Driven To Starvation

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By William A. Cohn

How the auto industry continues to destroy the environment and is now abetting global hunger and poverty -

In the wake of widespread food riots which have resulted in fatalities and political turmoil in poor countries around the world, on April 14th the head of the World Bank warned that 100 million people are now at risk due to food shortages and escalating prices. Yet Robert Zoellick’s proposed New Deal for Global Food Policy offers more of a band-aid approach than a cure to the causes of such needless world hunger. Oddly, the World Bank failed to call for an end to those ethanol and other biofuels subsidies which have exacerbated global hunger and poverty by prioritizing feeding cars over feeding humans.

Speaking at the United Nations on April 21st, Bolivian President Evo Morales called his country’s food crisis “an external problem” caused by policies in which “cars come first, not human beings.” Peruvian President Alan Garcia joined in saying that biofuels harm the world’s poorest people. Morales previously blamed the world’s leading polluters for causing the severe weather which has ravaged Bolivia with floods since November 2007, destroying more than 1.2 million homes. On April 22nd, the environmental group Friends of the Earth released a report warning the EU of the perils of expanding biofuels use in Latin America.

Josette Sheeran, head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), told the BBC on April 22nd that WFP is now delivering food aid to an additional 100 million people who did not need assistance six months ago, “but today simply can’t afford enough food for their family.” International organizations have begun the unpleasant task of addressing the relationship between our addiction to transport fuels and the plague of world hunger and poverty. As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon convenes a high-level conference on the food crisis this week, it appears that the long-anticipated resource wars are heating up.

On April 28th, Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapportuer on the right to food, called for a 5-year moratorium on the production of biofuels. He called the present US and EU policies a “criminal path” which are a main cause of the current worldwide food crisis. And things will only get tougher – the planet’s population is expected to grow by 50% to 9 billion in some 40 years, and the number of cars and trucks are expected to double to more than 2 billion in 30 years. And twice as many jetliners are projected to be in the skies in 20 years. The International Energy Agency says the world’s total energy demand will rise by 65% over the next 20 years. Corn ethanol, offered as a quick fix to oil depenednecy, is now seen as energy inefficient and environmentally destructive, as well as a cause of food scarcity.

Much of the global energy demand comes from cars. About 25% of the world’s oil goes to the US, and of that, more than half goes to its cars and trucks. US oil consumption has surged since the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. In large part, this is because the US has some of the lowest gas prices in the world, the lowest energy taxes and the least fuel-efficient cars. Presidential candidates McCain and Clinton have played to voters short-term instincts by calling for a suspension of the federal gas tax during the summer travel season. Others, such as China, which has seen a seven-fold increase in vehicles between1990 and 2006, to 37 million – a figure projected to reach 300 million by 2030, feel that it is their right to follow suit. Sadly, the US has set the example of denying the need for sacrifice and change.

Exhausted

2007 was a breakthrough year in educating the public of the need for dramatic action to avert the most disastrous consequences of global warming, culminating in Al Gore and the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in this regard.

Responding to public pressure, politicians have put forth reform proposals which have met with resistance from affected industries. None have been more successful at resisting mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to sustainable ecologically responsible business models than the automobile industry. While the auto industry has killed the electric car, and defied efforts to mandate greater fuel efficiency, it has embraced the development of cars using hydrogen and biofuels. This has aligned it with powerful economic and political interests in support of ethanol and other biofuels as the central initiative in response to global warming. Critics contend that these initiatives are designed simply to divert pressure for change.

The consensus is that biofuels are causing greater environmental harm in that they produce more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels given the pollution caused in producing these so-called green fuels. As well, we have seen resulting food shortages as farmers gear their crops for transport fuels. The fallacy of the touted silver bullet biofuels policies is in their failure to adopt a holistic approach to combating climate change. The danger of course, beyond the human suffering it has caused, is that such an omission wastes time and resources in addressing our precarious ecological situation.

Car crazy blowback

We live in a world that idolizes the car. Marketing tells us that the car gives us power, status and independence and that she is sexy, responsive and puts us in control. Cigarettes have been, and in parts of the world still are, marketed in a similar manner. Yes, our culture has given us a preference for the car. But our culture formerly gave us a preference for slavery and child labor. Change was seen as undesirable because it would impose a greater burden on us. Yet change happened suddenly when people realized such practices were wrong and must stop – even if cotton, for instance, would be more expensive.

