Biofuels, climate change and industrial development: can the tropical South build 2000 biorefineries in the next decade?

Jan 2008

This perspective article is concerned with the potential of first-generation biofuels grown and processed in countries of the South to reduce their dependence on oil, to kickstart their industrial development, and at the same time to help solve the fuel problems of countries of the North, and reduce the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Biofuels are important because they span all of these issues. They have something to contribute to the solution of each of the problems, which have so far proven to be intractable – namely extending industrial development and reducing poverty, enhancing energy security, and reducing the sources of global warming. The issue is to ensure that biofuels live up to their potential, and do not simply result in a further consolidation of North-South polarization and in further extensions of deforestation and land degradation.
This perspective proposes a global framework in which all the issues to do with biofuels can be addressed.
In this perspective, an evaluation of ‘where we are at’ with biofuels is provided.
A perspective on first-generation biofuels is sought, seen from the vantage point of the likely situation a decade from now, when biofuels from the South will have established themselves, when imports to the North will have become much more common, and when transport and other industrial systems will have become more ‘biofuel friendly’. From such a perspective, biofuel usage will likely be seen as simply the first wave (and therefore a controversial wave) of the coming transition from a fossil-fuel driven industrial system to a bioenergy driven system, which over coming decades will almost certainly phase out the short historical ‘blip’ represented by fossil fuel dependence.
For this is the first substantial point to make: much of the fear and loathing generated by the topic of biofuels is actually a response to an imagined but unrealistic future, where oceans of sugarcane are imagined as taking over from dense rainforests, and agribusiness methods of intense cultivation – with all its associated soil depletion, intensive pesticide and herbicide use, wasteful use of water and toxic runoff – is imagined as ousting all other approaches.
Many people are doubtless guided by a fear that we are simply creating ‘biofuelled traffic jams’ of tomorrow, not just in the North but also in the mega cities of the South. If biofuels were treated as an issue on their own, these fears would be entirely justified. In this paper the author states that when we look at the bigger picture, and see the current transition as one involving changes in energy mix; in the design of cities; in the historic completion of the industrialization of the South and a possible ‘final solution’ to the problems of worldwide poverty, then a different frame of reference is appropriate.

By: J. A. Mathews (Macquarie University, Australia)

 
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