Biofuels Brazil

In Silicon Valley, Venture Capitalists Turn Cautious and Focus on the Short Term

2009-01-05T09:08:00.001-08:00

posted by Dustin
from NYT...

CLEAN TECH GETS REALISTIC Venture capitalists are still chasing clean
technology. Through September, $3 billion was invested in
technologies that create alternative energy and conserve power, up
from $1.9 billion the year before, according to the National Venture
Capital Association. But big, expensive projects like building
factories to manufacture solar panels or biofuels are falling out of
favor.

"The economic arguments for those businesses literally went upside
down in a year," said Paul Holland, the general partner in charge of
the clean tech practice at Foundation Capital.

Instead, some venture capitalists are looking at technologies that
monitor energy demand, like software that tracks and regulates a
building's energy use.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/technology/start-ups/05venture.html?
_r=1

JC e-mail - Notícia enviado por um Amigo

2008-11-07T09:39:00.001-08:00

Blog,
seu amigo Leticia enviou esta noticía para você

Informativo publicado diariamente
Versão Eletrônica do Jornal da Ciência da SBPC.
Se você quiser cadastrar um amigo para receber este jornal, basta clicar aqui.

Clique no link da notícia para ler toda a matéria.

20. Monsanto compra empresas de biotecnologia da Votorantim Multinacional paga US$ 290 milhões pela Alellyx e a CanaVialis, especializadas em cana

Expediente Editora executiva: Daniela Oliveira Editor executivo adjunto: Luís Amorim Redação: Marina Ramalho Assessoria de Informática: Sérgio Santos, Fernanda Rodrigues. Tecnologia: RPM - Reação - Produtora Multimídia. Fale conosco pelo e-mail jciencia@jornaldaciencia.org.br ou pelo fone (21) 2295-4846

FT.com / Video & Audio / Interactive graphics - Interactive feature: Ethanol boom and bust

2008-11-04T09:48:00.000-08:00

FT.com / Video & Audio / Interactive graphics - Interactive feature: Ethanol boom and bust: "Interactive feature: Ethanol boom and bust

Published: October 21 2008 19:47 | Last updated: October 21 2008 19:47"

FT.com / In depth - Investors suffer as US ethanol boom dries up

2008-11-04T09:46:00.000-08:00

FT.com / In depth - Investors suffer as US ethanol boom dries up: "Investors suffer as US ethanol boom dries up

By Kevin Allison in San Francisco and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington

Published: October 21 2008 23:22 | Last updated: October 21 2008 23:22

Investors, such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, are sitting on billions of dollars in losses after buying into the corn-based ethanol industry that George W. Bush embraced as the ans wer to US energy woes.

Six of the biggest publicly traded US ethanol producers have lost more than $8.7bn in market value since the peak of the boom in mid-2006 and the beginning of this month, according to an analysis by the Financial Times. The boom followed a 2005 law requiring refiners to mix billions of gallons of the biofuel with petrol."

Re: California biofuels mandates go to court - Tesoro says GHG emissions too high

2008-11-03T23:27:00.001-08:00

In my view, this lawsuit stems directly from a lawmaking flaw based on the now-outdated assumption (circa 2006) that all ethanol causes less life cycle GHG emissions than all petroleum products. Tesoro is correct to point out that since this is no longer thought to be true, a volumetric blending mandate no longer makes sense from the perspective of climate mitigation .

In theory the volumetric mandates could still serve other purposes such as to prevent water pollution or to reduce dependence on petroleum. In practice these mandates directly conflict with the LCFS. I'm not sure the full extent of what's motivating Tesoro's action, but I can see how as a refiner, it would be untenable to be required to blend a certain percentage of ethanol, but the only cheaply/freely available ethanol causes more emissions than the gasoline/MTBE it's replacing, yet the LCFS requires reduced carbon intensity of Tesoro's fuel.

This isn't just a California issue. British Columbia, Ontario and the EU have (or may have) volumetric/percentage blending mandates underlying LCFS. These mandates also are vestiges of the assumption that all ethanol is greener than BAU. Come to think of it, there may also be conflicts between the LCFS and the volumetric biofuels mandates under US EISA. If that's so, numerous other states might eventually be affected too.

Re: California biofuels mandates go to court - Tesoro says GHG emissions too high

2008-11-03T15:06:00.001-08:00

Correction: I guess the action is comparing ethanol not only to oxygenates, but also to gasoline.

Tesoro's court action seeks to prevent enforcement of the ethanol blending mandate in the California Reformulated Gas Regulation. They argue that since the life cycle GHG emissions of most ethanol is greater than the petroleum oxygenates it replaces and it doesn't satisfy the mandate's own requirement for "improve[d]... emissions and air quality benefits".

source: http://ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=5004

California biofuels mandates go to court - Tesoro says GHG emissions too high

2008-11-03T15:00:00.001-08:00

Tesoro's court action seeks to prevent enforcement of the ethanol blending mandate in the California Reformulated Gas Regulation. They argue that since the life cycle GHG emissions of most ethanol is greater than the petroleum oxygenates it replaces and it doesn't satisfy the mandate's own requirement for "improve[d]... emissions and air quality benefits".

source: http://ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=5004

Fwd: EU biofuels regulatory science

2008-10-29T22:07:00.001-07:00

EU biofuel data change angers environmentalists

Wed Oct 29, 2008 12:58pm GMT,
Reuters

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By Pete Harrison

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European biofuels could receive a boost from a change in the way the European Union calculates their impact on the environment, a document shows, angering environmentalists who think they do more harm than good.

The European Council document seen by Reuters on Wednesday also annoyed European biodiesel producers who see a bias toward bioethanol.

New figures on how biofuels can help cut greenhouse gas emissions in the fight against climate change follow swiftly after the European Parliament proposed clamping down on their use, fearing negative side effects such as deforestation.

The EU's final stance will be decided in negotiations in coming weeks between the European Parliament and member states, who are discussing the new data this week.

"The timing and lack of transparency surrounding these new figures raises serious questions about how the biofuel lobby has been able to influence the debate," said Nusa Urbancic of environment group T&E.

The European Union's executive has proposed that 10 percent of all road transport fuel comes from renewable sources by 2020, as it seeks to heed U.N. warnings that climate change will bring more extreme weather and rising sea levels.

Much of that 10 percent would come from biofuels, creating a huge potential market that is coveted by exporters such as Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as EU farming nations.

But environmentalists charge that biofuels made from grains and oilseeds have pushed up food prices and forced subsistence farmers to expand agricultural land by hacking into rainforests and draining wetlands.

DEFORESTATION

The European Parliament has responded by agreeing to limit fuels from food such as Brazilian sugar to 6 percent of EU fuel.

It has demanded that from the outset biofuels cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent compared to petrol and diesel, an increase on the 35 percent saving originally proposed by the European Commission, which would have ruled out some EU biofuels.

Member states are now considering reclassifying European biofuels to give new values for the greenhouse gas savings they can achieve, according to the European Council document.

Among the new figures, sugar beet ethanol is given a new greenhouse gas saving of 52 percent, up from 35 percent in the European Commission's initial calculations, bringing it back into line with parliament's recommendation.

"This has been done without any transparency," said a spokeswoman for European Biodiesel Board. "Maybe this can be used as a starting point, but in no way can this be used in the longer term without more scientific work and input from biofuels producers."

T&E's Urbancic said the figures appeared to ignore the damage biofuels can cause by using vegetable oils that would otherwise have been used in foods -- thereby creating fresh demand that encourages farmers to expand farmland into forests.

"The Commission and Council are still ignoring the absolutely critical issue of indirect land use change," she said. "They are being selective about the science they take on board."

(Reporting by Pete Harrison, Editing by Peter Blackburn)

Dupont exec. discusses ILUC

2008-10-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

10/09/2008 -- E&ETV: "Later this month, U.S. EPA is expected to release a proposed rulemaking for implementing the lifecycle analysis requirements for biofuels under the renewable fuels standard. Estimating the emissions generated through the production of biofuels has been controversial, particularly with respect to how land-use changes affect emissions. During today's OnPoint, Jack Huttner, vice president of Dupont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol, gives the biofuels industry's take on how EPA should proceed with the rulemaking. Huttner discusses how the inclusion of indirect land-use emissions could influence his industry's ability to meet the renewable fuels standard."

kyoto-wto-biofuels-climate regulation

2008-10-15T22:36:00.001-07:00

a couple of relevant links that don't fully answer what climate aspects of biofuels can and cannot be regulated in the eyes of the WTO. Under Kyoto, it's tough to regulate LUC according to Wetlands International:

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1205-palm_oil_peatlands.html

http://www.wetlands.org/Whatwedo/Wetlandsandclimatechange/Peatlandsandclimatechangemitigation/UNClimateConventionUNFCCC/ActionsforUNFCCCtoreducepeatemissions/tabid/1293/Default.aspx

Ag. and Climate Change - New article from Royal Society

2008-10-12T20:41:00.000-07:00

Can anyone access this?

Greenhouse gas mitigation in agriculture

Issue	Volume 363, Number 1492 / February 27, 2008
Editor(s)	Chris Pollock Jules Pretty Ian Crute Chris Leaver Howard Dalton
Pages	789-813
Issue Title	Theme Issue ‘Sustainable agriculture II’ compiled by Chris Pollock, Jules Pretty, Ian Crute, Chris Leaver and Howard Dalton
DOI	10.1098/rstb.2007.2184

PDF (663.9 KB)HTML Free Preview

Authors

Pete Smith¹, Daniel Martino², Zucong Cai³, Daniel Gwary⁴, Henry Janzen⁵, Pushpam Kumar⁶, Bruce McCarl⁷, Stephen Ogle⁸, Frank O'Mara⁹, Charles Rice¹⁰, Bob Scholes¹¹, Oleg Sirotenko¹², Mark Howden¹³, Tim McAllister⁵, Genxing Pan¹⁴, Vladimir Romanenkov¹⁵, Uwe Schneider¹⁶, Sirintornthep Towprayoon¹⁷, Martin Wattenbach¹, Jo Smith¹

¹School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UU, UK
²Carbosur, Constituyente 1467/1202, Montevideo 11100, Uruguay
³Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, People's Republic of China
⁴University of Maiduguri, Maiduguri, Borno State 1069, Nigeria
⁵ Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Research Centre, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada T1J 4B1
⁶Institute of Economic Growth, University Enclave, Delhi 110 007, India
⁷Department of Agricultural Economics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA
⁸NREL, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA
⁹School of Agriculture, Food Science and Veterinary Medicine, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
¹⁰Department of Agronomy, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA
¹¹CSIR Division of Water, Environment and Forest Technology, Pretoria 0001, Republic of South Africa
¹² All-Russian Institute of Agricultural Meteorology, Obninsk, Kaluga Region 249020, Russia
¹³ CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, GPO Box 284, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia
¹⁴College of Resources and Environment Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, People's Republic of China
¹⁵ Pryanishnikov All-Russian Institute of Agrochemistry (VNIIA), 127550 Moscow, Russia
¹⁶Departments of Geosciences and Economics, Hamburg University, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
¹⁷The Joint Graduate School of Energy and Environment, King Monkut's University of Technology, Thonburi, Bangmod, Bangkok 10140, Thailand

Abstract

Agricultural lands occupy 37% of the earth's land surface. Agriculture accounts for 52 and 84% of global anthropogenic methane and nitrous oxide emissions. Agricultural soils may also act as a sink or source for CO₂, but the net flux is small. Many agricultural practices can potentially mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the most prominent of which are improved cropland and grazing land management and restoration of degraded lands and cultivated organic soils. Lower, but still significant mitigation potential is provided by water and rice management, set-aside, land use change and agroforestry, livestock management and manure management. The global technical mitigation potential from agriculture (excluding fossil fuel offsets from biomass) by 2030, considering all gases, is estimated to be approximately 5500–6000Mt CO₂-eq.yr⁻¹, with economic potentials of approximately 1500–1600, 2500–2700 and 4000–4300Mt CO₂-eq.yr⁻¹ at carbon prices of up to 20, up to 50 and up to 100 USt CO < sub > 2 < /sub > -eq. < sup > -1 < /sup > , respectively. In addition, GHG emissions could be reduced by substitution of fossil fuels for energy production by agricultural feedstocks (e.g. crop residues, dung and dedicated energy crops). The economic mitigation potential of biomass energy from agriculture is estimated to be 640, 2240 and 16 000Mt CO < sub > 2 < /sub > -eq.yr < sup > -1 < /sup > at 0–20, 0–50 and 0–100 US t CO₂-eq.⁻¹, respectively.

Keywords

greenhouse gas, agriculture, mitigation, cropland management, grazing land, soil carbon

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Amazônia deve ficar fora de área para plantio de cana-de-açú car, anuncia ministro Stephanes

2008-10-09T07:40:00.001-07:00

Amazônia deve ficar fora de área para plantio de cana-de-açúcar, anuncia ministro Stephanes - 08/10/2008

Local: Brasília - DF
Fonte: Agência Senado
Link: http://www.senado.gov.br

O ministro da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento, Reinhold Stephanes, anunciou há pouco a conclusão de estudo sobre o zoneamento agroecológico para produção de cana-de-açúcar, que ainda falta ser aprovado. Segundo informou, os biomas Amazônia e Pantanal não serão incluídos na área considerada apta para a produção da cana.

