FT.com - Biofuels can match oil production
This editorial by the head of Harvard's Center for International Development is a bit staccato and choppy in style, but the author brings up some great, if high-minded, points, including:
Some policy action in industrialised countries will be required to make this world possible. Biofuels policy needs to stop being seen through the prism of agricultural support policy – which justifies a 54 cents a gallon US tariff on Brazilian ethanol – and instead become the purview of energy and environmental policies. Standards will have to be developed to allow the energy and automotive industries to co-ordinate technologies. To make this scenario appealing, the impact of the expansion of the agricultural frontier on the environment and biodiversity, and the distributive effects of the rise in food prices will have to be addressed.
Hausmann doesn't flesh out many of his ideas, and I am particularly skeptical about his assertion about underutilized land (is he counting rainforest acreage as "underutilized" for example?), but this piece definitely encourages some comment and discussion.
2 months ago
1 comment:
It's a shame that he never gets around to mentioning that a lot of the concern related to the overuseage of fossil fuels centers not only on the fact that we have a limited supply of fossil fuels but also that fossil fuels pollute. Extensively. So do biofuels.
If there's any idealism about biofuels, it's the tendancy to forget that point.
Agreed about the style and the lack of depth of the piece; agreed about the encouragement of comment and discussion--though I think that might be due more to the subject matter than the piece itself.
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