The current American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology has a most amazing story demonstrating the foolish, indeed outright dangerous, application of the “precautionary principle” to AGW mitigation.
The story is at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es201943v, but all you really need to know is summarized in the last paragraph.
[ Note from Anthony: IPCC co-author, Dr. Rex Victor O. Cruz paper entitled “Yield and Oil Content Ideotypes Specification in Jatropha curcas L.” won Best Scientific Poster Award for Agricultural Sciences by the National Academy of Science and Technology on July 15, 2010.
It looks like Al Gore via his Goldman Sachs train-wreck had a hand in this nonsense too. See the Wikipedia description for Jatropha:
In 2007 Goldman Sachs cited Jatropha curcas as one of the best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to drought and pests, and produces seeds containing 27-40% oil, averaging 34.4%. The remaining press cake of jatropha seeds after oil extraction could also be considered for energy production. However, despite their abundance and use as oil and reclamation plants, none of the Jatropha species have been properly domesticated and, as a result, their productivity is variable, and the long-term impact of their large-scale use on soil quality and the environment is unknown. ]
The Extraordinary Collapse of Jatropha as a Global Biofuel
Promode Kant , Institute of Green Economy, C-312, Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024, India
Shuirong Wu Chinese Academy of Forestry, Wanshoushan, Haidian District, Beijing 100091, China
Blending of fossil diesel with biodiesel is an important climate change mitigation strategy across the world. In 2003 the Planning Commission of India decided to introduce mandatory blending over increasingly larger parts of the country and reach countrywide 30% blending status by the year 2020 and opted for nonedible oilseed species of Jatropha curcus raised over lands unsuited to agriculture as it was considered to be high in oil content, early yielding, nonbrowsable and requiring little irrigation and even less management.
In a massive planting program of unprecedented scale millions of marginal farmers and landless people were encouraged to plant Jatropha across India through attractive schemes.
…
In Tanzania more than 10
000 small farmers have established Jatropha plantations and many more have done so in the rest of East Africa.(2) By 2008, Jatropha had already been planted over an estimated 900000 ha globally of which an overwhelming 85% was in Asia, 13% in Africa and the rest in Latin America, and by 2015 Jatropha is expected to be planted on 12.8 million ha worldwide.(5)
But the results are anything but encouraging. In India the provisions of mandatory blending could not be enforced as seed production fell far short of the expectation and a recent study has reported discontinuance by 85% of the Jatropha farmers.(1) In China also until today there is very little production of biodiesel from Jatropha seeds. In Tanzania the results are very unsatisfactory and a research study found the net present value of a five-year investment in Jatropha plantation was negative with a loss of US$ 65 per ha on lands with yields of 2 tons/ha of seeds and only slightly beneficial at US$ 9 per ha with yields of 3 tons when the average expected Jatropha seed yield on poor barren soils is only 1.7 to 2.2 tons/ha. Even on normal fertile soils (average seed yield 3.9 to 7.5 tons/ha) Jatropha was no match for sunflower.(2, 4)
Though acclaimed widely for its oil, Jatropha was never considered economically important enough for domestication and its seed and oil productivity is hugely variable.
…
A case study of Jatropha plantations raised in 1993–1994 in the Indian province of Andhra Pradesh had reported actual yields that were far below expectations and the species was found to be prone to termite attacks, water logging, vulnerable to drought in the planting year and delayed yields.(3)
…
It appears to be an extreme case of a well intentioned top down climate mitigation approach, undertaken without adequate preparation and ignoring conflict of interest, and adopted in good faith by other countries, gone awry bringing misery to millions of poorest people across the world. And it happened because the principle of “due diligence” before taking up large ventures was ignored everywhere. As climate mitigation and adaptation activities intensify attracting large investments there is danger of such lapses becoming more frequent unless “due diligence” is institutionalized and appropriate protocols developed to avoid conflict of interest of research organizations. As an immediate step an international body like the FAO may have to intervene to stop further extension of Jatropha in new areas without adequate research inputs. Greater investments in dissemination of scientific data will help in ensuring due diligence does not cause undue delays in decision making.
The full story is at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es201943v
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Hey what are we worried about biofuel for? All we have to do is pass a law that our cars have to get 54 mpg and wala our energy worries are over. And they say government can’t solve our problems!
Forgive them; for they know not what they do.
Instead of looking wildly for alternative enrgies–or taking the trouble to bash them–How about simply promoting the reality that coal and other fossils will green the Earth?
Carbon dioxide makes plants and we can increase the carrying capacity of our Earth by freeing the fossils form their long entombment.
And the difference between “biofuels” CO2 and that produced by fossils? The former are merely renewable in that the sun can make more of them. The latter are superrenewable, in that once freed by being burned, they then make forests or other burnable biofuels that are renewable as long as the world lasts.
Dave Springer says:
August 7, 2011 at 12:54 pm
The fuel needs constant processing including enriched uranium as an ignitor.
Constant processing is an advantage. That’s what allows us to avoid expensive reprocessing. Th produces 233U and from that point, no 235U is needed. Another cost advantage is not having to manufacture solid fuel in the first place. Another is not having to store large amounts of waste. Another is being able to burn almost all of the fuel insted of 1 to 3% of it.