Stephanes participa de debate sobre a expansão das culturas para produção de biocombustíveis, em reunião na Comissão de Agricultura e Reforma Agrária (CRA), em conjunto com a Subcomissão dos Biocombustíveis.

Segundo Stephanes, ainda, o estudo que acaba de ser concluído aponta 65 milhões de hectares para plantio de cana, dos quais 37 milhões são áreas de pastagem degradadas. Ele também anunciou que a expansão da cana nos próximos oito anos será de cerca de cinco milhões de hectares.

climate registry reporting protocol

2008-10-07T15:17:00.001-07:00

This document, by the The Climate Registry, details their definition of Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions.

http://www.theclimateregistry.org/protocols.html

Tesco defends carbon label scheme - 21 May 2008 - BusinessGreen

2008-10-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

Tesco defends carbon label scheme - 21 May 2008 - BusinessGreen: "Tesco has today launched an impassioned defence of its plans to put carbon labels on all its products, rejecting accusations that the labels confuse customers and insisting that its pilot scheme has already delivered significant tangible benefits."

New Sugarcanes to Deliver One-Two Energy Punch | BiobasedNews.com

2008-10-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

New Sugarcanes to Deliver One-Two Energy Punch | BiobasedNews.com: "New Sugarcanes to Deliver One-Two Energy Punch
Oct 2, 2008 - By Jan Suszkiw, USDA-ARS

New varieties of sugarcane and other crops adapted to the U.S. Gulf Coast region are being developed for use in making ethanol as a cleaner-burning alternative to gasoline.

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists, in cooperation with the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station (LAES) and the American Sugar Cane League, USA (ASCL), have already released three new varieties of 'energy sugarcane.' They're called that because of their high stalk contents of sugar and fiber, which could eventually serve as complementary ethanol feedstocks.

Raw-sugar processors now burn the fiber to generate heat that powers stalk-crushing and sugar-crystallization processes, notes Edward Richard, who leads the ARS Sugarcane Research Unit in Houma, La. The extracted sucrose sugar is sold for consumption or converted into ethanol. However, Richard anticipates that biorefineries will use the fiber as well, once technologies for converting cellulose into ethanol become economically feasible."

Biofuels Sustainability Framework

2008-10-03T15:20:00.000-07:00

"Scientists call for sustainability framework for U.S. biofuels
from Bioenergy pact between Europe and Africa by Biopact team
In his State of the Union Address on January 23, 2007, President Bush stated that, in order to substantially lower foreign oil imports, 'We must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017.'

This mandate coupled with a $1.01 ethanol refiner subsidy promised in the 2008 Farm Bill and a $45 subsidy per ton of biomass production for growers are putting energy needs ahead of environmental sustainability, according to an article in the October 3, 2008 issue of Science Magazine entitled 'Sustainable Biofuels Redux'."

The Oil Drum | Terra Preta: Biochar And The MEGO Effect

2008-09-29T14:04:00.000-07:00

A substantial review of popular and scholarly literature on terra preta.

The Oil Drum | Terra Preta: Biochar And The MEGO Effect: "Terra Preta ('black earth') was discovered by Dutch soil scientist Wim Sombroek in the 1950's, when he discovered pockets of rich, fertile soil amidst the Amazon rainforest (otherwise known for its poor, thin soils), which he documented in a 1966 book 'Amazon Soils'. Similar pockets have since been found in other sites in Ecuador and Peru, and also in Western Africa (Benin and Liberia) and the Savannas of South Africa. Carbon dating has shown them to date back between 1,780 and 2,260 years."

a biorefinery

2008-09-26T13:45:00.000-07:00

Some texted, added.

IDB Biofuels Sustainability Scorecard - IDB

2008-09-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

IDB Biofuels Sustainability Scorecard - IDB: "�
IDB Biofuels Sustainability Scorecard
�

The Sustainable Energy and Climate Change Initiative (SECCI) and the Structured and Corporate Finance Department (SCF) of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) have created a Biofuels Sustainability Scorecard based on the sustainability criteria of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels. The primary objective of the Scorecard is to encourage higher levels of sustainability in biofuels projects by providing a tool to think through the range of complex issues associated with biofuels. Since the scientific debate around these complex issues continues to evolve, the Scorecard should be seen as a work-in-process and will continue to be updated and revised as needed. Comments can be submitted at the end of filling out the Scorecard."

Op-Ed Columnist - The Establishment Lives! - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

2008-09-22T21:31:00.001-07:00

Op-Ed Columnist - The Establishment Lives! - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com: "Once, there was a financial elite in this country. During the first two-thirds of the 20th century, middle-aged men with names like Mellon and McCloy led Wall Street firms, corporate boards and white-shoe law firms and occasionally emerged to serve in government."

Op-Ed Columnist - The Establishment Lives! - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

2008-09-22T21:31:00.000-07:00

Newswise Science News | Cornell Gets $10 Million NSF Grant to Establish New Institute That Applies Computer Power to Sustainability

2008-09-22T08:21:00.000-07:00

Newswise Science News | Cornell Gets $10 Million NSF Grant to Establish New Institute That Applies Computer Power to Sustainability: "Could a computer model help stabilize the tuna population? Can we compute how to transition to ethanol fuel without jeopardizing food production?

Those and other questions will be tackled by computer scientists, applied mathematicians, economists, biologists and environmental scientists affiliated with Cornell University’s new Institute for Computational Sustainability, being launched with a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

This program is designed to pursue “far-reaching research agendas that promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society.”

Directed by Carla Gomes, Cornell professor of computing and information science, the institute will involve 14 Cornell faculty members along with scientists at Oregon State University, Howard University, Bowdoin College, the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Conservation Fund.
“Our vision is that computing and information science can – and should – play a key role in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the way we manage and allocate our natural resources,” Gomes said."

Carbon News and Info > Climate change news > Energy & biofuels > EU, US diverging on biofuel policy?

2008-09-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

Carbon News and Info > Climate change news > Energy & biofuels > EU, US diverging on biofuel policy?: "U, US diverging on biofuel policy?
Carbon News and Info > Climate change news > Energy & biofuels
Monday, 22 September 2008
The EU is set to ease biofuels targets in the face of global concerns over their inflationary impact on food prices, but there appears less chance of similar action in the US, no matter who’s in the White House.

The push to substitute green fuels for fossil fuels following the spike in oil prices in recent years and the imperatives of greenhouse emissions reduction for global warming have led to alarm over food prices. A jump in global food prices this year, has in part been attributed to competition for grain produce from biofuel makers. Question marks over the true environmental impacts of biofuel production and use have also arisen."

Food prices threaten famed Argentine beef

2008-09-21T22:32:00.000-07:00

Food prices threaten famed Argentine beef: "Food prices threaten famed Argentine beef
Nicholas Kusnetz, Associated Press
Sunday, September 14, 2008"

blog post: Is Corn Ethanol Lowering Gas Prices at the Pump?

2008-09-16T18:49:00.001-07:00

http://www.cleantechblog.com/labels/ethanol.html
THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2008

Is Corn Ethanol Lowering Gas Prices at the Pump?
Despite providing the largest portion of alternative fuel in the US,
corn ethanol gets a lot of flack in the circles Cleantech Blog runs
in. The usual culprits go something like this: Corn ethanol is heavily
subsidized (yes it is). Corn ethanol does not reduce greenhouse gas
emissions (sort of, it really, really depends on your assumptions).
Corn ethanol contributes to the fertilizer driven "deadzone" in the
Gulf of Mexico (maybe, another complicated topic). Corn ethanol drives
up the price of food (a topic for another day).

But the main argument for supporting corn ethanol production has
always been about energy independence and fuel switching. Enabling a
new source of supply into our gasoline supply chain should in theory,
put some some downward pressure on gasoline prices at the pump, and
keep those energy dollars at home rather than send them overseas.

So the real question is, does it?

A very interesting paper was published at Iowa State
http://www.card.iastate.edu/publications/DBS/PDFFiles/08wp467.pdf
last month says yes, US ethanol production (almost all from corn) has
reduced gasoline prices at the pump $0.29-$0.40 per gallon, depending
on the region. Further, that the reduction came largely at the expense
of profits the refining industry would otherwise have made (indicating
perhaps that our ethanol production helped US consumers at the pump,
but did not impact world oil prices).

In their paper entitled The Impact of Ethanol Production on US and
Regional Gasoline Prices and on the Profitability of the US Oil
Refinery Industry, authors Xiaodong Xu and Dermot Hayes analyzed the
impact on price at the pump and refining profits of adding ethanol to
the US gasoline fleets by separating the impact of ethanol from the
major variables like gasoline imports, refining capacity, refining
utilization rates, hurricanes, market concentration in refining,
stocks, and seasonality, that generally affect gasoline price.

I find their $0.29 to $0.40 per gallon results a surprisingly large
number, indicating that ethanol production, while providing on average
well less than 5% of our gasoline supplies over their study period,
could have affected prices at the pump downward to the tune of greater
than 2 to 3 times that percentage level. That result is a huge win for
ethanol proponents, as it suggests that adding ethanol to the US fleet
has significantly benefited consumers (as one would expect), and also
suggests that the ethanol subsidy program (at about $0.40 per gallon
for 5% of the US gasoline production works out to around a 1 to 2 cent
effective tax on gasoline at current levels) may well have paid for
itself up to 20x over or more. The studies authors are careful not
extrapolate too much from the results, but they are certainly
interesting enough to warrant significant further research, and argue
a strong case for further corn ethanol support.

Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a
boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in
cleantech. He is founding contributor of Cleantech Blog, a
Contributing Editor to Alt Energy Stocks, Chairman of Cleantech.org,
and a blogger for CNET's Greentech blog.
Labels: cleantech, ethanol, gasoline prices, greentech

Florida Deal for Everglades May Help Big Sugar - NYTimes.com

2008-09-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

Florida Deal for Everglades May Help Big Sugar - NYTimes.com: "IN June, Gov. Charlie Crist announced that Florida would buy one of the state’s two big sugar enterprises, the United States Sugar Corporation. He billed the purchase as a “jump-start” in the environmental restoration of the Everglades, which cane growers are accused of polluting with fertilizer runoff."

ONU propõe regras para a produção de etanol, Brasil contesta

2008-09-11T21:25:00.001-07:00

]

Quarta-Feira, 10 de Setembro de 2008

ONU propõe regras para a produção de etanol

Entidade poupou Brasil, mas disse que biocombustível afetou preços
Jamil Chade, GENEBRA

http://www.estadao.com.br/estadaodehoje/20080910/not_imp239036,0.php

Para tentar dar um ponto final à polêmica do etanol e seu impacto nos preços de alimentos, a ONU propõe a criação de uma série de critérios para que os biocombustíveis sejam produzidos, uma entidade para monitorar a questão e a revisão dos subsídios que existem para o setor nos países ricos. Hoje, o relator das Nações Unidas para a Alimentação, Olivier de Schutter, apresentará sua proposta aos países da entidade. Ele poupa o etanol do Brasil de críticas e garante que a alta de preços dos alimentos no mundo não foi gerada pelo País. Mas confirma que o biocombustível em outros mercados teve um impacto direto nos preços dos alimentos.

"A produção atual de etanol não é sustentável", afirmou. A proposta de Schutter é que a comunidade internacional chegue a um consenso sobre as regras para a produção do etanol e para o estabelecimento de políticas públicas. Os critérios propostos devem incluir não apenas questões de preços de alimentos, mas aspectos relacionados ao meio ambiente e condições de trabalho. Para ele, a exploração é "freqüente" nas grandes plantações da indústria de biocombustíveis.

"Se o modelo de produção do etanol continuar, violações aos direitos à alimentação se proliferarão." Sua proposta é que cada novo investimento passe por uma avaliação sobre o impacto ambiental que terá, sobre o efeito na concentração de terras, as condições de trabalho e o preço dos alimentos na região.

Os critérios de produção e investimento devem incluir garantias de acesso a alimentos, de que pequenos agricultores não serão expulsos de suas terras e casas, de remuneração justa aos trabalhadores e de proteção dos direitos de indígenas e mulheres. Segundo a proposta, "países devem ser encorajados a não permitir investimentos se esses critérios não forem seguidos".

O acesso aos mercados internacionais só poderia ocorrer se o etanol fosse produzido nessas bases. A ONU sugere até mesmo uma reforma nas leis da Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC) para permitir que a discriminação seja feita. Para monitorar o cumprimento dos critérios, a ONU sugere a criação de um fórum permanente.

Outra proposta é dar fim a todos os esquemas de subsídios e incentivos fiscais nos países ricos para a produção de etanol, o que estaria gerando uma distorção nos mercados e um comércio artificial.

AMEAÇA

A ONU não nega que o avanço do etanol contribuiu para o aumento dos preços das commodities, "ameaçando o direito à alimentação". Um aumento de 1 ponto percentual no preço de alimentos provoca um aumento de 16 milhões de pessoas que sofrem de subnutrição.

De acordo com Schutter, o Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI) concluiu que o etanol foi responsável por 70% da alta no preço do milho e 40% no da soja. Outro estudo aponta que o etanol americano teria sido o principal responsável pela alta dessas commodities em 2007 e 2008, que foi superior até ao aumento do preço do petróleo. Diante dessa constatação, o relator da ONU pede que metas de expansão do etanol nos Estados Unidos e Europa sejam abandonadas.

