EU caps “bad” biofuels
The European Parliament retreats on its policy of supporting biofuels after rising concern about its negative social and environmental impact.
Turning plants into fuel seems like the ultimate in green, but in reality it has been much more problematic, blamed for increasing food prices, causing conflicts over land use around the world and even contributing to climate change — which is why the EU is backtracking on its support for biofuels.
The European Parliament on Tuesday agreed to cap the use of traditional biofuels that can be used to meet EU renewable targets at no more than 7 percent of transport energy. Such ‘first-generation’ biofuel comes from crops like palm oil, rapeseed, sugar cane and soy specifically grown to be turned into biodiesel.
The EU was originally very enthusiastic about the idea, setting a target in 2008 to source 10 percent of all transport fuel from renewable sources by 2020. This target drove EU states to put in place incentives for biofuels, which spurred rapid growth in the sector.
But campaigners said the incentives displaced food crops, caused inappropriate land use and raised food prices by motivating farmers in the developing world to raze fields to meet European demand; Europe is the world’s largest importer and user of biodiesel. Growing biofuel also results in more carbon emissions than are actually saved by use of these alternative fuels.
There were plenty of warnings even when the EU’s biofuel policy was put into place. A 2008 report from the European Environment Agency, an EU advisory body, warned that the expansion of biofuels “may cause adverse effects on the environment” that could “jeopardize the achievement of other environmental goals.” As time went on, the evidence for environmental harm caused by biofuels kept growing, but it took years to persuade the European Commission to change.
For the EU, it is an embarrassing retreat from a policy that was originally touted as the ‘great green hope’ for lowering transport emissions. The hope is that the change will encourage development of less problematic advanced biofuels derived from straw and household and farm waste.
Even that retreat wasn’t enough for some campaigners. Many green and center-left MEPs had wanted much stronger rules — with a 6 percent cap and a methodology to quantify indirect land use changes. They also wanted a minimum target for advanced biofuels. First-generation biofuels currently makes up about 5 percent of the fuels used to meet the EU’s renewable energy target, which means their use can still go up by 2020.
Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout, who worked on the file for the Green group, said the legislation “falls far short of what is required to address the myriad of problems with the EU’s biofuel policy.”
“This legislation was supposed to ensure the EU does not continue to promote biofuels that exacerbates climate change and has a negative social impact but what has been agreed and voted today will not do so,” he said.
But the traditional biofuels industry lobbied hard against introducing the methodology. Member states insisted on a more restrained change, and they were backed by center-right MEPs.
Makers of advanced biofuels also expressed disappointment at the lack of binding incentives for their products. “The final compromise is lacking ambition and fails to provide the certainty and direction needed for the sector,” said Thomas Nagy, executive vice-president of Novozymes, a Danish biotech company.
But environmental campaigners conceded that a deal was better than nothing. “This decision by the EU was long overdue,” said Faustine Defossez of the European Environmental Bureau. “The big question now is whether the EU has learned from its mistake of promoting biofuel despite concerns about its sustainability.”
With the biofuels file finally closed, environmental campaigners are turning their attention to bioenergy used outside the transport sector — for heating, cooling and electricity.
A coalition of NGOs including WWF, ActionAid, Greenpeace and Oxfam released a set of recommendations for the EU to adjust its non-transport bioenergy policy. Existing incentives in the EU’s renewable energy legislation mean that the use of bioenergy is growing, and three-quarters of this comes from forestry.
The Commission’s energy union strategy, published in February, promised a new policy for sustainable biomass by 2017. The NGOs want this legislation to introduce a cap to limit the use of biomass for energy to levels that can be sustainably supplied, and introduce a methodology for accounting the carbon emissions of land use change from biomass.
Campaigners are pressing the point that, given the experience with transport biofuels, the Commission would be wise to fully consider future side-effects when designing its new rules.
Watch the press conference with Finnish liberal MEP Nils Torvild, who steered the legislation through the European Parliament:
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