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Biofuels doubles prices of corn and wheat { May 18 2007 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/18/1429219http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/18/1429219
Friday, May 18th, 2007
George Monbiot: "If We Don’t Deal with Climate Change We Condemn Hundreds of Millions of People to Death"
The British journalist and environmentalist discusses his new book "Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning." George Monbiot says global warming is "the great moral issue of the 21st century." [includes rush transcript]
George Monbiot, columnist for the London Guardian. His new book is "Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning."
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
EXCERPT:
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about the role of hybrid vehicles, biofuels. In this year's State of the Union address, President Bush called for more investment into ethanol.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We need to press on with battery research for plug-in and hybrid vehicles and expand the use of clean diesel vehicles and biodiesel fuel. We must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol, using everything from woodchips to grasses to agricultural wastes.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush. George Monbiot?
GEORGE MONBIOT: This is a total disaster, and the reason it is a disaster is twofold. Number one, you set up a competition between feeding people and feeding cars, because you're producing those crops for biofuel on the same arable land which is currently being used to feed people. That competition will necessarily be won by the car drivers. The reason for that is that, by definition, those who are rich enough to run cars are richer than those who are in danger of dying of starvation. Already, with far less than 1% of the world’s transport fuel coming from biofuel, we’ve seen a doubling in the price of corn and a near doubling in the price of wheat. And this is having an impact on people all over the world.
The second reason why it's a disaster is that much of the new planting of biofuel is taking place on rainforest land or land which had other high carbon crops on it. And what we're seeing there is a massive impact, not just on biodiversity and on local habitat and environment, but also on climate change. In Malaysia and Indonesia now, the planting of palm oil for the biofuel market is the primary cause of deforestation. And one recent study shows that because you are cutting down tropical forests in order to plant it and draining peaty soils in order to plant it, every barrel of palm oil produces up to ten times as much carbon dioxide as a barrel of gasoline. Palm oil and most of the biofuels are actually worse for the planet than petroleum.
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