BRASIL

Para Schutter, porém, seria "irresponsável condenar" todas as políticas de etanol no mundo. A produção para o consume local reduzir a dependência de petróleo não é a mesma da produção em grande escala para a exportação. Para ele, não se pode avaliar da mesma forma o etanol produzido de milho e o de cana. Cada um teria feito diferente para o meio ambiente e para a criação de empregos. No Brasil, 1 milhão de pessoas estariam empregada no setor. Mas a ONU alerta que a mesma situação pode não ocorrer em outros países.

"A produção de etanol do Brasil a partir da cana não contribuiu para a recente alta nos preços das commodities", afirmou. O motivo é que a produção de cana no País aumentou de forma significativa e as exportações de açúcar triplicaram desde 2000. O Brasil ainda passou a dominar 40% do mercado mundial de açúcar, ante o peso de 20% em 2000. Segundo os estudos, as exportações nacionais de açúcar foram suficientes para manter a alta na commodity relativamente modesta, salvo em 2005 e 2006, quando uma seca afetou a produção.

CONCENTRAÇÃO

Um temor da ONU é que haja uma corrida por terras para a produção do etanol, deixando um espaço menor para a produção de alimentos e encarecendo o preço das commodities. O etanol não seria o único problema. A compra de terras por estrangeiros para garantir seu abastecimento seria outro problema crítico.

O etanol, segundo a ONU, provoca uma concentração de terras e ameaça o acesso de indígenas e pequenos produtores às áreas agricultáveis. No total, 60 milhões de indígenas e povos autóctones seriam afetados diretamente pela produção do etanol no mundo.

O relatório ainda alerta que a produção de etanol em um país em desenvolvimento para abastecer um mercado rico não vai ajudar na geração de desenvolvimento e combate à pobreza. O Brasil, ao lado dos Estados Unidos, está promovendo projetos nesse estilo na América Central.

FRASES

Olivier Schutter
Relator da ONU para a Alimentação

"Se o modelo de produção do etanol continuar, violações
aos direitos à alimentação se proliferarão"

"Países devem ser encorajados a não permitir investimentos se os critérios não forem seguidos"

"A produção de etanol do Brasil a partir da cana não contribuiu para a recente alta nos preços das commodities"

Quinta-Feira, 11 de Setembro de 2008

Brasil contesta proposta da ONU
Itamaraty discorda de sugestão de regras para etanol

Jamil Chade

http://www.estadao.com.br/estadaodehoje/20080911/not_imp239617,0.php

O Brasil questiona a proposta da ONU de criar diferentes categorias de etanol e critérios para que os biocombustíveis sejam exportados. O Estado informou ontem que a ONU iria sugerir a criação de requisitos para a produção de etanol e que as regras da Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC) fossem modificadas para permitir que apenas biocombustíveis produzidos conforme esses critérios pudessem ser exportados.

"O Brasil acredita que qualquer iniciativa relacionada com o comércio internacional de biocombustíveis seja não discriminatória, transparente e compatível com as regras da OMC", afirmou o Itamaraty em uma declaração lida diante do Conselho de Direitos Humanos da ONU, ontem.

O relator das Nações Unidas para a Alimentação, Olivier de Schutter, que apresentou a proposta, disse em uma coletiva de imprensa que ficou "surpreso" com a resposta do Brasil. "Não senti que o Brasil insistiu de forma suficiente no fato de que existem diferentes tipos de etanol no mundo", afirmou.

Para ele, a expansão dos biocombustíveis gerou parte da alta mundial dos preços de alimentos. Mas Schutter poupou o etanol brasileiro, alegando que sua produção não afetou o mercado da mesma forma que o etanol de milho americano.

O relator da ONU sugere a criação de um sistema para permitir que o etanol que não respeite o meio ambiente, os direitos trabalhistas e o acesso a alimentos seja banido do comércio internacional. Sua idéia é que o etanol que não cumprir esses requisitos em sua produção seja impedido de ser exportado. Para isso, sugere até uma mudança nas leis da OMC para permitir a discriminação. "O mundo precisa criar um código para essa expansão do etanol", defendeu ontem novamente.

Tanto ele como o governo brasileiro, porém, concordam que os subsídios americanos e europeus ao etanol estão distorcendo os mercados e agravando a fome. O Brasil, porém, alega que seria "injusto" colocar o etanol nacional no mesmo patamar de avaliação que o biocombustível dos demais países.

Brazil likely to challenge the US on ethanol imports

2008-09-04T12:35:00.001-07:00

http://ictsd.net/i/trade-and-sustainable-development-agenda/27614/

Far more land use in Brazil than is allowed by forest reserve law

2008-09-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.mnp.org.br/index.php?pag=ver_noticia&id=435808

A new study by the Brazilian Agricultural Corporation (EMBRAPA) has tallied all land legally available for all rural and urban land uses in Brazil. The findings sharply diverge from observed land use and suggest the impracticalities of enforcing environmental laws requiring legal reserves. The article's headline says that by environmental law only 7% of the Amazonian biome is available for any land use. The most surprising finding is that just 33% of the country as a whole is available for land use by law, approximately the area now occupied by cattle ranching. "What about already occupied agricultural areas, cities, mines, industry, and infrastructure,"asks the study's author Evarista de Miranda.

MNP - Movimento Nacional de Produtores: "03/09/2008
Fonte: Tribuna da Imprensa Online
Embrapa: 7% do Bioma Amaz�nia s�o pass�veis de ocupa�o
Um estudo da unidade de monitoramento por sat�lite da Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecu�ria (Embrapa), de Campinas (SP), mostra que o aumento significativo das �reas destinadas �prote�o ambiental e ao uso exclusivo de algumas popula�es reduziu de forma significativa as �reas pass�veis de ocupa�o econ�mica urbana, industrial e agr�cola. De acordo com o estudo, em termos legais, apenas 7% do bioma Amaz�nia e 33% do pa�s seriam pass�veis de ocupa�o."

"conservativeness"in response to scientific uncertainty and incompleteness: REDD vs. LUC

2008-09-02T18:25:00.001-07:00

I recently read a new article from the journal Environmental Research Letters called "Applying the Conservativeness Principle to REDD..."

The authors argue for a "conservativeness principle" to construct and monitor schemes to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). They argue that it's best to make conservative estimates of the emissions reduced by interventions to avoid deforestation because data on the subject are frequently incomplete and/or uncertain. That way:

-it's unlikely that the payments will be wasted

-there is incentive for tropically forested countries to prove that the default estimates are conservative

-such programs will then engage tropically forested countries in international climate change governance

I think one can conceptualize REDD emissions reductions as a function of carbon pool*intervention*persistence of intervention. Therefore, by the conservativeness principle, argue the authors, it is best to conservatively estimate all three of these values. They note, moreover that, "it is likely that the most typical and important example of incomplete estimates will arise from the lack of reliable data for a carbon pool." As a result, they argue that conservativeness in estimating the size of the carbon pool is the most prudent approach to REDD monitoring.

It's worth noting, however,that with respect to broader LUC governance this is the opposite of conservative. With respect to numerous other LUC issues (like say calculating the biofuels ILUC adder) overestimating the carbon stocks more closely falls under the "conservativeness principle". An overestimate of forest carbon stocks increases the cost of deforestation and puts the burden of proof on industry to advance the carbon accounting science. Such carbon footprint overestimates are used as default values in the Renewable Transportation Fuels Obligation (RTFO).

I think I like the premise of the conservativeness principle, but maybe it is best applied to measuring and monitoring the influences of the policies themselves, not the environmental systems/stocks/flows on which they are intended to act. Otherwise, there is a risk of some strange compartmentalization in the regulatory science. Thoughts?

FYI, the article also features a decent survey of the scientific literature on carbon flux from tropical forest conversion.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/3/3/035005/erl8_3_035005.html

Collaborative data visualization

2008-09-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/technology/31novel.html?_r=1&sq=visualization&st=cse&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=1220403636-o+vZh2VCFn66m095iI8+nw

Novelties

Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data

By ANNE EISENBERG

Published: August 30, 2008

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

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Enlarge This Image

Above shows occurrences of names in the New Testament.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another's work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. "When analyzing information, no single person knows it all," he said. "When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions."

The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. Dr. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals in academia, business and government. "We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience," he said — to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.

"The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database," he said.

The Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are among the popular tools.

Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for visualizing numerical data. "The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload blog posts, and entire books," Dr. Viégas said, so the site added techniques for unstructured text. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, President Bush's State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003.

Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an image, Dr. Wattenberg said.

Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. "It's great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats" on their blogs, Dr. Viégas said. "So why not a visual that gives you some insight into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone else, something completely different, and that's where the conversation starts."

Rich Hoeg, a technology manager who lives in New Hope, Minn., and has a blog at econtent.typepad.com, was so taken with the possibilities for group collaboration that he wrote a tutorial on using Many Eyes as part of his series called "NorthStar Nerd Tutorials."

"Many Eyes is unusual, because it takes advantage of the collective intelligence of a group to get more out of a data set," he said. For the tutorial, Mr. Hoeg exported enrollment data for graduate engineering students to the site, then used one of the tools there to display the information in various ways.

"I wanted people to understand that you can take the same data and have it tell lots of different stories," he said.

Dr. Wattenberg noted an example from the site. In charting a particular topic — deaths resulting from human violence in the 20th century — one user originally presented a bubble graph in which the size of the circles represented the number of casualties tied to an event — for instance, World War I or World War II. After discussion on the site about the substantial growth in population during the 20th century, the originator offered two new time-based visualizations of the data, one a line graph and the other a stack graph — plotting the number of casualties against this growing population.

"You could see a new downward trend emerge," Dr. Wattenberg said. "Violent deaths declined in the latter decades of the century. It's a slightly more optimistic view."

Ben Shneiderman, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a pioneer in information visualization, says sites like Many Eyes are helping to democratize the tools of visualization. "The gift of the Internet is that everyone can participate, and the tools can be brought to a much wider audience," he said.

Presenting results in a static spreadsheet or table may do the job. "But sometimes it's like driving with your eyes closed," he said. "With visualization, it might be possible to open your eyes and see something that will help you" — for instance, patterns, clusters, gaps or outliers in the data.

"The great fun of information visualization," he said, "is that it gives you answers to questions you didn't know you had."

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

Sources on How Biofuels are Influencing Food Prices

2008-08-24T21:42:00.000-07:00

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/4/163717/0989
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/8/1761/56481
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2008/jul/10/exclusivethebiofuelsreport

Correction to RTFO co-product allocation post

2008-08-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Phillip for posting the following correction in the comments section of the blog:

The version of the RTFO Carbon Reporting Methodology you are referring to is out of date. This was a version consulted on in the middle of last year and has since been updated.

In particular, the co-product treatment procedures were updated. The recommendation to use allocation by energy content for energy co-products was withdrawn. During the consultation exercise many stakeholders highlighted the fact that use of the energy allocation method could lead to perverse incentives (e.g. little or no reward for installing an efficient CHP system at a biofuel plant, which would have significant GHG savings).

Energy coproducts are now treated by system expansion / substitution. The rest of your post is accurate.

Please see the following link for the final version of the Carbon Reporting Methodology:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/rfa/_db/_documents/080227_Final_Carbon_Reporting_Methodology.pdf

Re: Indirect land use change in Version Zero of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels

2008-08-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Interesting the acknowledgement that there is no “broadly accepted methodology” to determine indirect land use change, and the decision that “RSB will work with key international and national agencies and experts to try to provide a methodology to measure the indirect impacts of biofuels production for inclusion in the assessment of compliance with this standard, and to give guidance to producers”. Perhaps a window of opportunity for the Berkeley biofuels project to contribute to debates and policy at the international level? Brent

On 8/13/08 12:16 PM, "Avery Cohn" <avery.cohn@gmail.com> wrote:

3.e looks like a placeholder as yet, but it has some curious parts - i.e. does the use of "previously cleared land" really minimize ILUC?

3.e        GHG emissions from indirect land use change, i.e. that arise through macroeconomic effects of biofuels production, shall be minimized. There is no broadly-accepted methodology to determine them. Practical steps that shall be taken to minimize these indirect effects will include:
o        Maximising use of waste and residues as feedstocks; marginal, degraded or previously cleared land; improvements to yields; and efficient crops;
o        International collaboration to prevent detrimental land use changes; and
o        Avoiding the use of land or crops that are likely to induce land conversions resulting in emissions of stored carbon.
Key guidance: The use of residues and waste shall not violate Principle 8 on Soil. Careful definitions and guidelines for identifying preferred land (marginal, degraded, underutilized, etc.) will be needed. The RSB will work with key international and national agencies and experts to try to provide a methodology to measure the indirect impacts of biofuels production for inclusion in the assessment of compliance with this standard, and to give guidance to producers.

coproduct allocation as recommended by E4tech to the UK for the RTFO

2008-08-14T16:42:00.001-07:00

Therefore, it is recommended that the approach to address co-products

should be flexible and, that the most appropriate approach (i.e. that

which most accurately estimates the net GHG impact) should be

decided for each individual co-product. In practice, this is means that:

• Substitution will be the first choice approach, and

• (I think they omitted the word energy here) Allocation will be preferred when co-products are used for heat or

electricity generation or are converted into another biofuel.