An essential change in combating the direst global warming prospects is to protect and preserve our dwindling and threatened rainforests. Such action seems far-removed from the power of the common person. Getting away from the car is within the immediate control of most people, and it can produce a big impact. Christian Brand of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University recently completed a study commissioned by Tesco, the British supermarket chain, to analyze its employees carbon emissions over a year – the emissions generated by car travel dwarfed all other activities. The February 2008 report found that “Personal travel is generally dominant over items like electricity use (with car and air travel accounting for more than 75% and as much as 90% of personal emissions for most, especially younger and higher income, people). Car travel is the dominant factor.”

While people are switching their light bulbs and lowering their thermostats, few have been willing to forego the car. A study by the British environment agency Defra found that 75% of people were prepared to change their behavior to limit climate change, “But not in the ways that count most: Only 5% of car drivers said they had driven less because of environmental concerns.” Studies have shown that car ownership is a one-way door: once a person has a car they won’t give it up, and they then tend to want a bigger and better one – which means more pollution. Studies also show that cars tend to be used simply because they are there.

According to Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy, it is time to slam the door on our car addiction: “I listen when the scientists say that if we fail to mitigate climate change, the environmental, social, and economic consequences will be stark and severe. . . . There comes a moment when it is clear what you must do . . . [we must] create a low-carbon economy. In saying this, I do not underestimate the task. It is to take an economy where human comfort, activity and growth are inextricably linked with emitting carbon and to transform it into one which can only thrive without depending on carbon. This is a monumental challenge. It requires a revolution in technology and a revolution in thinking. We are going to have to rethink the way we live and work.”

Greenhouse gas emissions and climate context

The successes and failures of IPCC 2007, the 4th assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, can be measured in myriad ways including a drumbeat of media coverage of carbon footprints and green alternatives. One notable success is on the political front – following Kevin Rudd’s resounding defeat of John Howard as Australian Prime Minister, he quickly reversed national policy on climate-change, and in December signed the Kyoto Protocol in Bali, thus leaving the United States isolated as the only major country to reject it (On Feb. 26th, the White House signaled its conditional consent to a mandatory international agreement on climate change).

Lest we get too pleased with the developments of 2007 and early 2008, it is instructive to put this in recent historical context. In 1992, at the “Earth Summit” in Rio, the US and almost every country of the world endorsed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The treaty, ratified by the US Senate and other national legislatures, bound every industrialized (Annex 1 – the US, Canada, Japan, Europe and then Eastern Europe) country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of returning emissions to 1990 levels. Excepting the Eastern bloc countries, whose economies were crumbling, none of these Annex 1 countries progressed towards compliance, but rather, emissions increased despite follow-up negotiations in 1995 (Berlin), 1996 (Geneva) and 1997 (Kyoto).

The Kyoto Protocol, an addendum to the 1992 Treaty, which reduced the commitments of the signatories, has the EU states commit to the goal of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perflourocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride) to 8% below 1990 levels by 2012. The US and Japan had lesser targets, and the US rejected the Kyoto Protocol following a $13 million anti-Kyoto advertising campaign by The Global Climate Coalition, a lobbying group sponsored by General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, ExxonMobil, Shell and Texaco. The authors of Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future trace the nexus between the auto and oil sectors, which they term the “industry of industries,” and how the two have shaped the international landscape.

In 1993, Bill Clinton pledged that the US was committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, saying; “Unless we act now, we face a future in which the sun may scorch us; where the change of season may take on a dreadful new meaning; and where our children’s children will inherit a planet far less hospitable than the world in which we came of age.” Seven years later Clinton made essentially the same speech, yet when he left office in 2001 greenhouse gas emissions were 15% over their 1990 levels. The dire warnings of IPCC 2007 are not new. Is time passing us by consigning us to the ash heap of history?

