The Shell Game

You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy: The old saying appears to hold true for oil companies' expansion into renewable fuels.

Earlier this week, Royal Dutch Shell announced a $12 billion joint venture with the Brazilian company Cosan to make ethanol from sugarcane. Cosan, however, was recently blacklisted by the Brazilian government for relying on forced labor.

Cosan subsequently secured a temporary injunction allowing it to continue to do business, but the massive expansion Shell is funding will almost certainly force the company to prioritize growth over improving its labor practices. (Change.org's Human Trafficking blog has more details on the forced labor allegations.)

Also at stake are environmental practices.

Sugarcane is, on the whole, an efficient source of ethanol, requiring far less fossil-fuel energy per unit of energy produced than corn. But the rapid expansion of Brazil's crop for ethanol production has infringed on environmentally senstive lands and pushed other agricultural ventures into the Amazon rainforest.

Land use often determines whether plant-based fuels offer improvements over gasoline. And there's no question that Shell executives know that.

If Shell is serious about hedging its environmental bets by producing greener fuels in addition to oil, it should create a clear, enforceable policy on where and how its sugarcane is grown.

Photo credit: Mette Nielsen