• Allocation by market value will be allowed when it is not possible to define

a sensible substitution approach.

source: http://www.dft.gov.uk/consultations/closed/rtforeporting/carbonreporting
-

By substitution they mean that one should measure what the marginal quantity of the co-product replaces (i.e. DDGs might replace soy meal so the substitution method would credit corn ethanol with the carbon footprint of making the amount of soy meal it replaces in animal feed. They recommend that this is would be allocated by protein equivalence).

Fwd: Cana é proibida na Amazô nia, mas capacidade de fiscalização preocupa

2008-08-14T08:28:00.001-07:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brent Millikan <bmillikan@uol.com.br>
Date: 2008/8/14
Subject: Cana é proibida na Amazô nia, mas capacidade de fiscalização preocupa
To: Michael O'Hare <ohare@berkeley.edu>, Avery Cohn <avery.cohn@gmail.com>, "Renata M. T. Andrade" <natypete.andradedowns@gmail.com>

FYI, in case you hadn't see this.. Brent

Cana é proibida na Amazônia, mas capacidade de fiscalização preocupa

http://noticias.ambientebrasil.com.br/noticia/?id=39950

09 de agosto de 2008

Não será autorizado nenhum novo projeto de plantio de cana-de-açúcar na Amazônia, de acordo com os resultados da negociação dos ministérios de meio ambiente e agricultura para o Zoneamento Ecológico Econômico. Segundo o acordo feito entre os ministérios, divulgado na segunda-feira (4), os projetos de etanol já existentes na Amazônia não serão afetados, mas nenhuma outra usina poderá ser instalada.

Além de excluir a Amazônia, o zoneamento agroecológico da expansão da cana-de-açúcar também excluiu as planícies do Pantanal. A decisão final depende do Palácio do Planalto, que deve analisar o texto acordado entre os ministros e tomar as medidas necessárias para a sua execução.

Na opinião do diretor adjunto da organização Amigos da Terra - Amazônia Brasileira, Mario Menezes, é preocupante a capacidade do poder público conseguir fiscalizar e impedir novos plantios na Amazônia. "A efetividade dessa medida depende da capacidade do Estado em fazer com que o setor econômico cumpra as restrições", diz.

Menezes, que coordena um projeto para se criar uma certificação socioambiental para a produção agropecuária, inclusive a cana-de-açúcar, acredita que essa capacidade de fiscalização é precária, "como se vê no caso da grilagem, do desmatamento, da exploração ilegal de madeira e tantos outros eventos ilícitos que campeiam na Amazônia e no Pantanal".

Cana-de-açúcar na Amazônia - Existem atualmente três empreendimentos de etanol de cana-de-açúcar na Amazônia, localizados nos estados do Acre, Amazonas e Pará, e um projeto já aprovado no estado de Roraima. O plantio da cana na Amazônia é muito criticado por ambientalistas e pela comunidade internacional, mas defendido pelo setor produtivo dos estados da Amazônia.

No final de julho (30), o ministro da agricultura Reinhold Stephanes admitiu que fosse possível produzir cana-de-açúcar nas savanas de Roraima e a defesa da produção de etanol na região foi uma de suas polêmicas com a ex-ministra do meio ambiente Marina Silva.

Polêmica também é a produção de etanol na Usina Álcool Verde, no Acre. O Ministério Público Estadual do Acre rejeitou os estudos de viabilidade do plantio de cana, devido à fragilidade do Estudo de Impacto Ambiental (EIA-RIMA), que não avaliou o uso da água e o impacto das plantações na Amazônia. Além disso, segundo o Ministério Público, na área do canavial da usina encontra-se um importante sítio arqueológico, conhecido como Geoglifos, que pode ser impactado. (Fonte: Bruno Calixto/ Amazônia.org)

Indirect land use change in Version Zero of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels

2008-08-13T08:16:00.001-07:00

3.e looks like a placeholder as yet, but it has some curious parts - i.e. does the use of "previously cleared land" really minimize ILUC?

3.e GHG emissions from indirect land use change, i.e. that arise through macroeconomic effects of biofuels production, shall be minimized. There is no broadly-accepted methodology to determine them. Practical steps that shall be taken to minimize these indirect effects will include:

o Maximising use of waste and residues as feedstocks; marginal, degraded or previously cleared land; improvements to yields; and efficient crops;

o International collaboration to prevent detrimental land use changes; and

o Avoiding the use of land or crops that are likely to induce land conversions resulting in emissions of stored carbon.

Key guidance: The use of residues and waste shall not violate Principle 8 on Soil. Careful definitions and guidelines for identifying preferred land (marginal, degraded, underutilized, etc.) will be needed. The RSB will work with key international and national agencies and experts to try to provide a methodology to measure the indirect impacts of biofuels production for inclusion in the assessment of compliance with this standard, and to give guidance to producers.

EPA Keeps Biofuels Levels in Place after Considering Texas’ Request

2008-08-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/871e4716874340fe8525749e005b43be?OpenDocument
Release date: 08/07/2008

Contact Information: Jonathan Shradar, (202) 564-4355 / shradar.jonathan@epa.gov

(Washington, DC – August 7, 2008) Following extensive analysis, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Stephen L. Johnson today announced his decision to deny a request submitted by the State of Texas to reduce the nationwide Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS). As a result, the required total volume of renewable fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, mandated by law to be blended into the fuel supply will remain at 9 billion gallons in 2008 and 11.1 billion gallons in 2009.

“After reviewing the facts, it was clear this request did not meet the criteria in the law,” said EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson. “The RFS remains an important tool in our ongoing efforts to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions and lessen our dependence on foreign oil, in aggressive yet practical ways.”

Current law authorizes EPA to waive the national RFS if the agency determines that the mandated biofuel volumes would cause “severe harm” to the economy or the environment. The agency recognizes that high commodity prices are having economic impacts, but EPA’s extensive analysis of Texas’ request found no compelling evidence that the RFS mandate is causing severe economic harm during the time period specified by Texas.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 established the RFS program – and included amendments to the Clean Air Act to set strict criteria for RFS-related waivers. RFS nationwide volume mandates were increased in the Energy Independence and Security Act, which was signed into law in December 2007.

EPA conducted detailed analysis, consulted closely with the Departments of Energy and Agriculture, and carefully considered more than 15,000 public comments in response to the Texas request.

This is the first RFS-related waiver request. In a Federal Register notice, EPA is publishing a detailed rationale that will also serve as a framework for any future waiver considerations.

More information: http://www.epa.gov/otaq/renewablefuels

Stephanes defende o ‘plantio’ de cana na Amazônia

2008-08-05T17:34:00.000-07:00

http://josiasdesouza.folha.blog.uol.com.br/arch2008-08-03_2008-08-09.html#2008_08-03_22_17_36-10045644-0

Sérgio Lima/Folha
Na contramão do que dissera Lula no início de junho, o ministro Reinhold Stephanes (Agricultura) defende o cultivo de cana-de-açúcar na região Amazônica.

Disse que, do ponto de vista agronômico, o plantio de cana na Amazônia é factível. “Na minha visão, poderia haver plantio nas savanas de Roraima”, exemplificou.

Defende também a preservação da cana em solos amazônicos onde já estão assentadas usinas sucroalcooleiras.

Menciona os casos de três usinas –uma no Estado do Acre, outra nas proximidades de Manaus (AM) e a terceira no Pará.

O risco da proliferação da cana na Amazônia é uma das principais críticas que organizações ambientais estrangeiras fazem ao etanol brasileiro.

Em junho, ao participar de reunião da FAO, em Roma, Lula dissera coisa diversa do que afirma agora o seu ministro da Agricultura.

O presidente afirmara que o Brasil não plantaria cana na Amazônia porque era desnecessário. Acrescentara o seguinte:

"Estamos fazendo o zoneamento agroecológico exatamente para que a gente demarque claramente o que você pode plantar e onde...”

“...Não queremos plantar cana na Amazônia porque sabemos que a terra lá não é produtiva para cana. Então não adianta fazer investimento lá."

Lula alfinetara os ambientalistas em timbre azedo. Tachara a crítica de que as plantações de cana-de-açúcar estão invadindo a Amazônia de argumento "sem pé nem cabeça".

Cuidadoso, Stephanes trata de esclarecer que não se deseja plantar cana em áreas desmatadas, mas em pontos específicos.

Seja como for, a posição do ministro ateia fogo numa fogueira de críticas que Lula imaginava ter apagado com as declarações da reunião da FAO.

Resta agora aguardar pela divulgação do zoneamento agroecológico, cujo anúncio o governo anuncia para breve.

Escrito por Josias de Souza às 21h17

Comentários (20) | Enviar por e-mail | Permalink

Petrobas starts up a biodiesel plant

2008-07-31T08:20:00.001-07:00

Brazil's Petrobras starts commercial biodiesel production

Technicians work in a new biodiesel station, at Petrobras oil and
natural gas treatment and process unit pole of Guamare, some 180km
northeast of Natal, northern edge of Brazil. Photo courtesy AFP.
by Staff Writers
Candeias, Brazil (AFP) July 29, 2008
Brazil's state-run oil group Petrobras started commercial production
of biodiesel Tuesday, ignoring the food versus biofuel controversy
already dogging the planting of crops to make carburant.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva inaugurated the first of three
plants Petrobras is to open this year to turn out the biodiesel.

It is located in Candeias, a town 55 kilometers (35 miles) from the
northern city of Salvador de Bahia, and has a capacity of 57 million
liters (15 million gallons) per year.

"Brazil must not be afraid of this international biofuel debate. We
want this discussion, and we are not going to flee from it," said
Lula.

The Brazilian president has frequently and fiercely rejected claims
that his country is contributing to the current crisis caused by high
food prices by encouraging biofuel crop cultivation on arable land.

Brazil is the second-biggest producer of biofuel in the world, after
the United States, and the biggest exporter. It currently makes 15
billion liters of ethanol from sugarcane per year, and exports nearly
a third of that.

It stands behind biofuel as a means to reduce the dependency on oil,
and to combat global warming by cutting greenhouse gases generated by
fossil fuels.

Brazil already uses biodiesel as a three-percent additive to its
standard petro-based diesel. The government's plan to increase that
mix to five percent in 2010 may be advanced by the push to embrace
biofuel.

According to the ministry for agricultural development, the country
already makes enough biodiesel for its current needs, 840 million
liters produced from vegetable-oil generating crops grown by 40,000
farmers.

Petrobras's biofuels division intends to increase overall biofuel
production over the next four years by acquiring factories and forming
strategic alliances with companies.

Lula said Brazil would tackle the controversy surrounding the
production in November, when an international conference would be
hosted to allow dialog "without tempers, but with scientific bases, on
the supposed competition between biofuels and food."

He said the meeting would look at the "real" reasons for
carbon-dioxide production and the rise in food prices.

Petrobras president Jose Sergio Gabrielli acknowledged that Brazil's
biofuels strategy was under attack, but affirmed that the critics
"attribute to our program problems that don't come from it."

He also said the foundation of the biodiesel production would be "the
promotion of family farming."

Lula's cabinet chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, rounded out the defense
by stressing that Brazil's biofuels offered "a solution to the
problems caused by fossil fuels, and at the same time is a tool in the
fight against hunger through the support of family farming."

South America Biofuel, beef etc 2006/2007

2008-07-27T11:57:00.001-07:00

South America Environment, Science &Technology, and Health Newsletter

Edition #88. Also attached is a calendar of up-coming ESTH events across
the Western Hemisphere. The information contained was gathered from news
sources from across the region, and the views expressed below do not
necessarily reflect those of the Regional Environmental HUB Office or of
our constituent posts. Addressees interested in sharing any ESTH-related
events of USG interest are welcome to do so.

Agriculture

World Bank Close To Approving Amazon Beef, Other Projects

JAN. 23, 2007 -The International Financial Corporation, the private lending
arm of the World Bank, is close to making a final decision on a US$90
million loan that would help one of Brazil's top beef exporters double beef
production capacity at its facilities in the Amazon region of Para
state. For the IFC, this is a controversial and unprecedented investment,
according to the bank's own assessment. However, according to the press
report, it would serve as a "certificate of confidence"that Bertin is a
good steward of the environment and abides by fair labor practices. That's
good news for Bertin because the view of Brazilian beef overseas is often
one of a sector living large off cheap labor as it wipes out swaths of
rainforest. "No other lender is going to demand, monitor, and follow
through on social and environmental policies like the IFC. "

Source - <http://www.cattlenetwork.com/>http://www.cattlenetwork.com

Record Biotech Plantings in 2006

JAN. 18, 2007 - A biotechnology advocacy group reported that a record
number of biotech crops were planted worldwide last year, but critics
complained the gains were more of the same: aimed at making corn, soy and
cotton crops resistant to weed killers and bugs. None of the genetically
engineered crops for sale last year were nutritionally enhanced and much of
the output feeds livestock, which critics said undercuts industry claims
that biotechnology can help alleviate human hunger. Still, the report
prepared by the industry-backed International Service for the Acquisition
of Agri-Biotech Applications touted the record as evidence that crops
engineered to cut pesticide use can ease poverty and financially benefit
small farmers around the world. Some 10.3 million farmers in 22 countries
grew engineered crops on 252 million acres last year, a 13 percent increase
over 2005, according to the report. About 9.3 million of those people were
considered subsistence farmers. The United States, Argentina and Brazil
were the top three countries that grew genetically engineered crops last
year, mostly soy.

