Regulations:

Fighting off negative publicity

25th September, 2007

Biofuels have received a whole raft of bad press in recent months - but is any of it deserved?

Earlier this year a UK free commuter newspaper, Metro, carried the headline, 'Biofuels are not our saviour'. The piece followed the release of a UN report on sustainable energy and quoted Friends of the Earth campaigner Ed Matthew who said: 'We are struggling to feed people and suddenly we want to start feeding our cars on crops. If this is done it could cause dramatic social and environmental problems.'

Almuth Ernstig of Biofuelwatch also said: 'Food security, local communities and bio-diversity are all under threat.'

This year has seen the public debate move rapidly from the situation in which biofuels were seen as the answer to carbon emissions from transport fuels. Now the rush towards biofuel production is portrayed as diverting land from growing food crops, depriving the hungry of food, pushing up food prices and causing untold ecological damage in countries growing crops such as soya and palm for biodiesel production. Headlines such as: 'Surge in biofuel production pushes up food prices', 'Corn will not save the planet', 'The Biofuel Timebomb', and 'The Great Green Con' have all contributed to the overall impression that biofuels are now a bad thing. It seems the NGOs believe that the UK government's pursuit of targets for inclusion of biofuels under the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), and the EU's targets of 10% voluntary inclusion by 2010, and 10% obligatory by 2020, is poorly thought out. As such, the introduction of these targets is currently being opposed by a number of them.

However, positive slanted pieces did appear in July in The Times in the UK on the use of jatropha for biodiesel, highlighting UK-based biodiesel producer D1 Oils' plans. The UK Sunday Times also explained how growing crops for biofuels was helping to put one farmer back into profitability. These are possibly the first signs of fight-back on behalf of the growers and processors, which believe that biofuels can be produced in a sustainable way, without damaging the environment, and providing exactly the kind of greenhouse gas savings which are needed to help to meet climate change targets.

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