Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Roger Helmer MEP – The European Union has scrapped post 2020 biofuel targets, thanks to pressure from green groups concerned about environmental damage.
Green transport target will be scrapped post-2020, EU confirms
EU laws requiring member states to use “at least 10%” renewable energy in transport will be scrapped after 2020, the European Commission confirmed, hoping to set aside a protracted controversy surrounding the environmental damage caused by biofuels.
The European Commission will table a revision of the Renewable Energy Directive at the end of 2016, aiming to further push renewable sources like wind and solar across the European Union.
On transport, “we will look specifically at the challenges and opportunities of renewable fuels including biofuels”, said Marie C. Donnelly, Director for Renewables at the European Commission.
The current directive, adopted in 2008, requires each EU member state to have “at least 10%” renewable energy used in transport by 2020 – including from biofuels and other sources like green electricity.
This has drawn criticism in Britain, where reaching the 10% target will require doubling current biofuel supply, adding a further penny per litre on pump prices, according to a leaked memo by the Department for Transport.
But the 10% target will be dropped in the new directive, Donnelly told a breakfast seminar organised at the European Parliament on Tuesday (3 May).
The article goes on to discuss bureaucratic strategies by which EU administrators might quietly undermine or even reverse the official change in biofuel policy – but murky byzantine policy twists are nothing unusual, for a tenuously democratic organisation which habitually “misspends” billions of Euros of its annual budget.
‘The European Commission will table a revision of the Renewable Energy Directive at the end of 2016, aiming to further push renewable sources like wind and solar across the European Union.’
This running amok gets cancelled by lack of amunition: money.
The bio-fuel-from-food scheme pressed for by green Groups is a humanitarian and environmental disaster which causes clear-cutting and burning of rainforests for palm oil plantations, burning of rainforests for sugarcane-ethanol schemes in Brazil. overplanting corn in the USA driving up World prices, and especially high food prices and hunger in Latin America.
The WindTurbine power generation schemes pressed forward by Green Groups are inefficient, costly and require massive subsidies to keep them going. The Wind-Turbines kill bats and birds and spoil people’s health and sanity, despoil the landscape, reduce milk production and are a fire hazard too.
Energy and CO2 taxes pressed for by Green Groups, fail to effect the World temperature, impoverish people and reduce their access to useable energy, kill old people in fuel poverty and cold, handicap the development of Third World Countries, and restrict people’s ability to travel and move goods.
There seems to be a pattern of Green Group activity emerging through the haze of CAGW.
I am skeptical about liars who are experts is everything.
I do not know about the EU but I have read most of the 2005 US Energy Bill.
Mandates for biofuels were not to reduce CO2. They were to develop alternate sources of transportation fuel. There was no mandate for any particular source. So there is no mandate for corn.
Farmers in the US could produce more crops than the world needed for food. Some were using feed corn in pellet stoves. Feed corn was dirt cheap.
Since corn farmers were ready to meet the demand, they captured the market. Good for them. There is not a nicer group of people in the world.
For all you folks who want to blame all the ills of the world on corn farmers, shame on you.
Mostly agree except the bit about apportioning shame. No need for that. Corn is just biomass that grows pretty efficiently. Nothing wrong with using biomass as fuel. It doesn’t affect the price of corn-based food.
The interference in the world food price is the dumping of low priced corn on the market where farmers need a higher price to make a viable living. Like putative CO2 harm, there have to calculated benefits and opportunity costs for economic actions. Overproduction and dumping are definitely harmful to small scale farmers who were doing fine before the intervention. There are numerous examples. South Africa and milk from the EU is a good one. The EU subsidises milk production and the net effect is to destroy the South African dairy industry.
If green groups are concerned about environmental damage, why haven’t they called for an end to the bird-choppers?
It’s called “cognitive dissonance”, which manifests itself as abject fkin stupidity, usually put forward with an elitist, holier than thou, planet-saving voice.
Google Emma Thompson
Ethanol is only good for drinking (gin, vodka, whiskey) The only environmentally-good biofuel is used cooking oil for diesel engines. Biogas from cow and pig manure is also good for engines converted to compressed natural gas.
That tree growing out of a petroleum barrel looks staged, I suspect the photograph has been manipulated to make it appear that such things happen. Does anyone have any experience with green biofuel barrels placed on featureless grey landscapes and the objects that emerge from them? I have also seen a hose and dripping fueling nozzle from a petrol pump emerging from a such a barrel fantastically suspended in the air, as if it were summoned by a snake-charmer. No supporting wires were in evidence..
The planet has been conquered but our exploration of stock imagery is far from complete.