Source - New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/>http://www.nytimes.com

Colombia: Irrigation District on Its Way

JAN. 6, 2007 - The Colombian Institute for Rural Development (INCODER) is
to undertake construction of the Triangulo de Tolima land development
project (in the central province of the same name), with an investment of
150 million dollars. German Molina, INCODER coordinator in Tolima
province, told Tierramerica that this will be the biggest project of its
kind in the country, after the southern irrigation district of Rancheria
which is currently under construction. The project will benefit some 45,000
people who live on 24,000 hectares in the south of the province that will
be cultivable under irrigation. Eleven thousand of the beneficiaries are
indigenous people, Molina added. The Environment ministry awarded the
environmental permit for the project to INCODER on Dec. 27. The Institute
will be in charge of providing infrastructure, operation, maintenance, land
preparation, sowing and irrigation.

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iecobreves.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iecobreves.shtml

Outbreak of Brucellosis in Southern Chile

JAN. 8, 2007 - An outbreak of bovine brucellosis has been confirmed in the
Chilean province of Osorno, according to the Minister of Agriculture Alvaro
Rojas. Measures to isolate the outbreak in the rural area of Osorno have
been taken and "we're talking with farmers about the complications to rural
activities which this entails", Rojas is quoted by an Osorno daily adding
that since "we have an open alert system", the re-appearance of the
outbreak was rapidly detected". Luis Paredes, from SAG's Livestock
department said that the outbreaks come as a "great surprise", since
"Osorno has been the region which has most advanced in the matter and no
outbreaks had been reported for a very long time". "We believe we are
facing isolated cases but it's a call of attention to remind us we must be
alert at all times", added Paredes.

Source - MercoPress
<http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9596&formato=html>http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9596&formato=html

Forests
Brazil Gambles on Monitoring of Amazon Loggers

JAN. 14, 2007 - A Brazilian government plan set to go into effect this year
will bring large-scale logging deep into the heart of the Amazon rain
forest for the first time, in a calculated gamble that new monitoring
efforts can offset any danger of increased devastation. The government of
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in an attempt to create Brazil's first
coherent, effective forest policy, is to begin auctioning off timber rights
to large tracts of the rain forest. The winning bidders will not have title
to the land or the right to exploit resources other than timber, and the
government says they will be closely monitored and will pay a royalty on
their activities. The architects of the plan say it will also help reduce
tensions over land ownership in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical
forest, which loses an area the size of New Jersey every year to
clear-cutting and timbering. But the called-for monitoring of the loggers
allowed into the rain forest's largely untouched center will come from a
new, untested Forest Service with only 150 employees and from state and
municipal governments. That concerns environmental and civic groups because
local officials are more vulnerable to the pressures of powerful economic
interests and to corruption.

Source - New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/>http://www.nytimes.com

Amazon rainforest relies on African dust

JAN. 10, 2007 - A single spot in the Sahara desert is responsible for over
half the Amazon basin's annual supply of minerals, researchers say. In a
study published in Environmental Research Letters, scientists show that
dust winds arising from the Bodele depression northeast of Lake Chad
are the main mineral source fertilizing the Amazon rainforest in Latin
America. Using recent advances in satellite instrumentation, researchers
produced the first quantitative estimate of the dust emission: 56 per cent
of the Amazon's total annual mineral supply. It was known that West
African dust winds played an essential role in the Amazon mineral
supply. But the rate of emission from the Bodele depression has not been
measured until now. According to the study, the soil of the Amazon
rainforest is shallow, poor in nutrients and almost without soluble
minerals. The health and productivity of the Amazon basin depends on
nearly 50 million tons of mineral-containing dust transported annually
across the Atlantic Ocean from the Sahara.

Source - SciDev
<http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readNews&itemid=3327&language=1>http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readNews&itemid=3327&language=1

Wildlife
Chile Draws Up Endangered Species List

JAN. 13, 2007 - Chile is home to some 30,000 types of flora and fauna and,
as is increasingly the case throughout the planet, many of those plant and
wildlife species are seriously endangered. In fact, two Chilean tree
species - the Juan Fernandez Sandalo and the Toromiro, of Easter Island -
are already extinct, according to the National Environmental Commission
(CONAMA). If measures aren't taken to protect them, more Chilean species,
including the Huemul deer, the Taruca deer and the Andean cat, will
follow. Last month, CONAMA published the results of study that sought, for
the first time ever, to classify native Chilean plants and animals
according to their endangerment. CONAMA's research focused on 35 species
and concluded that 20 face a real danger of extinction. The government
entity now plans to expand the list by as many as 150 additional species.

Source - Santiago Times (no link)

Brazil: New Law against Biopiracy

Jan 13, 2007 - A new Brazilian regulation requires biotechnology patent
applicants to prove that they had legal access to the genetic resources
involved in the products and inventions they wish to register. The
requirement, imposed by the Genetic Heritage Management Council and the
National Institute of Industrial Property from the beginning of this year,
also applies to traditional knowledge used in research. "It's an important
step towards overcoming biopiracy and promoting the distribution of the
benefits of biodiversity, as required by the Convention on Biological
Diversity (1992)," Fernando Mathias, a lawyer with the non-governmental
Socioenvironmental Institute, told Tierramerica. However, this pioneering
law will need controls to be in place to ensure that patent royalties go to
the owners of the genetic resources and the traditional knowledge that
formed the basis of the developed product, Mathias added.

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0113/iecobreves.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0113/iecobreves.shtml

EU to Ban Imports of Wild Birds

JAN. 12, 2007 - The trade in wild birds is to be permanently banned across
the European Union starting in July, EU animal health officials have
decided. The move will replace a temporary ban imposed by Brussels in 2005
as part of measures to prevent outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird
flu. Animal welfare campaigners say the permanent ban will save millions
of birds, including many rare species. Only captive-bred birds from
approved countries will be allowed into the EU. Tighter controls on the
health and quarantine of imported birds are also to be imposed.

Source - BBC
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6253543.stm>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6253543.stm

Chile: Promoting Endangered Huemul Deer

JAN. 11, 2007 - Kris Mc Divitt, wife of controversial U.S. environmentalist
Doug Tompkins, has launched an ecotourism event aimed at raising awareness
of Chile's endangered huemul deer. Organizers of the "Ruta del Huemul
(Huemul Deer Path)" event hope around 600 participants will take part in
weekend activities of walking and hiking through Region XI - home of the
threatened deer. The huemul deer population faces both natural and man-made
threats. The over-grazing of sheep and cattle, wind and water erosion, road
construction and fire and logging are just some of the factors contributing
to the deer's' gradual extinction. As well as raising awareness about the
plight of the huemul deer - which suffered a population decline of 58
percent over the last two decades - Mc Divitt is promoting the creation of
a new national park. The Patagonia National Park (Parque Nacional de la
Patagonia) will cover 173,000 acres of southern Chile and be managed by Mc
Divitt's organization, Conservacion Patagonica.

Source - Santiago Times (no link)

Brazil: Plants with Economic Potential

JAN. 6, 2007 - In Brazil, the pupunha palm (Bactris gasipaes kunth)
produces 20 tons of oil per hectare, four times more than the African palm
(Elaeis guineensis), the source of the oil that is second in terms of world
consumption. Cultivation of pupunha palm, found in the Amazon region and
Central America, has been expanding to provide heart of palm, but not yet
for its vegetable oil, which will be in growing demand to make biodiesel.
It is one of 775 native species with great economic potential identified by
the Ministry, which will publish this information in five volumes, starting
this year, in a bid to encourage their sustainable use.

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iecobreves.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iecobreves.shtml

Fishing & Marine Conservation

Argentine hake biomass again down to critical levels

JAN. 20, 2007 - The southern stocks of Argentine hake (Mercluccius hubbsi)
are in fragile biological balance which will have a negative impact on
catches this year and even more in 2008. According to the conclusions from
the preliminary assessment , Technical Report 92/06 from Mar del Plata's
National Institute for Fisheries Research and Development, INIDEP, a
considerable drop in the numbers of classes 1 and 2 of hake (between 18 and
30 centimeters) has been confirmed. Based on this information and a
considerable reduction in hake's breeding biomass, scientists are
recommending a drastic cut in catches of juveniles, both directly and in
the by catches. Recruitment has dropped to the critical levels of
1998/2000. The report highlights that as yet "there is no concrete
information as to the reasons for this drop, but something happened between
January 2005 and January 2006".

Source- MercoPress
<http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9684&formato=html>http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9684&formato=html

Chile: Step Forward for Blue Whale Protection

JAN. 13, 2007 - The Los Lagos Regional Commission for the Use of the
Coastal Fringe in Chile has given definitive approval for a 46 square
kilometer protected zone in the gulf of Corcovado and the sea surrounding
Chiloe Island which is home to the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus).
Promoted by the Blue Whale Centre (CBA), the declaration of the Protected
Multi-purpose Marine and Coastal Area was approved on Jan. 2. Maximiliano
Bello of CBA explained to Tierramerica that the next step is to obtain the
approval of the Aysen regional authorities. The entire process could be
completed by the end of June. On Dec. 21, the government awarded the
Bicentennial Seal to the project to designate this protected area, for
contributing to development in Chile, in anticipation of the national
celebrations of 200 years of independence in 2010.

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0113/iecobreves.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0113/iecobreves.shtml

Brazil Hosts the First South American Fishers Forum

JAN. 12, 2007 - On December 12-14, an OES-sponsored workshop with the
slogan "Catch Fish Not Birds" brought together 50 experts from across the
world to take a look at the potential to reduce seabird bycatch throughout
the South American long-line fishery via the adoption of mitigation
measures in South America fishing fleets. As a result of the event,
several solutions to reduce the incidental catch of sea birds were
identified between fishers, fishing entrepreneurs, researchers, NGO's and
governments. In addition, the partners conducted a full discussion of the
economic and environmental benefits of reducing sea bird bycatch and
committed themselves to implementing some of these mitigation measures
throughout South America.
Source - BRASILIA 00000071

Argentine anchovy fishery may damage South Atlantic ecosystem

JAN. 09, 2007 - The indiscriminate Argentine anchovy (Engraulis anchoita)
fishing in the southern zone of Argentina could inflict serious damage to
Magallanic penguins, whales, seals and sea lions population numbers, warned
a study published in scientific magazine Science. The study says that the
growing demand of fishmeal could encourage an unsustainable expansion of
the Argentinean anchovy commercial fishery along the Patagonian coast.
"Changes in the Argentine anchovy population could alter abundance of
predators and prey. A reduction in the population of one species could
spread along throughout the food chain and change the energy flow and the
abundance of species that are not directly linked to Argentine anchovy,"
scientists explain.

Source - MercoPress
<http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9604&formato=html>http://www.mercopress.com/vernoticia.do?id=9604&formato=html.
See also
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0120/iarticulo.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0120/iarticulo.shtml.

Climate Change
Crunch year for planet Earth

JAN. 18, 2007 - This will be a crunch year for action on the climate
crisis, according to a leading environmental lobbyist. Never have the
opportunities been better and the danger from failure greater, Friends of
the Earth chief Tony Juniper said in an interview with Reuters. "There is
an urgency that wasn't there before," Juniper said. "The science is there,
the economics is there and the politics is there ...If they don't take this
opportunity then we really should start to think about the future of life
on earth." The scientists who mind the "Doomsday Clock" moved it forward
two minutes on Wednesday to five minutes until midnight, symbolizing the
growing risk of the annihilation of civilization, and for the first time
said global warming was a threat. Early next month the International Panel
on Climate Change will produce the first of four key reports this year
assessing the latest scientific knowledge on global warming. This will be
followed by a report in April on adaptation, one in May on mitigation and a
final overview in November. A European Union-United States summit in April
is expected to focus on energy security, and a Group of Eight summit in
early June will highlight energy and climate.

Source - CNN (no link)

Multimillion Dollar Effort to Study Polar Ice Thaw

JAN. 13, 2007 - More than 60 nations, from Chile to China, and 50,000
scientists and researchers will be involved in the International Polar Year
(IPY) 2007-2008, actually a two-year period that will last from Mar. 1,
2007 to the same date in 2009. The IPY will study the Arctic and Antarctic
regions, focusing on the effects of global warming produced by greenhouse
gases. It has a budget of over 500 million dollars, to which Canada
contributed 160 million. The last major international effort to study the
world's coldest regions took place 50 years ago and was called the
International Geophysical Year. It was a landmark scientific collaboration
involving 67 nations that produced data still used today. The IPY is
organized by the International Science Council and the World Meteorological
Organization, and is sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program.

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0113/iarticulo.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0113/iarticulo.shtml

Chile: Climate-Change Cyclist Travels 13,097 Miles to Santiago
JAN. 9, 2006 - David Kroodsma - a young environmentalist in the middle of a
15,000-mile journey from Palo Alto, California to Ushuia in Argentine
Patagonia - pedaled into Santiago on January 2nd, marking the 13,097th mile
of a 17-month trip. Kroodsma has traveled through 15 countries between the
U.S. and Chile - including Belize, El Salvador and Columbia - since he set
off on his "Ride for Climate" in November 2005. From Santiago he will
travel south through Chile and Argentina to South America's southern-most
town of Ushuia at the tip of Tierra del Fuego. Despite ultimately aiming
to raise awareness for a U.S. audience - mainly through his personal
website, <http://www.rideforclimate.com/>www.rideforclimate.com - Kroodsma
punctuates his journey with visits to local schools, where he talks to
children about his trip and the effects of climate change.

