It seems like quite a nice idea, if you don’t think about it too hard. Why not grow some fresh new energy rather than relying on finite fossil fuels that are cooking the climate? Why not swap some of those dirty coal mines and oil wells for fields of fuel crops, powered by the sun, delivering clean, renewable energy year after year?
Sadly, as soon as you do start thinking about it, you realize that things aren’t so simple. We’d need to turn around 600 million hectares of cropland – accounting for almost half of current global food production – over to biofuels just to power the world’s vehicle fleet.1 Despite this, over the past 20 years, the dream of a plant-powered world has grown from a green-tinted vision to a globe-spanning industry. Millions of hectares of African land have been set aside for energy crops like jatropha and oil palm.2 Forty per cent of the US corn crop now feeds cars rather than people. More than a third of the fuel in Brazilian cars started life as sugar cane. Neste Oil have just completed the world’s largest biofuel refinery in Singapore, with a processing capacity of 800,000 tonnes per year.3 A whole host of problems have followed the push to exploit biofuels, from land grabs and deforestation to food price rises and increased carbon emissions.