Unplugged

Resistance to real and sustainable solutions is still found at many levels, including those industries whose growth has depended upon carbon emissions. The award-winning 2006 documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car by director Chris Paine asserts that the technology exists which would allow us to dramatically reduce global warming emissions and our dependence on costly foreign oil, and improve our respiratory health.

General Motors developed a prototype electric car which could go fast and emit no exhaust fumes or carbon emissions. Like a mobile phone, it plugged in at night, and would be ready to drive in the morning. The electricity needed costs a fraction of the price of petroleum for the same travel distance. The auto and oil industries lobbied fiercely to defeat laws aimed at promoting the electric car. Why? Why kill such a potentially profitable new technology? Marketing electric cars as ‘clean’ transport would mean admitting their core product is dirty, and since electric cars run on a battery rather than a combustion engine, and it threatened the business model of the auto industry which profits by maintaining and replacing internal combustion engines. The biggest criticism of the electric car was that after 60 miles the battery needed to be recharged (as well, there is the issue of the source of the electricity which powers these cars – is it coal? or is it clean and renewable?). So the engineer Stan Ovshinsky created a battery that could run up to 300 miles at 70 mph on a single charge. According to The Independent, the auto and oil companies then bought that technology, and it has not been seen since.

In 1993, the US govt. agreed to subsidize the auto industry and to provide it with military technologies that would enable US carmakers to build prototype sedans capable of getting 80 mpg by 2003. As we know, the goals of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles have not been realized. The GM Precept (equipped with 2 electric motors), the aluminum bodied Ford Prodigy, and the largely plastic Dodge ESX3 were wheeled out with much fanfare at the 2000 North American Auto Show in Detroit, and then wheeled away, never to be seen again. Then in 2002, after more than a billion dollars of federal money had been spent, the Bush administration Energy Secretary flanked by the top executives of GM, Ford and Dodge announced the scrapping of the Partnership project explaining that the administration and the automakers now aimed to produce vehicles that would run on pure hydrogen.

Zero-emissions hydrogen fuel cell cars have been touted by General Motors, Daimler Chrysler and lawmakers since 1990, but over the past five years less than 200 of these clean cars have been built. Meanwhile, battery electric cars have proven a more practicable and potentially enduring option, yet regulators have defied logic by continuing to promote the more expensive and cumbersome hydrogen alternative. Critics contend that the manner in which the auto industry and its politicians keep changing the tune is just smoke and mirrors, mere ploys intended to take the heat off and distract the public.

Running on empty

Drivers have been burning fossil fuels at artificially low prices. The warning of the renowned economist Sir Nicholas Stern that climate change is “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” has been heeded by eminent economists and climate scientists. The operation of free market forces can encourage sustainable allocation of resources only when goods and services are priced properly. This can be achieved through heavy taxation (like alcohol and cigarettes), regulatory standards (like fuel efficiency for cars), or various cap and trade approaches. A carbon tax is widely seen as the most effective way to place overall costs at their source. (On pricing importance and challenges see “Big Foot,” The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 2008)

Making carbon emissions more costly provides incentives for conservation and investment in clean and renewable sources of energy. The 1972 Clean Water Act provides a relevant example of how industrial and consumer behavior can be modified towards ecological sustainability. The US today manufactures more products using less water than it did in 1972. Prior to then, people did not value water since it was free. Likewise, a heavy carbon tax will make consumers more mindful of the cost and the value of scarce resources. Yes, providing economic incentives for ecologically responsible behavior is essential to combating climate change. Currently, affected industries and the politicians they support are providing the wrong incentives.

In late February, the Canadian province of British Columbia proposed a carbon tax in its latest budget, which would be the first such tax in North America. The US, Europe and others have been resistant to adopting a carbon tax, despite a growing consensus that it is the best way to properly price the consumption of energy. Leaders have generally denied the need to make lifestyle changes which are seemingly essential to climate change adaptation, opting instead for a technology-based approach as enabling us to have our cake and eat it too. The European preference has been for cap and trade schemes which have been criticized for being a form of eco-colonialism which allows the rich to buy the right to impose their emissions on the rest. This in turn leads to finger-pointing and provides those short-sighted “leaders” in positions of power with excuses for inaction.

