Jamie Kitman and Biofuels
Never can one be more certain of being tied to than when a multinational corporation tells you that the questionable activity in which it is engaged must be done because the lives of those in the developing world depend on it. Let Kitman’s First Truism concerning Corporate Altruism guide your thinking when you hear oil companies decry the rise of biofuels, tearfully relating how cropland that might otherwise go to feeding the world’s poor will instead be devoted to powering someone’s car.
The obvious question here: which world would that be? The one in a parallel universe, where major corporations look out for the poor, and oil companies want people to use less oil?
Frankly, nothing frosts my chaps more than appeals to my sense of humanity and fairness when they’re put forward by enterprises that have spent decades, sometimes even centuries, doing the most inhumane, unfair things. Can anyone pretend that oil companies hold something dearer to their dead hearts than what they call maximisation of shareholder value?
Why, yes, as it happens, they can pretend just that. Self-aggrandisement packaged as altruism is no longer a scoundrel’s last refuge; it is his first line of attack. We care! Perhaps it is because the gravity (and potential legal implications) of the environmental wrongs committed over the last 100 years has only just fallen into relief.
Now that global warming is known, and we’ve begun to realise how comprehensively we’ve trashed the place, largely by playing with fossil fuels and their derivatives, the mind boggles. And how interconnected it all is. And such a short time it took! There is the need, both today and tomorrow, not just for any lie, but for a really, really big lie. Indeed, a series of really big lies. And a lot of little ones.
We hear about Arab and Venezuelan intransigence and the ripple effects of high petroleum demand in China and India, including food shortages and high prices at the pump. More proof, we are told, of the world’s urgent need to swallow the industry agenda whole: lose biofuels immediately, weaken existing and eliminate new environmental regulations, including those aimed at curbing C02 emissions, and resist all nationalised oil movements. Taxes must be cut while heavy profits are allowed to accrue. More drilling – offshore and in protected lands – is essential.
Meanwhile the energy providers’ growing economic might empowers them to make mighty green claims -repeated by the media, no matter how ridiculous. ‘Beyond Petroleum’. ‘Clean coal”. ‘Safe nuclear energy’. Public hysteria has mounted in the US as petrol prices reach record levels, though it has not led to introspection or coherent fact-finding by the media.
All but unnoted has been more than one hundred years of huge subsidies for the oil industry and its latest windfall – the extended period of record profits that coincides exactly with George W. Bush’s two terms. Having gutted the Justice Department, the pro-oil Bush administration couldn’t put the brakes on the industry’s pricing even if it wanted to, and it’s preparing to leave office anyway. One gets while the getting is good.
Speaking of getting, the story of biofuels makes for another illuminating chapter in America’s long tradition of socialism for the very rich, sportingly pitting Big Oil against those other great feeders at the public trough, Big Agriculture. For understandable reasons, oil companies hate ethanol.
And given the way ethanol rolls in the USA these days, as the much-subsidised product of an agricultural oligopoly, there is much to hate about the business. As any schoolboy could tell you, no government-backed alternative fuels programme was ever going to get off the ground without surprising and delighting our gigantic agribusiness types. With their outsized ability to grow corn, ethanol fits the bill.
However, lost in all the amped-up anti-biofuel rhetoric as titans collide is this – ethanol doesn’t need to be made from corn. When derived from other bio-cellulosic material, crop waste or even rubbish, ethanol is less land-intensive and more carbon neutral. But the American tax code is written to favour ethanol derived from corn, grown on big corporate farms in the Midwest, knee-deep in petrochemical fertilisers and genetically modified seeds.
The big players in this game, Archer Daniels Midland. Cargill and Monsanto (who remind you that GM seeds are needed to help feed the poor) can be counted on one hand, but counting their questionable deeds would require an auditorium full of hands, at least.
Take away the chemicals and the GM seeds, as some have suggested, and these farms might yield less corn. So now the poor will have to starve because yields are down. Feeling guilty yet7 Thank heavens it’s not up to you, and our farm and oil lobbies are here to do the right thing.
Source: TopGear