I’m surprised. You usually do better than that.
We don’t need thorium. We already have technology that has been built and proven to work. We could use a “combined fuel cycle” facility where you have two conventional plants and one fast breeder plant combined with a reprocessing facility on site. The only thing going in to the plant is normal natural non enriched U238. The only thing that comes out is relatively short half-life waste components that decay to background in less than 500 years and can’t be weaponized. No material that can be weaponized ever moves outside the site.
Cellulosic ethanol makes steps toward commercial implementation ….
http://wallacesfarmer.com/story.aspx/iowa-a-step-closer-to-cellulosic-ethanol-production-9-51115
Using farm waste as an addition to their corn ethanol plants – increases the yield of the corn planted plus can use waste from “food” corn and other biomass feedstock sources …
Jatropha – a perfect parallel to the GWS- Global Warming Scam 😉 … claims of certain science and all manner of benefits – few if any truly supported by clear, undisputed science of fact – luckily we haven’t gone down the mass implementation of the “plan” as with Jatropha
@MorinMoss who wrote:
I believe he was talking about funding another research project like those at Argonne which, as I recall, were started twice in the last 27 years by Republican administrations and canceled twice by Democratic administrations, most recently by Clinton. See http://www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsSA1205.pdf (December, 2005.)
We are currently sitting on our bums, losing what expertise we once had to retirements, while other nations are far ahead of us in this research. Yes, we need funding for breeder reactor research. It would cost far less than the federal monies that have been wasted on wind power or on solar power, not to mention all the bio-fuels fiascoes. It’s time to get serious, but nobody seems to realize how far behind the USA is in nuclear research.
Looks like BP gave up on this 2 years ago – couple of comments suggest there was a scam afoot over acreage planted:
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/07/17/bp-gives-up-on-jatropha-for-biofuel/
http://www.d1plc.com/
http://www.google.co.uk/finance?client=ob&q=LON:DOO
The thought occurs, and forgive me if I’m stating the obvious, is that if biodiesel / biofuels / whatever are a ‘CO2 mitigation strategy’, how does burning fossil fuel result in less Carbon Dioxide emitted than biofuel? Given that both have essentially equal calorific values / contaminant levels.
Surely ‘biofuels’ are ‘less’ green than the stuff from out of the ground. Especially since biofuel production first requires ‘ordinary’ fuel to power the machinery for preparing the ground, planting the crop, fertilise and treat with pesticides before processing the crop ready for conversion and refining into biofuel even before it is ready to be used as a fuel source.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown on the loss of agricultural production in each country as a result of this crop (and not as a result of drought, el nino etc).
Poor fellows.
Dave Springer says:
August 7, 2011 at 12:32 pm
“My older daughter is environmentally concerned. The electric company where she’s at, she lives about 25 miles from me and has a different electric company than mine, offers “pure wind power” at $0.08/kWh. ”
They can do that in the US because they get tax credits when they build the wind farm. The subsidy does not have to be added to the prize of the other electricity your daughter needs (yes, the evil electricity that she needs when the wind doesn’t blow).
.
J85!
Most farmers in a region know from long experience what grows well and makes money in their locale. Every once in a while, under economic distress, farmers get talked into something stupid. In eastern Wyoming in the 1990s, I think, there were some conmen who sold a large number of people on planting “artichokes”. As it turned out these were not edible nor useful for anything except seeds to sell to bigger fools to plant these same artichokes (like the old Goon Show routine). Those artichokes were very difficult to remove from fields–lots of opportunity costs.
Dave Springer says: “My older daughter is environmentally concerned. The electric company where she’s at, she lives about 25 miles from me and has a different electric company than mine, offers “pure wind power” at $0.08/kWh.”
Check your wallet, Dave. You’re probably getting your pocket picked for the difference between 8 cents/kwh and the real cost.
The height of arrogance, use a fraud to screw things up and expect it to work.
I believe in the all the above approach. I dont think we should be using food to burn while people are starving in the world. I think this jatropha could be a good alternative but it seems too premature. A PBS public television show called the journal thejournalol.com with Joan Lunden talked about biofuels as a future solution. We need to tap all our resources until we have a definite solution. We cant let the global warming scam dictate our policy. The PBS series was informative but nothing concrete. America can not afford to be lead by people who subscribe to the global warming scam. 25 years ago we were all going the freeze. What if we enacted policy around that scam?
In a way, the Jatropha thing was an ill-timed closing of a “circle of fraud.”
By now we were supposed to have a global carbon emissions scheme, with “developed” nations, in atonement for their carbon sins, sending massive gobs of cash to “developing” countries, with the built-in assurances that the “developing” nations wouldn’t develop further and become much-larger carbon polluters themselves.
The “developing” nations then get sold on growing crops for biofuels, with Jatropha looking attractive as suitable for land they wouldn’t be using for food production anyway. But biofuels are at least subject to the market force of competitiveness with each other. The cost of the product has to be low enough to compete with other biofuels, and all this development of Jatropha farming should have led to lots of production which would have driven down the market price. End result, the Jatropha farmers would be basically enslaved to the buyers, working for a subsistence income without local market demand and no one else to sell to, likely working land unsuitable for raising anything better, with the biofuel feedstock (if not the actual biofuel) being shipped to the “developed” countries. And because their countries won’t be developing into anything offering better opportunities anytime soon, that’s the best those farmers can get.
