Green Groups Go Cold on Biofuel

Farmers have welcomed the advent of biofuels but environmental and development groups, including "Friends of the Earth", "Royal Society for Protection of Birds" , Oxfam the International Development Institute, and a group of MEPs have questioned their introduction. In the meantime Lord Stern, the ex World Bank Chief Economist and author of the seminal work on the cost of climate change, has given a bleaker view on global warming.

The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation is now in force throughout the European Union and envisages 10% of total transport fuel usage as biofuels by 2020.

UK Ministers said the RTFO, would help to cut emissions because using some biofuels can result in two-thirds less greenhouse gas output than fossil fuels. Farmers say they can produce all of the biodiesel and bioethanol needed to meet the targets from feed wheat that would otherwise be exported, or oilseed rape grown on former set-aside land. Scientists back the plan.

But environmental groups and donor agencies disagree. Campaigners from Friends of the Earth, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Oxfam protested against the RTFO outside the UK parliament on Monday. Oxfam said biofuels drove up the price of food for the poor, as too much of the world's grain production was being turned towards them, and the International Development Institute said that developing countries would lose out yet again "Those who have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions, and may suffer most from the impact, should not have to pay the high price of tackling climate change."

And, a group of Members of the European Parliament Claude Turmes, Dorette Corbey and Anders Wijkman, who are central players in steering the EU plan through the parliament, have asked the Commission to reconsider the goal that 10 per cent of transport fuel be derived from plants by 2020. Their intervention follows the release of two scientific studies which have raised concern over the environmental and economic impact of the goal.

The three MEPS want the EU executive to reveal how much biofuel production will be necessary to meet the 10 per cent target inside the 27-country union; how much land currently devoted to food will need to switch to biofuels production; and the projected level of imports of biofuels from outside the EU.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Financial Times, Lord Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, and author of the seminal climate change report said "We underestimated the risks ... we underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases ... and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases,"

The Stern report on climate change underestimated the risks of global warming, according to its author, Lord Stern, and should have presented a gloomier view of the future
In retrospect, he said, he would have taken a much stronger view in the report on the drastic changes that would come about if greenhouse gas emissions were not abated.

In the report, he estimated the costs of climate change at between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of global gross domestic product.

But these costs would be much higher if the report had taken a more aggressive stance on the probable consequences of warming.

Lord Stern said data published since his report came out, in October 2006, had led him to change his mind.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of the world's leading climate scientists convened by the United Nations, published the most comprehensive study of climate change science.

It predicted a temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius within the next 100 years with catastrophic consequences for the planet, unless greenhouse gas emissions were stabilised and then cut within the next decade.

"The damage risks are bigger than I would have argued. Things like the damage associated with a 5 degree temperature increase are enormous. We can't be precise about what it would be like but you can say it would be a transformation," he said.

But he defended his estimates of the cost of taking action on emissions, which he put in the report at about 1 per cent of global GDP.

"Subsequent reports, [from] McKinsey, the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have pointed to the [Stern report's] costs of action being roughly in the right ball park. Nothing [since] has led me to revise the cost of action," he said.