Get the lead out

While the auto industry purports to be developing hydrogen car technology, it resists efforts to promote greater fuel efficiency from cars fired by fossil fuels. Indeed, it has a long track record in this respect – one similar to the deceptive practices of the tobacco industry. In February, Bob Lutz, the Vice-Chairman of General Motors Corp, the largest US automaker, told a group of reporters that global warming was a “total crock of shit” – a statement he stood by in subsequent questioning. A 40-year auto industry veteran and long-time campaigner against higher fuel efficiency standards, Lutz wrote in 2006 that forcing the auto industry to sell smaller cars would be “like trying to end the obesity problem in this country by forcing clothing manufacturers to sell smaller, tighter sizes.”

In Auto Mania historian Tom McCarthy uses archival records to examine a series of decisions made by the auto industry since 1900. The earliest cars were made to run on ordinary unleaded gasoline. In 1921, a team of GM researchers discovered that by adding small amounts of lead to the fuel supply they could solve the problem of engine knocking. The toxicity of led was well known at that time, and so GM and Standard Oil, which had formed a joint venture to manufacture leaded gas, launched a PR campaign to convince the public that there was no alternative to leaded gas. When the govt. took a hands-off approach leaded gas became the standard at US filling stations.

It is estimated that by 1996, when the sale of leaded gasoline for use in cars was banned in the US, seven million tons of lead had been released from auto exhaust pipes into the air, and nearly 70 million American children had been exposed to dangerous blood-lead levels. Lead is especially dangerous for children, and high blood-lead levels can result in physical and mental ailments including brain damage, anemia, liver and kidney damage and even death. McCarthy characterizes the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles as an evasive tactic to avoid the more effective but politically riskier step of raising fuel-efficiency standards. The average new car sold in the US today gets 20 mpg – the same as 15 years ago, and less than Henry Ford’s Model T got when it went on the market more than 99 years ago.

Noxious fumes

Studies by the World Health Organization (WHO) and NGOs have reached alarming conclusions. In France, auto emissions kill almost 10,000 people a year according to the Agency for Health and Environmental Safety. A WHO report covering Austria, Switzerland and France found that some 40,000 people die every year as a result of auto emissions. “Human natural defense mechanisms fail to prevent airborne fine particulate matter from penetrating into the lungs,” the German Council for Environmental Questions reported. The German Council found that auto particulate matter is “the most important health problem linked with air pollution.” These agencies propose a tax on cars proportionate to their fuel consumption and the costs of their toxic emissions.

CO2 emissions from road transport in Europe increased by 26% from 1990 to 2004. Since 1993, the European Union has been working to reduce passenger car CO2 emissions, but has encountered stiff resistance from auto industry lobbyists. For instance, the German car industry, which has lagged behind in reducing emissions, uses scaremongering tactics. In 2007, DaimlerChrysler deputy chairman and board member Erich Klemm told reporters that if the EU Commission proposal were approved, then factories would need to be closed costing 65,000 workers their jobs.

Some 70 paid auto industry lobbyists are based in Brussels, including those of the European Car Manufacturers Association and individual carmakers. Thus in 2007 when the European Parliament sought to establish binding targets for new passenger cars marketed in the EU, MEP Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a prominent member of the MEP-industry group the Forum for the Automobile and Society stated, “we will not completely dismantle this proposal, but we will shape it in such a way that it will protect both the climate and the car industry.” Indeed, last December, the 33 carmaker lobbyists accredited to the EU Parliament helped water down a long-awaited European Commission proposal for curbing global warming pollution generated by new cars. The final version was much weaker than the original proposal, both in terms of carbon limits and penalties for offending carmakers

Environment NGO Greenpeace issued the following statement on December 19, 2007: “Last week in Bali, the European Union stood up like a lion for the world’s climate – this week the Union’s executive arm is going down like a lamb and putting carmakers’ short-term profits before our common survival. Car manufacturers are in the driver’s seat at the European Commission . . . [which] has come up with a pathetic legislative proposal that fails to demand any significant changes from the road transport sector, whose carbon dioxide emissions are continuing to rise.”

