington's house looks well-kept and tidy and an asset to any street. That's what the planners should have taken into account, rather than rules that seek to trap the world in the past.