The clearing of tropical forests for the production of biofuels is bad news for the climate and reduces plant and animal diversity, a study revealed yesterday.
The study was released in Poland during a UN meeting on climate change with representatives from 187 countries. It said that it would take 75 years for carbon emissions saved by the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon emitted by the burning of forests.
Are you as shocked as I am? I already knew that biofuels are not as green as they were cracked to be a few years ago, but to realize that forests are being knocked down to be replaced with biofuel monocultures makes them sound seriously menacing. Millions of acres of forests in Southeast Asia have already been transformed into palm tree plantations. And if all that was not enough bad news, the study says that only one in six animal species would survive biofuel crops.
Surely there may be some types of biofuel that do not cause so much environmental wreck, but an international standard of sustainability needs to be set as soon as possible. And these need to be very strict, otherwise such negative data defeats the purpose entirely.
Hmm… The dangers of myopic environmental policy… There should be experts assigned to evaluate fallout from these activities and offer solutions which are optimum and not counterprductive.