Source - Santiago Times (no link)

Pollution
Firewood Source of Santiago, Chile Contamination

Jan. 20, 2007 - A recent study revealed an increase in air pollution caused
by wood-burning stoves in Santiago. Although wood stoves emit almost as
much contamination as diesel combustion, their prohibition is
unlikely. The government maintains that the increase in wood smoke is not
significant enough to warrant stove regulations in its anti-pollution plan.
Scientists, however, insist the increase is important because the three
major sources of air contamination in Chile are now industry, wood burning
and diesel combustion. Former National Commission on the Environment
(Conama) director Pablo Badenier warned that stoves emit 200 tons of
material particles a yearmore than the projected emissions of the
Transantiago transport system. There are an estimated 20,000 wood stoves in
the city, each emitting more than one pound of material particles per hour.

Source - Santiago Times (no link)
Cell Phones Getting Greener

JAN. 08, 2007 - Cellular telephones that contain toxic chemicals are still
being sold in Latin America and other developing regions. But thanks to
strict European regulations, there are progressively fewer phones being
made with cadmium, lead and other dangerous materials.
The new, stricter standards adopted by the European Union in 2006, forced
the world's five leading cell phone manufacturers to eliminate toxic metals
and other materials from their products. In a year or two, the majority of
the more than one billion new mobiles sold annually will meet the EU
standards even if most countries don't have those restrictions, says Zeina
Alhajj, a toxics expert with the environmental watchdog Greenpeace
International.

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iacentos.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iacentos.shtml

Energy
Brazil Infrastructure Plan Doesn't Include Nuclear Plant

JAN. 22, 2007 - An ambitious infrastructure investment plan announced on
January 22nd by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva did not include
completion of Brazil's third nuclear plant. The investment plan calls for
more than 503 billion reals (US$240 billion) through 2010 to be spent on
repairing and building highways, boosting electric power generation,
expanding ports and airports and providing housing, water and sewage
service for poor Brazilians. Completion of the Angra 3 nuclear power plant
in Rio de Janeiro, which has been stuck in the planning stage for a number
of years, "is not part of the (investment) plan," Mines and Energy Minister
Silas Rondeau told reporters. "Resumption of work on Angra 3 is part of
the resumption of Brazil's nuclear program, which involves much more than
generating electricity," Rondeau told reporters without going into
details. He said the future of the nuclear program was still under
discussion.

Source - IHT <http://www.iht.com/>http://www.iht.com

Peru President Garcia Touts Maple Gas Ethanol Project
JAN. 11, 2007 - On January 5, U.S. oil firm Maple Gas signed a $650 million
contract with the Piura Regional Government for a sugar cane-based ethanol
plant. President Garcia spoke at the signing ceremony, calling the biofuel
project the start of an "agrarian revolution" that showcased foreign
private investment. Sited on the northern desert coast, the plant should
produce 30 million gallons/year by 2010. Garcia announced other biofuel
projects in the works. The Maple project is a model for U.S investors on
how to coordinate land and water rights acquisition with the national and a
regional government.
Source - LIMA 00000087

Argentina: A Boost for Renewable Energies

Jan 6, 2007 - The government of Argentina published a law on Jan. 2 to
promote the use of renewable energy sources, which envisages increasing
their participation in the national electricity grid from one percent to
eight percent over 10 years. The law declares that generating wind, solar
and geothermal power, among others, is "in the national interest", and
promotes investment and research by means of tax incentives and subsidies
for every kilowatt generated from alternatives to fossil fuels. Juan
Casavelos, coordinator of Greenpeace's energy campaign, told Tierramerica
that this is a "very good sign" and that "any step that increases the share
of renewable sources in the grid is of great value." However, he said the
incentives should be larger. According to Casavelos, a fund is needed to
plan investments and make renewable energy supply more competitive.

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iecobreves.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iecobreves.shtml

General
Vast Pipelines in Amazon Face Challenges over Protecting Rights and Rivers

JAN. 21, 2007 - In theory, the issue is a simple one: Brazil needs more
sources of energy to keep its economy humming, and huge reserves of gas and
oil are in the Amazon jungle. Problem solved. Over the years, Petrobras,
Brazil's state-controlled oil company, has, in fact, invested more than $7
billion in Amazon exploration and development, and in 1986 it made a major
find here. But only now after a seemingly endless sequence of geographic,
logistical, environmental and political challenges were overcome is the
first in what is intended as a series of pipelines finally being
constructed, this one to carry gas the 400 miles from here to Manaus, a
port city of 1.5 million at the junction of the region's two biggest rivers
that is emerging as an important industrial center. But oil pipeline leaks
and the collapse of an offshore drilling platform in other parts of the
country have damaged Petrobras's reputation, and there was initially strong
resistance to the pipeline from local people, environmental and indigenous
groups and archaeologists. Rather than steamrolling the opponents and
skeptics, however, as often happens in Brazil, the company chose to woo
them. The two million residents of Amazonas State have been promised
economic benefits that have contributed to the project's $1.15 billion
price, and scientists and environmentalists were consulted about how to
minimize damage to the jungle that blankets the state.

Source - New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/>http://www.nytimes.com

Brazil: Indigenous Groups Surviving in the Amazon

JAN. 18, 2007 - Far more Indian groups than previously thought are
surviving in Brazil's Amazon rain forest isolated from the outside world
but they risk extermination at the hands of encroaching loggers and miners,
experts say. A study by Funai, the government's National Indian
Foundation, and seen by Reuters estimates that around 67 Indian groups live
in complete isolation, up from previous estimates of around 40. "With the
rate of destruction in the Amazon, it is amazing there are any isolated
people left at all," said Fiona Watson, campaigns coordinator with Survival
International, an advocacy group for tribal peoples. Funai reviewed old
and new discoveries of footprints, abandoned huts, and other signs of human
life in the thicket of the world's largest rain forest. "There are still
vast unexplored areas and new indications of [Indian groups]," Marcelo dos
Santos, head of Funai's department of isolated Indians, told
Reuters. Brazil is likely to have the largest number of uncontacted tribes
in the world, Watson said.

Source - Reuters (no link)

Uruguay: Film Explodes "Myths" About Pulp Mill

JAN. 13, 2007 - A documentary film criticizing activists in the Argentine
city of Gualeguaychu, who fear a pulp mill to be installed on the eastern
bank of the border river between both countries will cause pollution, was
shown for the first time in Uruguay on Jan. 12. "No a los papelones",
directed by Argentine Eduardo Montes Bradley, is being shown in cinemas in
Montevideo and Punta del Este. "It's about ideological falsehood, about a
town afraid about something it knows nothing about. And it portrays those
in the front line of the demonstrations using emotional arguments, such as
that (the area's residents) will have three-headed babies," Pepi Goncalvez,
the film's press spokeswoman, told Tierramerica. "It's not against people
who do serious environmental work," she said. The distributors are not
showing the film in Argentina for fear of reprisals.

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0113/iecobreves.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0113/iecobreves.shtml

Does the Environment Need a New Global Agency?

JAN. 08, 2007 - The creation of a new United Nations Environment
Organization (UNEO), proposed by French President Jacques Chirac, has
divided environmentalists. Some believe it will be useful for combating the
challenge posed by global environmental deterioration, but others see it as
a redundant proposal and a political maneuver by Chirac before the French
general elections due in April and May. Chirac proposed creating the UNEO
on Dec.12 in Paris, after a meeting with the organizing committee for the
International Conference on Environmental Governance, which the French
government is hosting in February. According to Chirac, this conference,
to be attended by representatives from about 60 countries, and from many
international and non-governmental organizations, should present "an
inventory of the situation of the global environment and its alarming
degradation, and present priority political proposals that are
internationally acceptable."

Source - Tierramerica
<http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iarticulo.shtml>http://tierramerica.net/english/2007/0106/iarticulo.shtml

In Peru, a Move to Get Farmers to Trade in Fish Rather Than Coca

JAN. 04, 2007 - A new program aims to help coca growers raise paiche, a
huge, endangered fish known for its flaky meat. The program has a few
thousand fish in each cage, with the goal of reaching a constant population
of 8,000 paiches per cage. This may not seem like much, but with each fish
reaching up to 25 pounds in a year, authorities believe that they will
harvest enough paiche meat annually to satisfy local demand and begin
exporting. Edwin Vasquez, who left office as governor of Ucayali on Jan.
2, says marketing studies done by government agencies show that paiche
steaks can sell for around $20 a pound in European and US gourmet markets.
"This is an economic opportunity for communities that have few options," he
says. Mr. Vasquez believes that if the Imiria project is successful,
similar efforts will pop up in the region. The US Agency for International
Development (USAID), through one of its partner organizations, has
contributed one-fifth of the $250,000 cost of the program as part of its
anti-drug work in Peru.

Source - CSM
<http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0104/p05s01-woam.html>http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0104/p05s01-woam.html

Update on Avian Influenza
Bird Flu Will Challenge to U.S. Health System, Expert Predicts

JAN. 15, 2007 - A bird flu pandemic remains a threat that the U.S. health
care system must take seriously despite less frequent media coverage and
the absence so far of human cases in the United States, experts
warned. John Bartlett, an infectious disease expert at John Hopkins
University, said the decentralized U.S. health system will make it more
difficult to get ready for a possible human pandemic of H5N1 avian virus --
or anything else. He disagreed with the suggestion that the bird flu
threat has been overstated by the media. "The number of cases in 2006 was
more than it was in 2005, which is more than it was in 2004 ... so it
continues to go up in people," he said in an interview. "And it continues
to be just as lethal as it was in the beginning," Bartlett said at a
conference aimed at helping U.S. hospital administrators prepare for a
pandemic. Hospitals "have to plan that there'll be no vaccine," he said,
urging administrators to start "speaking collectively about the need for a
much more ambitious and aggressive vaccine strategy." With no federal
guidance on who will receive pandemic vaccine once it is developed and
manufactured, Inglesby said, state and local health authorities will have
trouble making and enforcing decisions. Bartlett and Inglesby said the
absence of clear guidelines on an avian flu pandemic would pose ethical
challenges when it came to choosing who would receive scarce treatments.

Source - CNN
<http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/01/15/bird.flu.usa.reut/index.html>http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/01/15/bird.flu.usa.reut/index.html

Gassing Up With Garbage

2008-07-26T11:39:00.001-07:00

posted by Dustin

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/business/24fuel.html

July 24, 2008

The Energy Challenge: Gassing Up With Garbage

By MATTHEW L. WALD

After years of false starts, a new industry selling motor fuel made from waste is getting a big push in the United States, with the first commercial sales possible within months.

Many companies have announced plans to build plants that would take in material like wood chips, garbage or crop waste and turn out motor fuels. About 28 small plants are in advanced planning, under construction or, in a handful of cases, already up and running in test mode.

For decades scientists have known it was possible to convert waste to fuel, but in an era of cheap oil, it made little sense. With oil now trading around $125 a barrel and gasoline above $4 a gallon, the potential economics of a waste-to-fuel industry have shifted radically, setting off a frenzy to be first to market.

"I think American innovation is going to come up with the solution," said Prabhakar Nair, research chief for UOP, a company working on the problem.

Success is far from assured, however. Some of the latest announcements come from small companies whose dreams may be bigger than their bank accounts. They are counting on billions in taxpayer subsidies. Big technological hurdles remain, and even if they can be solved, no one is sure what unintended consequences will emerge or what it will really cost to produce this type of fuel.

"We desperately need it, and I personally think it's not there yet," said Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. "You have to look at starts with a grain of salt, especially starts where they say, 'It's around the corner, and by the way, can you pay half the bill?' "

Still, the incentive to make fuel from something, anything, besides oil and food is greater than ever. Moreover, the federal government is offering grants to help plants get off the ground and subsidies for one type of fuel of $1.01 a gallon, twice the subsidy it historically offered to ethanol made from corn.

Potential controls on global warming gases would heighten the appeal of these fuels, since many of them would add little new carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Tellingly, the type of companies placing bets on the field has started to expand. The earliest were small start-ups founded by people with more technological vision than business experience. Now some of the giants of global business, including Honeywell, Dupont, General Motors, Shell and BP, are taking stakes in the nascent industry.

The dream of making fuel from plants is almost as old as the internal combustion engine. Henry Ford himself was fascinated by the idea, and it re-emerges in periods of fuel scarcity and high prices. These days, advancing technology has made the notion more plausible.

Virtually any material containing hydrogen, carbon and oxygen could potentially be turned into motor fuel. That includes plastics, construction debris, forest and lawn trimmings, wood chips, wheat straw and many other types of agricultural waste.

The potential fuels include ethanol, which can be blended with gasoline, or other liquids that could displace gasoline or diesel entirely. Government studies suggest the country could potentially replace half its gasoline supply in this way — even more if cars became more efficient.

The government is pushing to get the industry off the ground. Legislation passed last year mandates the use of 36 billion gallons of biofuels a year by 2022, less than half of it from corn ethanol. Almost all the rest is supposed to come from nonfood sources, though the requirement could be waived if the industry faltered.

"One has to say upfront that what Congress has done is remarkable in its bravery," said David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a group in Minneapolis that advocates biofuels.

Much of the new money flowing into the field is coming from Silicon Valley, where the venture capitalists who gave the world the Internet revolution see an opportunity to do something similar with the fuel supply.

