Another inconvenient truth - How biofuel policies are deepening poverty and accelerating climate change

Jun 2008

The proponents of biofuels argue that they have the solution, or at least a part of it. Ethanol and biodiesel will allow us to continue our love affair with the internal combustion engine, while simultaneously reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Authors states that biofuels currently provide a solution neither to the oil nor to the climate crisis, and are now contributing to a third: the food crisis. In recent years, food prices have nearly doubled, placing poor people, who often spend over half of their income on food, in an untenable situation. Oxfam estimates that the crisis has endangered the livelihoods of at least 290 million of the world’s rural and urban poor.
The West’s biofuels boom is contributing to deeper global poverty and accelerated climate change, while allowing governments to avoid difficult but urgent decisions about how to reduce spiralling demand for energy in transport.
This paper explains how a sustainable development opportunity would have instead turned into an unsustainable nightmare, and examines the conditions under which some of the original promise, particularly for poor people, might still be realised.

By: Oxfam

 
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