Biofuels are a good idea?

Saw this story in Monday's Guardian. Francisco Anselmo de Barros, a leading environmental campaigner, set fire to himself in protest at an expansion of biofuel production in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. Hmm, hasn't our government just announced a "Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation"? Almost totally unquestioned by our media.

In fact, this is not a good idea, far from it. It will lead to disaster. It takes no account of the amount of land required (some millions of hectares for the UK's needs, that is tens of thousands of square kilometres - 10,000 square km is an area 100km by 100km - that is about 60 miles by 60 miles). Not only does this ignore concerns about the impact on biodiversity in the UK, it will in fact have the opposite effect to that intended. Land being used to produce biofuels cannot be used for forests, which both store huge amounts of carbon, and are part of nature's way of slowly removing carbon from the atmosphere. Biofuels are just a way of meeting the letter, but not the spirit of Kyoto - and of maintaining an economy based on burning carbon fuels rather than technology based on renewable ways of generating electricity.