At Solazyme, a start-up in South San Francisco that hopes to commercialize a process for making fuel from algae, President Harrison F. Dillon said, "When we founded the company in 2003, we couldn't find a venture capital firm that had heard of the concept of a biofuel." Now he is backed by two such firms.

Venture capital investment in the first half of this year hit $612 million, up from $375 million in all of 2007, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. Every few days brings another announcement. PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm, counts projects worth perhaps $1.5 billion that will total more than 300 million gallons of capacity by 2011, if they all get built.

That is small in the scheme of American fuel demand, but it would presumably set the stage for substantial growth if those first projects prove that the economics can work.

One of the first companies to bring a plant online is KL Process Design Group, in Wyoming. With experience making corn ethanol plants, it has built a small plant meant to use pine wastes from a nearby national forest. The company is still testing its production line but hopes to begin commercial sales of ethanol late this year.

"We're still learning and tweaking, and hoping for a little bit of capital infusion," said Tom Slunecka, a vice president of the company.

Range Fuels, of Denver, is building a commercial-scale plant in Soperton, Ga., with help from the Energy Department. That plant will take pine chips and turn them into ethanol, with commercial sales expected by late 2009 or 2010.

Some companies want to use garbage. On Friday, a company called Fulcrum BioEnergy said it would start construction later this year on a $120 million plant at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, in Storey County, Nev., to make 10.5 million gallons of ethanol a year from 90,000 tons of garbage. Operation would begin in early 2010.

In Montreal, another firm, Enerkem, plans to use arsenic-contaminated utility poles from the provincial electric company. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission approved a plan by BlueFire Ethanol to build a $30 million garbage-to-ethanol plant on 10 acres next to a landfill in Lancaster, Calif.; construction will start soon, the company said.

A handful of small companies has long made a diesel replacement from waste oil, or sold kits to individuals to do the same. One company in Carthage, Mo., even turns turkey guts into fuel. The goal of the emerging waste-to-fuel industry is more elaborate, however: to take bulky, solid feedstocks and transform them into high-grade motor fuel.

History provides plenty of warning that it will not be easy. A company called Verenium in Lafayette, La., has cut ribbons three times in one locale since 1998 on plants that would supposedly make fuel from sugar cane waste, and has yet to sell a drop because of problems converting laboratory success into smooth, commercial-scale operation.

A bigger operation, Iogen, has been running a demonstration plant in Ottawa since 2004 that can turn wheat straw into ethanol. It was expected to build a plant in Idaho but has suspended work to focus attention on a plant in Saskatchewan. "It would be our view that there are substantial challenges in scaling up a big new biochemical process," said Brian Foody, the president.

The Energy Department early last year picked six projects as most likely to succeed, and offered each of them tens of millions of dollars. Iogen's Idaho project was among them; so was a plant in Kansas proposed by a Florida company, Alico, that has also been abandoned. Still, increasing interest from big companies — ones with a track record of solving technical problems — suggests that a waste-to-fuel industry may not remain out of reach forever.

General Motors has invested an undisclosed sum in two companies, Coskata, of Warrenville, Ill., and Macoma, of Lebanon, N.H., that aim to turn crop wastes into ethanol.

DuPont, one of the world's largest chemical companies, has joined forces with a company called Genencor, announcing plans to commercialize a process for making ethanol from the nonedible parts of corn and sugar cane. They plan to invest $140 million over three years.

In making their announcement, the companies estimated the worldwide market for fuels made by methods like theirs would eventually reach $75 billion, dwarfing the scale of today's biofuels produced from food crops like corn and sugar cane.

Rising demands threaten wetlands

2008-07-25T17:17:00.001-07:00

Rising demands threaten wetlands

By Mark Kinver
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

Demand for biofuels could lead to wetlands being converted to farmland

The recent surge in demand for food and biofuel has increased the risks facing the world's wetlands, warn scientists.

A declaration by 700 scientists said the habitats faced a growing risk of being converted into farmland.

It also stated that the current knowledge of the extent of the world's wetlands was "unacceptable" and called for a global inventory to be set up.

The document was produced at the end of a UN-convened major scientific conference in Cuiaba, Brazil.

In their statement, the scientists highlighted other activities that were degrading the habitats, such as peat extraction and the construction of hydro-electricity dams.

"It is time to recognise the incalculable value of wetlands to all species - including ours," said Paulo Teixeira, co-chairman of the 8th Intecol International Wetlands Conference.

"If we don't plan and invest properly now, the cost to recreate artificially the services wetlands provide will dwarf the cost of preserving and protecting them in the first place."

In their declaration, the scientists called on the 158 countries that were party to the international wetlands agreement, known as the Ramsar Convention, to adhere to the global framework.

"Some countries have high standards for wetlands management, restoration and protection; however, many others are far behind," it said.

Fuelling the problem

They also warned against increasing farmland that encroached on the habitat, which caused damage through sediment, fertiliser and pesticide pollution.

There has been a boom in the number of farmers planting corn

"Biofuel production has led to a large loss of wetlands in the US already," explained Eugene Turner from Louisiana State University.

"They are now growing as much corn to produce biofuels as they used to export out of the country."

Professor Turner told BBC News that the surge in demand for the crop had resulted in agreements to conserve areas on the margins of farmland being broken.

"It is more profitable now to farm right up to the edge of a stream, so we are losing wetlands in the US from this alone."

"Of course, there are knock-on effects," he added. "If you do not grow the corn while the price is high, then somebody else is going to produce it - maybe on a key wetland site.

"This is an example of how interrelationships are not considered when we make decisions."

Carbon concerns

Another topic that was high on the conference agenda was the role the landscapes played in the global carbon cycle.

"Although that they may be 3-5% of the terrestrial surface, wetlands store about 20% of all terrestrial carbon, which amounts to 500-700 gigatonnes," explained Professor Turner.

"We are releasing, on a net basis, about 3.5 gigatonnes into the atmosphere, so any small change in the carbon from wetlands going into the atmosphere has a big impact."

He added that the future well-being of wetlands in the Arctic region was of particular concern.

"The places where it is going to proportionally warm the greatest is towards the Arctic; that region has an awful lot of wetlands.

"You put food in a refrigerator at home to keep it cool; if you don't, it begins to rot.

"The same thing applies in the Arctic," he explained. "The carbon is stored under the permafrost, meaning it is permanently frozen.

"The ice is receding, so the carbon that is stored there is going to be released and that is a problem."

EPA Delays Decision on RFS Waiver Request

2008-07-25T11:55:00.001-07:00

The roundtable material

2008-07-24T13:44:00.001-07:00

Hello biofuelheads,

Here´s the link for the roundtable on the 27th of June and Mike´s talk on the 14th of July. I am finishing uploadding all the presentations very soon.

http://www.ucb.br/mestradoplan/Seminarios.htm

Cheers

Renata

exchange rates slow sugar ethanol investment in Brazil

2008-07-18T18:51:00.001-07:00

http://uk.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=UKN0740906220080708

Print | Close this window

Brazil ethanol, sugar mills miss the commodity boom

Tue Jul 8, 2008 7:58pm BST

By Inae Riveras - Analysis

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Record ethanol consumption in Brazil, surging exports of the biofuel to the United States and a recovery in sugar and ethanol prices will not be enough to pull local mills' margins out of the red, producers said.

Sugar and ethanol prices have started to improve since December as investment fund buying stormed into commodity complex after a gloomy period of low profitability mainly due to a huge global surplus of sugar.

But this will be offset by a strong surge in costs and the local currency against the dollar, and new investments in production in the world's top sugar and second largest ethanol producer, are unlikely under current market conditions.

"People talk about a commodities boom. But high commodities prices in dollars do not mean a boom," said Carlos Murilo Barros de Mello, commercial director at Cosan (CZLT11.SA: Quote, Profile, Research) (CZZ.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Brazil's largest sugar and ethanol producer group.

Brazil, already the world's top ethanol exporter, is expected to export a record 5 billion liters of the biofuel this year, after U.S. ethanol prices rocketed due to flooding that hurt the Midwest corn belt. Europe and Japan are also poised to begin importing more of the Brazilian biofuel.

Meanwhile, demand for ethanol in Brazil is expected to eclipse gasoline as the main automobile fuel this year due to growth in the flex-fuel cars fleet that can run on any combination of gasoline or ethanol.

"It will be a boom when producers' profit margins rise, and this is not the reality now. Maybe it is to energy and metals, but not for sugar and ethanol," de Mello said.

Costs to produce anhydrous ethanol, which in Brazil is made from sugar cane, rose 20 percent in reais from February 2007 through April 2008, according to Datagro analysts, who forecasts a new increase until July.

During the same period, anhydrous ethanol prices on the local market fell 20 percent, on average.

"Practically all the commodities rose and it was possible to compensate all the increase in costs. In ethanol and sugar, prices would need to rise much more to reach this level," said Antonio de Padua Rodrigues, technical director at the Sugar Cane Industry Association (Unica).

As in other sectors, Brazilian sugar and ethanol producers' profitability has been hit not only by a surge in production costs such as the price of fertilizer which has doubled in the past year but also a strong appreciation of the local currency against the dollar.

The real BRBY has rose 27 percent since April 2007, when the 2007/08 sugar cane crop began.

"The real problem is not the price, but costs and the currency exchange," said Luiz Guilherme Zancaner, president of Unialco sugar and ethanol group. He said fertilizer prices rose 64 percent from a year ago.

Rising fertilizer and diesel prices, and growing labor costs hit mills' results hard in the past year or so, Padua said, adding that poor cane quality this crop has also hurt.

Cane industrial yields -- the amount of sucrose per tonne of cane -- are lower than the same time last year, when the dry weather contributed to sugar concentration in cane.

Poor sugar content means a rise in transport and production costs as mills get less product from each tonne of cane they harvest, transport and crush.

A 8-kg (17.6 lb) reduction in sugar concentration is equivalent to 8 kilograms less sugar or 5 liters less ethanol per tonne of cane processed, Padua said.

"I would say profit this season will likely be lower than in the previous one, which was already difficult. (Sugar and ethanol) prices will possibly be higher (than in 2007/08) but costs will be even higher still," Padua said.

High costs are not sufficient to cause cancellations of new plants, but have been delaying some projects. Investors do not look as enthusiastic as they did a few years ago, producers said.

"Projects that are being built were decided in 2006, 2007. You don't see any new investment, to be ready around 2011, 2012," Padua said.

A new mill usually takes three years to begin operations.

"Prices have to reach 17 cents (per lb) for Brazil to resume planting cane. At 15 cents, no mill will be built," Cosan's de Mello said.

Hedge funds, private equity funds and multinational companies are the majority of investors now in the sector and if prices do not compensate production costs and invested capital, "there won't be more production," he said.

But de Mello added that this situation would help boost sugar prices to around 17-18 cents per lb in the next two years.

Catie's sugarcane work

2008-07-10T12:24:00.000-07:00

anyone around Berkeley next week?

Catie Almirall (ARE grad student) will be informally presenting some preliminary work on sugarcane areas and expansion in Brazil Thurs July 17, 3-5pm in Giannini 234

Andy

On Jul 9, 2008, at 4:23 PM, Avery Cohn wrote:

Gretchen, Geoffrey, et. al.-
I found the following article posted on Weber Amaral's website when I googled the Portuguese translation of WTO+biofuels+Brazil (OMC+biocobusteveis+Brazil). The article, published several weeks ago in Folha de São Paulo, says that Brazil is attempting to fight some process-based standards being proposed by a Swedish diplomat for indirect land use change (ILUC) caused by biofuels, but they consider the WTO a forum of last resort They have sent Isiais Macedo to Brussels to discuss his life cycle analysis on the topic. In the interest of time I google translated the two versions of the article. The translation is pretty bad so non-Portuguese speakers should ask for clarifications if they'd like.
Finally, the basic logic/rhetoric of the ITAMARATY (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), as described in this article, very closely mirrors the conversation we had with an ITAMARATY rep. right around the same time. She attended our meeting at UNICA. Abby has her name and contact info. Abby could you reply to this post with her name and contact details?
http://www.polobio.esalq.usp.br/noticias-visualizar.php?Id=637

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/dinheiro/ult91u415927.shtml

Brasil tenta derrubar na UE "taxa verde" ao álcool (25/06/2008)
O Brasil mobilizou sua diplomacia para convencer a União Européia a não levar adiante uma lei que reduziria a vantagem ambiental dos biocombustíveis, comprometendo a imagem do álcool e a campanha do governo Lula para transformar o produto em commodity internacional. Num encontro com representantes da UE na segunda-feira, diplomatas brasileiros deixaram claro que não descartam recorrer à OMC contra a iniciativa.
O projeto que está atualmente em estudo no Parlamento Europeu prevê o corte de 24% na taxa de redução de emissões de gases poluentes de cada biocombustível, tornando-os menos atraentes. O álcool brasileiro, que emite 74% menos gases do que a gasolina, teria essa taxa reduzida para 50%.
A preocupação com os possíveis danos dessa lei a seus interesses levou o Brasil a reunir, em sua missão em Bruxelas, membros da CE (Comissão Européia), o braço executivo da UE, e representantes de nove países. Embora a reunião tenha sido de nível técnico, e não político, os interesses comerciais não puderam ser ignorados.
Elaborado pelo deputado sueco Anders Wijkman, o projeto cria uma taxa sobre o "uso da terra", com base numa idéia polêmica: a de que mesmo os biocombustíveis mais "verdes" provocam dano ambiental indireto, pois forçam o deslocamento de plantações e, nos piores casos, causam desmatamento. É exatamente a idéia que o Brasil tenta combater nos fóruns internacionais.
Para convencer as autoridades européias das vantagens ambientais do álcool, o Itamaraty levou a Bruxelas o professor Isaías Macedo, especialista em biocombustíveis da Unicamp. A UE respondeu convocando seu próprio expert, Robert Edwards. O Brasil mostrou números da eficiência do álcool de cana, mas não deixou de lado a ameaça velada de apresentar uma queixa à OMC.
O conceito de Wijkman, membro do Comitê de Meio Ambiente do Parlamento, divide opiniões também dentro da Comissão Européia. Há uma queda-de-braço entre os setores de Energia e Transporte, que são favoráveis aos biocombustíveis, e o de Meio Ambiente, que os vê com desconfiança.
Os ambientalistas não conseguiram fazer a UE rever a meta de ter, até 2020, 10% do transporte rodoviário movido a biocombustíveis. Mantida a meta, abre-se um grande mercado para o biocombustível estrangeiro, principalmente o biodiesel, o mais usado na Europa.
A nova norma, se aprovada, atingiria outros biocombustíveis com mais força que o álcool, mas o Itamaraty acha que a imagem do mercado como um todo sofreria um golpe. "Seria uma pancada" nos biocombustíveis, reconhece um especialista no assunto. O Brasil também prefere manter um recurso à OMC como uma opção remota, pois acha que causar barulho em torno do assunto pode ferir seus interesses mais do que uma possível vitória.