Euro-hypocrisy

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso warned EU leaders on March 13th that the EU would be left with “zero credibility” if it yields to pressure to renege on the commitments it made last year to combat global warming. As the Commission’s mid-March meeting in Brussels got underway, Germany and France were seeking concessions to heavy industry and Berlin was seeking exemptions for its carmakers. Echoing Daimler Chrysler as she made the claim that those countries that manufacture big cars should not be treated any worse than countries that make smaller cars, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated, “I will be standing up particularly for jobs in Germany’s car sector.” “Let them eat cake” has now become “let us drive SUVs.” There is much that could be done but for the Pavlovian resistance to change. For instance, a simple climate-fix is for carmakers to use lightweight material, such as carbon-fiber composites, because weight (not size) accounts for 75% of the energy needed to propel a car.

The Czech Republic, Germany, France, Austria and Italy want a pledge that heavy users of energy will be exempted from the Commission’s measures so that they will not lose investment. Talk about a loophole large enough to drive a truck through! Germany, with Europe’s biggest economy, also expressed concerns that its carmakers would suffer under the Commission’s proposal which subjected makers of heavy polluting luxury vehicles (like BMW, Mercedes Benz and Porsche) to heavy fines if they fail to reduce their carbon emissions.

The EU professed to be at the forefront of combating climate-change. Recall Ms. Merkel’s strong statements of leadership on the issue upon taking office as Chancellor and EU President (and in August pushing the G8 to commit to halve global carbon emissions by 2050). The March 31st Newsweek report on “Europe’s Worst Double Talkers,” looks at how Germany has talked green while “German policymakers in Berlin and Brussels are taking a different tact altogether,” concluding that the “rhetoric is failing to stand up to the reality.” The report notes the unusually close relationship between industry and government in Germany, and looks at the revolving door between government and the auto industry, with its powerful lobby. EPM Claude Turmes says “the German government defends German private companies, rather than the common interest.”

Overdrive

A new car that gets 20 mpg and which is driven 100,000 miles will produce more than 11 metric tons of carbon (a metric ton weighs 2,205 pounds). Every gallon of gasoline consumed produces about 5 pounds of carbon, meaning that in a 40 mile commute a SUV releases about a dozen pounds of carbon into the air. As Elizabeth Kolbert notes in her book Field notes from a catastrophe: Man, nature and climate change, “Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas, it lasts for about a century. Thus, while it is possible to increase CO2 concentrations relatively quickly, the opposite is not the case.” There is a growing recognition that every SUV bought today diminishes the prospects of human life in the future. We thus confront a moral imperative to break our self-destructive habits.

Greenhouse-gas emissions have risen dramatically in the past two centuries, and levels today are higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years. Climate-change is a global problem which demands global solutions. The rapid-growth of China and India surely means many millions of new car owners. Car ownership in these countries is extremely low relative to US standards (there are 9 personal vehicles per thousand eligible drivers in China and 11 in India, compared with 1,148 in the US – yes, more than a car per driver). Rapid income growth in these states means that many millions more will soon be able to buy cars.

In January 2008, Tata Motors of India unveiled its Nano, the world’s cheapest car, calling it the “people’s car” made of plastic and glue rather than welded steel and selling for 100,000 rupees ($2,500 USD). Nano is priced to get Indians, of which there are more than a billion, into a car. The Nano is expected to force other automakers to cut prices and to develop cheap cars, bringing millions more drivers onto the roads. A super-cheap auto will encourage people to rely on their car rather than mass transit. “This car promises to be an environmental disaster of substantial proportions,” says Yale environmental expert Daniel Esty. As the authors of Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future write, “Just consider the scale of the potential problem – for instance, the effects on global warming of 750 million more cars in India and China, belching carbon dioxide.” By most estimates, China has already surpassed the US as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

Indian climatologist and IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri criticizes the climate impact of Nano: “Before we unleash this kind of animal on the streets of India, we ought to explore the public transportation options.” The Nobel Prize winner says the Nano “is clearly a carbon-intensive option. We need to impose a price on that carbon.” He proposes making drivers pay carbon tolls.

