A week ago, Biofuelwatch released a new report, ‘Sustainable Biomass: A Modern Myth’.
Several years before I arrived in Argyll, I had the opportunity to see the destructive effects of large landowners scrabbling for land to produce the new commodity of "biofuel" in Colombia. It keeps happening, to the great distress of crofters, very small landowners in Las Pavas, Sur de Bolivar.
Here's a video documenting the peaceful resistance of villagers/smallholding farmers against the illegal destruction of their land and of their property by Aportes San Isidro S.A., one of the world's big palm oil producers:
(In Spanish – the farmers' resilience, resistance and faith-based humour is admirable –
they've been fighting this "dirty game" for six years!)
they've been fighting this "dirty game" for six years!)
What initially looked like a great idea has contributed to world hunger, mass displacement of people in the third world, and certainly hasn't helped to push us toward reducing our energy consumption, quite the contrary.
The Biofuelwatch report "explores the certification companies certifying biomass as sustainable, the UK government’s proposed sustainability criteria for biomass, and developer’s ‘promises’ to source sustainable biomass."
Download Sustainable biomass: A modern myth – A review of standards, criteria and schemes certifying industrial biomass as ‘sustainable’, with particular emphasis on UK biomass electricity developments, Biofuelwatch report [Note: File size 4.75 MB]
Download the Report without pictures (831 kb) here.
Download the Executive Summary (4 pages)
And here's a link to a few good, critical articles in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/biofuels
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