The European Parliament have now voted on the Biomass Action Plan. They can only make recommendations and the final decision will be made by the European Commission, probably on 10th January. Some of the European Parliament's resolutions are extremely alarming: They recognised that, without safeguards, biofuels could cause serious environmental harm, accelerate deforestation and do little to reduce greenhouse gas emission (fine, although they seem to hvae ignored a recent study by European research institutions which warns that one the worst type of biofuels, palm oil from South-east Asian peatlands, is linked to ten times the carbon emissions from an equivalent amount of mineral oil). BUT: They still want to massively expand Europe's palm oil industry right away, without having any safeguards in place. They refused a ban on palm oil. They are pushing for certification, even though no single certification scheme exists (the one which is furthest developed, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, still hasn't even got a time-table for certifying anything sustainable and there is no evidence that the companies involved have improved their practices at all), and nobody knows for sure if certification could work anyway. They want to abolish compulsory set-asides, even though the European Environment Agency and conservation NGOs all say that this would dramatically reduce Europe's biodiversity. And finally they want to class PEAT as a source of 'long-term renewable energy' for biomass. Now that would be a sure way of considerably increasing our greenhouse gas emissions in the name of 'green energy'. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clearly say that it's not renewable, it's not biomass or bioenergy and it is linked to high carbon emissions from burning and also from cutting it (it's actually worse than most conventional fossil fuels because you don't just release the carbon from what you burn, but from a whole peatbog which you'll need to have drained first). Finland and Sweden already subsidise 'green electricity' from peat! What to do: Go to http://www.rainforestportal.org/alerts/send.asp?id=europe_biofuel Please edit your letter if possible - but if you don't have time to do that, sending the standard letter unedited will still help! Many thanks. Almuth
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Campaign against Climate ChangeUK activists portal |
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Thanks for the link, Almuth
Almuth,
Thanks for that link. I wanted to express myself somehow, and it was easy to do, even using the letter unedited, which I thought spoke for me very adequately.
I picked up the National Geographic magazine to read today with a massive photoreportage of the way the Amazon is being felled to make way for agriculture and to provide timber - most of it going to the United States, presumably for construction and paper products. Is there a similar scheme to the FSC recognised in the US, does anyone know ?
Also, Europe takes most of the soya beans grown in the Amazon on cleared land - for cattle feed and food products mostly, I would expect. We take it from there because we don't want the GM soya from the United States, I'm guessing. Please correct me, and fill me in.
Does someone know about the major retailers committing to not source products from the rainforest ? There was some agreement announced a while back, but I forget the details. Can anyone answer ?
The problem with Amazon forest clearance is clearly the demand for timber and soya, feeding raw resources into our energy-intensive industrialised economies, the "mechanised society". If we did not burn so much Fossil Fuel, we would not have so much cheap and dirty power to process timber and soya in these kinds of quantities for our "markets", and the Amazon Rainforest would be easier to protect.
If we cannot protect the Amazon Rainforest from felling, then the impacts of Climate Change will be exacerbated there.
Double plus bad.
It's a compound problem that demands the rationing of Carbon Energy as one part of the solution.
In the meantime, don't buy paper or wood products that could have come from Brazil, and eat European pulses instead of soya, and eat European beans instead of meat products.