Given the information and scenarios for the future put forth by IPCC 2007, the issue is clearly how we get from here to there – both in terms of how we transport ourselves and in achieving needed climate-change mitigation. Some analysts maintain that the technology exists to double fuel efficiency. Passenger vehicles in the US now account for 40% of its oil use and 10% of global oil use. But the political will to reduce carbon emissions has been lacking. In fact, the will has been to stifle solutions aimed at promoting a sustainable energy policy (recall that in January 2001 upon taking office President Bush sought to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and appointed Dick Cheney to head an energy commission charged with establishing US energy policy, yet the administration has steadfastly refused to disclose who served on and consulted the Commission).

Energy policy, developed behind closed doors, has even overridden anti-bribery laws (see Peter Maass, “The Fuel Fixers,” New York Times Magazine, 12-23-07) prompting British and US officials to call off bribery investigations and prosecutions in deference to a need for scarce oil. As well, secretive energy policy based on antiquated obsolete premises has led to costly wars precipitated by a perceived need to maintain access to foreign oil. Such reliance on old school thinking will surely necessitate ever-more brutal overseas interventions. As Peter Maass concludes, “The choice is simple: Make painful but necessary changes to reduce our addiction to oil, or sink deeper into our moral sludge.”

Fossil fools

In a March 26th editorial, the International Herald Tribune lamented that the Bush administration’s “shortsighted policies . . . mean the country is far too dependent on oil that is both ruinously expensive and ruinous for the environment,” concluding that “the era of cheap oil is truly over” and “the nation has to replace the oilmen in the White House.” The IHT also called for greater fuel efficiency, noting that until last December US fuel efficiency standards had not been raised for 30 years, and that US per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide are twice that of Germany and Japan and three times that of France.

A 2002 report by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the health risks from automobile emissions bears the words “don’t cite, don’t quote” on each page. This caution was prompted by fears that the auto industry would sue the EPA, which had sought strict limits on emissions in 1977 but had to relent under pressure from the auto industry. More recently, the EPA has become a willing accomplice of the auto industry’s efforts to thwart emission controls. The December 21, 2007 New York Times editorial “Arrogance and Warming,” opined, “The Bush administration’s decision to deny California permission to regulate and reduce global warming emissions from cars and trucks is an indefensible act of executive arrogance that can only be explained as the product of ideological blindness and as a political payoff to the automobile industry.”

In late December, the EPA told 17 states, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California, that they could not set their own more stringent standards for carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks. Denying a two-year-old application from the states to act pursuant to the 1974 Clean Air Act, the agency said that it was up to the federal govt., not the states, to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. The Bush administration thus prevailed for the time being, despite the April 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that the states could act. The director of the Environmental Defense Fund noted, “The Administration’s denial of California’s request relies on a flawed argument that the federal courts have already rejected.”

Carmakers lobbied using the arguments they made against the catalytic converter and other changes that made cars cleaner, saying the proposed emissions standards were not technologically feasible, would cost too much, would deny consumer choice, and now added that the states have no right to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The EPA, using the auto industry’s rationale, said that it was up to the federal govt., not the states, to regulate CO2 emissions from vehicles. This was the first time the EPA fully denied California a waiver under the Clean Air Act. EPA staff reported that the agency’s head ignored their conclusions, instructing them to provide the legal rationale for his decision. One staffer told a reporter, “California met every criteria . . . on the merits, the same criteria we have used over the last 40 years.” Insiders at the EPA suggested to the Los Angeles Times that Dick Cheney was behind the action. The states had adopted tougher fuel efficiency and tailpipe standards, scheduled to be phased in between 2009 and 2016, to cut global warming emissions by 30 percent. In January 2008, California sued the US govt. asserting that it is “ignoring the will of millions of people who want their govt. to take action in the fight against global warming.”

Once again, as in the Dept. of Justice lawsuit against the tobacco companies, administrative agency political appointees acted at the behest of the White House and against the findings of their own experts. Commenting on the March 14th disclosure that Bush had issued an executive order to the head of the EPA on its anti-smog rule, John Walke, clean air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said “Never before has a President personally intervened at the 11th hour, exercising political power at the expense of the law and science, to force the EPA to accept weaker air quality standards than the agency chief’s expert scientific judgment had led him to adopt. It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference.” Why such obstruction?

