Killing Fishes for Fuel?

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-08-13 13:53:00 UTC
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As noted in the past, I have a love-hate relationship with TreeHugger when it comes to the site's animal-related coverage, and when I saw this headline this morning--"LiveFuels to Farm Fish to Make Biofuel = Bad Idea"--I initially groaned, not processing the "Bad Idea" part right away. But it turns out TreeHugger and I agree this time. Writer Matthew McDermott too thinks that the following is a preposterous and unethical proposal:

LiveFuels thinks it knows the way around making expensive algae biofuel production equipment and scaling that up for commercial production, raise fish to eat the algae and store it in their organs, and then kill the fish to get the oil.

Crazy, right? But when we get down to the fundamentals, I struggle to see how this differs from fattening animals to kill them and take their body parts and fluids unnecessarily for our dinner purposes (the writer indicates that he has a problem with factory farming but doesn't in this piece clearly indicate an aversion to the unnecessary fattening, killing, and taking-from in general). Nevertheless, I'm still glad that McDermott points out the ethical problem in this particular case, and I'll almost-ignore his brief remark regarding fishes' intelligence (which is actually much greater than most realize), given that he's still standing up for them:

Assuming LiveFuels works out the technical kinks, how many fish would we have to raise in ponds, deal with the waste from that, and then kill, just to power our cars, buses and airplanes? . . .

This whole thing just strikes me as grossly unethical, not to mention absurd.

Indeed. And it's easy to draw a comparison to the equal absurdity of killing animals to power our bodies, when we have alternatives in that arena as well.

Read McDermott's post in full here.

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The photo of tilapia farming above is taken shamelessly from the TreeHugger post, which in turn published it courtesy of Flickr user Andy.

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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