Days of Jatropha and Seaweed

As we've discussed before, climate change caused by the release of greenhouse gases is going to have a severe, negative impact on our ability to feed ourselves.

And not only because sea level rise will be worse than expected and flood more low-lying agricultural lands and water tables.

Inundated and desertified agricultural lands are likely to be replaced by disturbing grassland and forest ecosystems that store lots of carbon in the soil and biomass. And as Doreen Stabinsky noted, the European Environment Commission has urged the EU Parliament to take carbon storage in soils seriously and encourage better management practices, up to and including the conversion of agricultural land back to forest and grassland ecosystems. This naturally, alongside rising grain prices, raises the question of where actual food is going to be grown.

Biofuels advocates are trying to take these concerns to heart:

... "All of the airlines have very strict sustainability criteria, one of them being no deforestation," said Sanjay Pingle, president of Terasol Energy, the firm that provided the biofuels for the Continental, Air New Zealand and Japan flights.

"All of the jatropha sourced for these flights came from marginal land not suitable for food production, that had no significant indigenous growth on it for at least 20 years." ...

But the logic of the market has its inevitable pull:

... Indigenous leaders from the Philippine island of Mindanao warned in December that 500 hectares of jatropha had already displaced food crops like rice, corn and bananas.

Deforestation for palm oil crops, which can also be refined into biofuel, has also triggered vast fires through slash-and-burn farming in Indonesia. ...

See, jatropha can be grown on land that doesn't interfere with food crops. But if it's profitable, well, it isn't like anyone's going to pass a law saying that it can't be grown in former vegetable gardens or grain fields.

Now South Korea's announced that they're going to try making biofuel out of seaweed, which is just big algae, after all. It avoids all the land-based hurdles, but what about marine ecology? I don't know, though I wish them the best.

There are areas where seaweed overgrowth is overshading and killing coral reefs, which depend on photosynthesis, themselves. So in theory it could be done right. But will it?

Do current biofuel initiatives work? Could any of them work? Is there any biofuel initiative that I won't nitpick? In my opinion, no. Maybe. And no.

Considering the peril of the situation that we're in, it's incumbent on us to do no further harm. Not to create further industries that profit from the destruction of our biosphere. No effort deserves to be furthered because of the good intentions of its supporters, or because of wishful thinking.

If we can't be more thoughtful in trying to get out of this mess than we were getting into it, we won't get out of it.

(Photo credit: edwardyanquen on Flickr.)