Exxon Mobil earned a record $40.6 billion in 2007, besting its own 2006 record for profits earned by a company. Bush and Cheney have financial interests in the oil and gas industries as well as in corporations like Halliburton which provide ancillary services. Despite growing recognition of the serious threat posed by global warming, in 2008 the US govt. will spend 88 dollars on the military for every dollar it spends on climate-related programs according to the 2008 study by the Institute for Policy Studies entitled Military vs. Climate Strategy. “While we spare no expense to wage war, we seem to have no money to spare on averting climate disaster,” says the report’s author.

Bio-fuelish

Legislation in the US and EU has turned ethanol into big business which has spawned industry lobbying groups such as the “American Coalition for Ethanol.” In March 2007, EU leaders pledged to raise the share of biofuels in transport from 2% to 10% by 2020. DaimlerChrysler and other automakers have promoted clean, green biofuels as a response to environmental pressure groups. In January 2008, however, the EU Commission’s in-house scientific unit completed a study which found that EU biofuels promotion policy’s environmental costs outweigh its potential benefits. Likewise, in the US, where some 200 govt. biofuels subsidies cost taxpayers $7 billion per year, General Motors and other carmakers have promoted biofuels. Biofuels are also promoted as national policy in Brazil, China, India and elsewhere.

Almost every European or American who owns a car is already partly running his engine on ethanol, as the law de facto imposes forced blending of an increasing percentage of ethanol into regular gasoline. Carmakers and others have thus jumped on the ethanol bandwagon by producing cars that can run on any blend of gasoline and ethanol. Every liter of ethanol produced in the US enjoys a govt. subsidy of some 50 cents. Towards what end? UC Berkeley Professor David Pimentel found that ethanol production is neither economical (absent state subsidies it would not be viable) nor ecological. His 2005 findings have gained much recent support.

Two studies published in February 2008 in the venerable journal Science conclude that almost all the biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels when the pollution caused by producing these fuels is taken into account. These studies looked for the first time at the comprehensive emissions effects of the vast lands that are being geared towards biofuels development, and found that the resulting rainforest and other destruction of natural ecosystems has dramatically increased the release of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

Princeton University environment and economics scholar Timothy Searchinger, the lead author of one of the studies, characterized the net increase of greenhouse gas emissions as substantial. His study finds that despite EU restrictions on the type of biofuels produced (most of the biofuels produced in Europe is biodiesel made from vegetable oils), biofuels promotion in the US and Europe is transforming land use and indirectly destroying natural habitats. Brazilian farmers, for instance, are deforesting the Amazon to produce soya beans for US consumers whose farmers have shifted to producing corn-based ethanol. And, according to a February report of Friends of the Earth, the increasing demand for palm oil created by the EU biofuels policy is causing the destruction of Indonesia’s forests and the livelihoods of indigenous peoples, and leading to other human rights abuses there.

As stated by a UN Environment Programme spokesperson, “There was an unfortunate effort to dress up biofuels as the silver bullet of climate change.” Overlooked was the effect on land use and its ecological consequences. As Princeton’s Searchinger noted: “The land-use problem is not just a secondary effect. It is major. The comparison with fossil fuels is going to be adverse for virtually all biofuels on cropland.” This is not to suggest that biofuels have no potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but simply that present biofuels initiatives are ineffective and must be rethought. Indeed, the unintended consequences of biofuels promotion are many.

Hungry for change

With the price of essential food staples rising dramatically, people have begun asking why energy policy favors feeding automobiles rather than people. The US govt. response to climate-change is inappropriate at many levels, including its misguided incentives to promote corn-based ethanol as the primary substitute for foreign oil. This massive agribusiness subsidy does not reduce carbon emissions, but it has reduced nutrition for the poor and middle class, who have been hit hard by the steep rise in food prices in recent months as farmers have been given the incentive to gear their crop production towards the automobile.

Ethanol plants are projected to use half of America’s 2008 corn harvest (even if the entire corn crop were used it would replace only 7% of US oil consumption), and the diversion of corn usage from food to fuel is resulting in higher food prices (e.g., theApril 11th IHT reports that corn doubled in price in the last 2 years, and The Economist reports that world wheat prices rose 25% during the last week of February 2008 to its highest price in 28 years) and widespread food shortages as soaring prices have led farmers to replace crops such as wheat with corn. The resulting shortage of wheat and many other related foods has exacerbated poverty, hunger and starvation not just in America, but globally (see “The Fight between Fuel and Food,” Risk Management Magazine, April 2007). As well, the severe weather which has resulted from climate-change has disrupted agriculture and food production.