Meanwhile in the “developed” countries, with the mandated use of biofuels artificially driving up the prices for the consumers, the dealers in biofuels will make significant profits, for what came from feedstock bought dirt cheap. And who will be selling the biofuels, which are to be blended with traditional “carbon polluting” fuels? The same “Big Oil” that was to be punished by the carbon taxes.
Consumers get hit up for carbon taxes, that wealth gets “redistributed,” residents of the receiving countries (who likely won’t see any benefit from the money) are enslaved as cheap labor growing feedstock, which becomes expensive fuel for the carbon tax payers. Who, in ways direct and indirect, will pay carbon taxes on the biofuel as well. With “Big Oil” soaking up a good share of the “liberated” money getting sloshed around, while assorted governments split up the rest.
That would have been quite a sweet setup. It’s a crying shame it didn’t pan out.
Amazing, I was actually talking to a Jatropha farmer last night.
I need to be careful but I am disappointed with a lot of responses, as only a few referenced the misery inflicted on the poorest farmers. Why was this.
Two simple problems along with Banking greed. Jatropha only really has one problem, a social problem, it is very difficult to hand harvest a fruit when its ripe, when it fruits all the time. Secondly, no thought was given to making a viable market or distribution system for the finished product.
I note also nobody mentions the report by Lord Monckton re Pachuris direct involvement in the Jatropha business but from the Banking side. This is where the money was made, setting up the financing and financial instruments made the bankers very rich but the farmers very poor.
I note all the comments about yields and performance, very true but readily fixed and that I was discussing with the farmer n question ( no dummy, he is building an ethanol plant and owns 17,000 hectares).
The concept is good but when the concept was launched it was to benefit bankers not farmers or to provide a green fuel.
You have to laugh don’t you?
Here in Zimbabwe the government in the form of our Central Bank governor took time out from printing $100 trillion dollar notes to build a Bio Diesel plant of 5 million liters a month capacity. He paid a South Korean company $20m real American dollars to design and build it. The President opened the plant and called upon our “new farmers” to supply Jatropha berries in great quantities so that we could overcome the “evil” western sanctions.
This all happened six years ago.
Total amount of bio diesel produced to date . . Zero.
Comrades: reading all of the above, I congratulate the capitalist world for adopting the glorious traditions of true socialist agriculture. Be not distracted by what appear to be initial setbacks; they just require true diligence, devotion,encouraging the media to report according to The Truth, and the eliminination of saboteurs. Applying the principles of Lyssenkoist biology will increase the oil yield of Jatropha easily by more than a pitiful twentyfold. I must admit that I had doubts as to the true socialist spirit of these programmes, but reading this: “The drivers then could go into town and drink for eight hours before collecting their tractors and collecting their pay. However after that much drinking they sometimes could not find their tractors and the tractors would be covered over the years by wind-blown dirt and dust” confirmed that it was done in true Soviet tradition. I will watch, Comrades, hopefully and cheerful, from far-off Workuta.
To use any land for a monoculture that has limited return and destroys the local ecology cannot be a good idea. To grow biofuel plants instead of food crops is criminal.
Biodiesel has been shown to produce less power and destroy engine parts like injectors due to low lubricant properties. Two good reasons for not using it plus the fact that you can’t eat biofuel.
If jatropha goes pear shaped at least it might take some pressure off the rain forest in S.America and Indonesia which was being slashed and burnt to make way for the new crop. Unintended consequencies indeed.
jorgekafkazar says:
August 7, 2011 at 7:02 pm
“Dave Springer says: “My older daughter is environmentally concerned. The electric company where she’s at, she lives about 25 miles from me and has a different electric company than mine, offers “pure wind power” at $0.08/kWh.”
“Check your wallet, Dave. You’re probably getting your pocket picked for the difference between 8 cents/kwh and the real cost.”
Possibly. There are restrictions on that rate. The home must meet certain standards for energy efficiency and must have an energy audit completed showing compliance. Thermostat can not be set lower than 79 degrees in the summer and probably some maximum in the winter which I didn’t ask about. I was pretty shocked that their electric bill for a 3000 sq.ft. house is only $80/mo. Water is another story though. If they water their small lawn regularly that bill can hit $300/mo in the summer and they have little choice due to HOA convenants requiring lawns be well maintained. Personally I don’t have any landscape plants, including lawn grass, that can’t survive without irrigation. If it isn’t producing food for the table it’s on its own.
From the article: “the Commission may have relied too heavily on the opinion of one of its top functionaries, who expected an internal rate of return ranging from 19 to 28% across India”.
My mother was a proofreader. She made a career out of correcting other people’s errors because, as she put it, it is almost impossible for anyone to catch all of their own mistakes. For this reason, editors, proofreaders, and peer-review exist.
NEVER trust the unchecked opinion of a single person.