Food stocks are dwindling worldwide. On March 6th, the executive director of the UN World Food Programme, Josette Sheeran, said that as a result of climate change, high food and oil prices and low food stocks, the world economy “has now entered into a perfect storm for the world’s hungry” which will likely increase in the coming years and continue for the foreseeable future resulting in major social disruptions. On March 7th, noting that “the world’s poorest are hit hard,” Ms. Sheeran warned the EU that its biofuels policy had driven food prices to record levels. We are in a vicious cycle whereby our addiction to transport fuel produces severe weather which threatens food production, and then the effort to find alternative transport fuel adds further to global hunger and poverty. Critics contend that all the convoluted solutions of the oil and auto industries are designed to avoid a simpler one – reducing the consumption of transport fuel.

Biofuels policy is socially inequitable as well as ecologically irresponsible -- it shifts the financial burden of fuel consumption from those actually consuming it at the fuel pumps to the whole of society since only the relatively affluent drive a car, but everybody needs to consume food. As well, promoting ethanol shifts the cost of fuel consumption from industrialized to developing countries because corn is a primary source of nutrition. And this costly endeavor is increasingly being shown not to fulfill its stated purpose – to mitigate climate change. To the contrary, it seems to be exacerbating ecological destruction as well as social dislocations and human suffering.

On April 11th, the head of the World Bank reported that “In just two months, rice prices have skyrocketed to near historical levels, rising by around 75% globally.” Mr. Zoellick also noted that the price of wheat has risen 120% over the past year and that the poor spend as much as 75% of their income on food. The World Bank estimates that food prices overall have risen by more than 83% over the past three years. Also on April 11, a European environment advisory panel urged the EU to suspend its targets for biofuel use in transportation fuels, concluding that Europe’s rush to biofuels was causing deforestation in Southeast Asia and higher grain prices. And the April 15th New York Times reported that at the April 12-13 G7 conference several finance ministers and central bankers called for a reconsideration of recent biofuels policies. An economist commenting on the food crisis told the Times, “Ethanol is about the only lever we have to pull, but none of the politicians have the courage to pull it.”

Reality check

There are no silver bullets for fixing the ecological harm caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. Just as the ethanol solution failed to take an integrated approach (conveniently, negligently, or just unwittingly overlooking its actual environmental impacts), other green alternatives to fossil fuels such as the hydrogen car tend to overlook the fact that the production of hydrogen requires using energy. Half the electricity generated in the US comes from burning coal (and coal is the largest source of energy in China), so if that energy comes from coal, then the carbon emissions have not been fixed – just rearranged. So, unless the electricity which fuels hydrogen or electric cars comes from clean and renewable sources, the best car of the future is likely no car at all.

The laws of thermodynamics present humanity with the inconvenient truth that the use of matter and energy produces waste products (just as you can’t make something from nothing, you can’t make nothing from something). These waste products, including carbon, have reached a level that clearly threatens the natural ecosystem which sustains us. David Pimentel, now professor emeritus at Cornell where he has led studies on the energy impacts of ethanol and other biofuels, wrote on March 18th, “The science is clear: The use of corn and other biofuels is an ethically, economically, and environmentally unworkable sham.”

As noted by the global community at the 1992 Rio and 2002 Johannesburg Earth Summits, “present day production and consumption patterns are unsustainable.” If we wish to protect biodiversity and our progeny, our energy policies must evolve from the way we have become accustomed to doing things towards allocating resources with a broad global perspective on impacts and sustainability. Our present biofuels policies have not yet done that.

We are in a vicious cycle whereby our addiction to transport fuel produces severe weather which threatens food production, and then the effort to find alternative transport fuel adds further to global hunger and poverty. Critics contend that all the convoluted solutions of the oil and auto industries are designed to avoid a simpler one – reducing the consumption of transport fuel.