Brazil seeks to overturn the EU "green rate" to alcohol (25/06/2008)

The United States mobilized its diplomacy to convince the European Union not to carry out a law that reduce the environmental benefit of biofuels, undermining the image of alcohol and the campaign of Lula's government to transform the product in international commodity. In a meeting with EU representatives on Monday, Brazilian diplomats made clear that not descartam recourse to the WTO against the initiative.

The project is currently under study in the European Parliament provides for a cut of 24% in the rate of reduction of emissions of pollutants from each biofuel, making them less attractive. The Brazilian alcohol, which emits 74% less gas than petrol, would have reduced the rate to 50%.

The concern about possible damage to its interests that law led Brazil to gather in their mission in Brussels, members of the EC (European Commission), the EU's executive arm, and representatives of nine countries. Although the meeting was of a technical, not political, commercial interests could not be ignored.

Developed by Swedish MEP Anders Wijkman, the project creates a tax on the use of land ", based on a controversial idea: that of biofuels that even more" green "indirect cause environmental damage, because forcing the displacement of plantations and in worst cases, cause deforestation. It is exactly the idea that Brazil tries to combat in international forums.

To convince the authorities of European environmental benefits of alcohol, the Itamaraty Brussels led to the teacher Isaias Macedo, a biofuel expert at UNICAMP. The EU responded calling its own expert, Robert Edwards. Brazil figures showed the efficiency of the sugar cane alcohol, but did not leave aside the implied threat to lodge a complaint with the WTO.

The concept of Wijkman, member of the Committee on the Environment of Parliament, also divided opinions within the European Commission. There is a drop-in-arm among the sectors of Energy and Transportation, which are favourable to biofuels, and the Environment, which sees with suspicion.

Environmentalists failed to make the EU revise the goal to have, by 2020, 10% of road moved to biofuels. Kept the goal, there is a large market for biofuel abroad, mainly biodiesel, the most widely used in Europe.

The new standard, if approved, would reach other biofuels with more force that alcohol, but the Itamaraty think the image of the market as a whole would suffer a blow. "It would be a pancada" in biofuels, acknowledges an expert in the subject. Brazil also prefers to maintain an appeal to the WTO as a remote option because it believes that cause noise around the issue may hurt their interests more than a possible victory.

Source: Leaf, 25/06/2008.

Iniciar impressão | Voltar para página

25/06/2008 - 09h43
Brasil tenta derrubar na UE "taxa verde" ao álcool
da Folha Online
A diplomacia brasileira ameaçou recorrer à OMC (Organização Mundial do Comércio) numa tentativa de derrubar um projeto de lei que reduziria a vantagem ambiental dos biocombustíveis na União Européia, conforme relata Marcelo Ninio, correspondente da Folha em Genebra, em reportagem publicada na edição desta quarta-feira (íntegradisponível somente para assinantes do jornal e do Uol).
O projeto de lei, que está em estudo no Parlamento Europeu, cria uma taxa sobre o "uso da terra", com base numa idéia polêmica: a de que mesmo os biocombustíveis mais "verdes" provocam dano ambiental indireto, pois forçam o deslocamento de plantações e, nos piores casos, causam desmatamento. É exatamente a idéia que o Brasil tenta combater nos fóruns internacionais.
Os biocombustíveis são hoje o grande "cavalo de batalha" do governo brasileiro em nível internacional. O presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, em suas viagens internacionais, têm procurado não deixar sem resposta às principais críticas sobre a produção de álcool a partir da cana-de-açúcar.
"[O] Brasil tem tecnologia de produção de um combustível que é o álcool, que emite menos gás carbônico do que os outros combustíveis. E era importante dizer isso porque tem uma verdadeira guerra comercial", afirmou o presidente, numa referência a sua participação na cúpula da FAO (Organização das Nações Unidas para a Alimentação e a Agricultura), em Roma, no início de junho.
As críticas aos biocombustíveis se estendem desde o campo econômico até a área ambiental. No final de abril, O relator da ONU (Organização das Nações Unidas) para o Direito à Alimentação, Jean Ziegler, chegou a afirmar que a alta dos alimentos se devia à transformação de alimentos em biocombustíveis e a especulação financeira.

The Brazilian diplomacy threatened to resort to WTO (World Trade Organization)
in an attempt to overthrow a draft law that would reduce the environmental benefit
Biofuels in the European Union, as reports Marcelo Ninio,
the Folha correspondent in Geneva in story published in this edition
Wednesday (fully available only to subscribers of the newspaper and Uol).

The draft law, which is under consideration in Parliament, creates a tax on
"use of land", based on a controversial idea: that the same biofuels
more "green" indirect cause environmental damage, because forcing the displacement of
plantations and, in worst cases, cause deforestation. It is exactly the idea that the
Brazil tries to combat in international forums.

Biofuels are now the great "horse of battle" of the Brazilian government in
internationally. The President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in his travels
international, have sought not to leave unanswered the main criticism of
the production of alcohol from sugar cane.

"[The] Brazil has technology for producing a fuel that is the spirit, which issues
less carbon dioxide than other fuels. And it was important to say that
because it has a real trade war, "said the chairman, in a reference
its participation in the umbrella of FAO (United Nations to
Food and Agriculture) in Rome in early June.

Criticism biofuels extends from the field until the economic area
environment. In late April, the rapporteur of the UN (United Nations)
for the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, reached a high of saying that the
food was due to food processing in biofuels and speculation
financial.

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 7:25 PM, Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith <gawsmith@ucdavis.edu> wrote:

If you do have such a cite, can the rest of us see it, too?

Geoffrey.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gretchen Gordon [mailto:graciela@riseup.net]
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 11:04 AM
To: Alastair Iles
Cc: Avery Cohn; Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith; Renata M. T. Andrade; Andy
Jones; Abigail Martin; Leticia Cesarino; Gretchen Gordon;
alastair.iles@gmail.com
Subject: Re: More interesting biofuels news

Hi,
Do any of you have a cite for Brazil saying it won~t stand for mandatory
sustainability reqs?
g

> Jatropha may provide seeds for future energy use
>
> By Doreen Hemlock | South Florida Sun-Sentinel
> July 6, 2008
>
> ELIAS PINA, Dominican Republic - Could a scraggly tree now used as
> fencing in the tropics help slash the world's dependence on petroleum,
> producing income for farmers and a plant oil to substitute for diesel?
>
> South Florida energy experts want to find out. They're watching a host
> of projects in Latin America to grow jatropha and process its seeds
> into biodiesel. If those ventures take off, those countries could
> possibly reduce their petroleum imports, develop rural areas and
> export biofuel to Florida.
>
> The potential for business is huge. Fort Lauderdale-based Global
> Energy Trading Company, Getco, is among the jatropha pioneers in South
> America, with plans to invest tens of millions of dollars in Peru,
> Colombia and maybe Brazil. International Clean Energy of Palm Beach
> Gardens is testing different varieties to figure out which are best
> suited for South Florida conditions to yield the most biodiesel.
>
> But the big question is whether the projects can turn profits on
> large-scale production. So far, operations are too small and artisanal
> to gauge. It will take years — and lots more investment — to determine
> jatropha's viability as a global biofuel industry, experts said.
>
> Video
>
> Related links
>
> *
> Find it: Lowest gas prices in your neighborhood Find it:
> Lowest gas prices in your neighborhood
> *
> Calculator: Gas prices to cities nationwide
> *
> Quick tips: Easy ways to save on gas Quick tips: Easy
> ways to save on gas Photos
> *
> Fuel efficiency calculator
> *
> Latest update on the pain at the pump Video
> *
> Tips: Tracking prices across S. Fla., plus how you can save
>
> Agronomist Mathilde Laval is banking on jatropha to help the Dominican
> Republic, initially to improve the lives of subsistence farmers in
> Elias Piña, a dusty area on the border with Haiti where jobs and money
> are scarce. She works with a nonprofit group that is encouraging
> farmers to plant the trees, sell the seeds to be crushed into oil and
> then, use the oil in stoves instead of burning firewood.
>
> In the future, she hopes oil can be processed into biodiesel, offering
> rural areas a chance to meet more of their energy needs.
>
> Jatropha seems almost a miracle plant. It doesn't need much water or
> fertilizer. It grows even on denuded soil and hills. Animals don't
> like to eat it. It's too scrawny to cut down for firewood. It can grow
> for more than 40 years. And just selling the seeds for their oil
> should earn farmers in Elias Piña more than most earn — perhaps $800 a
> year for a 2.5-acre farm, Laval said.
>
> That's enough money to interest farmer Hector Tolentino. The
> 54-year-old now rides his horse farther each day to find enough
> firewood to cook his meals. Area residents have been cutting down
> trees for so many generations that the land is eroding and drying out.
>
> "If I could get jatropha oil at a reasonable price, I'd get a stove to
> cook on," said Tolentino, a thin man with a big smile.
>
> Native to the Caribbean area, jatropha has become coveted worldwide
> amid rising costs for petroleum and diesel. At least 720,000 hectares
> already have been planted in China, Guatemala, Malaysia, India and
> other countries. By 2014, that acreage could more than triple,
> according to London-based research firm New Energy Finance.
>
> Advocates say biodiesel from jatropha burns cleaner than fossil fuels.
> It can be used in vehicles without having to adapt the engines. And
> unlike corn processed into ethanol, it is not a food crop. Its
> harvesting for fuel won't put pressure on food prices.
>
> But there are many risks for producers trying to make profits on a
> large commercial scale.
>
> Trees can die from diseases, for example. A fungus recently attacked
> hundreds of jatropha seedlings at a nursery developed by Laval's
> group, said farmer Rafael Paulino, 54. He gets paid to plant seeds in
> plastic bags and help nurture them into seedlings that later will be
> transported for planting on farms — earning about $8 a day plus lunch,
> more than the going wage in the area.
>
> Producers still need to figure out which varieties yield the most
> seeds and oil for different areas depending on soil, rain and other
> conditions. And they must weigh costs, which can vary widely by region
> and country for labor, land and other basic inputs.
>
> There are also questions about creating environmental imbalances by
> planting a single crop over miles of land.
>
> "I can't recommend now that anyone plant 100,000 acres," conceded Omar
> Bros, co-founder of the nonprofit group, Dominican Institute of
> Integrated Development, where French agronomist Laval is leading the
> small-scale test project.
>
> But Getco of Fort Lauderdale is placing bigger bets, preparing to
> invest millions of dollars in South American plantations. Chief
> Executive James Fanning is buoyed by a 2007 report from investment
> firm Goldman Sachs that estimated jatropha could be processed into a
> barrel of fuel for about $43, about the same cost as sugar cane-based
> ethanol and roughly half the cost of ethanol made from corn. He knows
> the report bases its projections on relatively small jatropha farms in
> India, but figures even at higher costs, he can cash in.
>
> "With the price of oil where it is today, you don't have to be a
> rocket scientist to know there's a tremendous amount of money to be
> made," Fanning said during the recent JatrophaWorld conference in
> Miami.
>
> International Clean Energy of Palm Beach Gardens is more cautious.
>
> It's first testing different varieties and compiling data on plant
> yields, costs and other basics before considering investment in
> biodiesel on a large scale. Growing and testing seeds will take at
> least a year, said energy expert George Philippidis of Florida
> International University, who is working with the new company.
>
> "There's this fascination with jatropha now," Philippidis said. "But
> we need to manage expectations."
>
> Doreen Hemlock can be reached at dhemlock@sun-sentinel.com or
> 305-810-5009.
>
> Jatropha facts Grows in wastelands and can thrive in sandy or rocky
> soil. It can be planted in the desert, so it doesn't compete with food
> crops. Is a poisonous shrub . It has been used as a living fence to
> protect gardens and fields from animals. Originates in Central Americ
> a and has spread to other tropical and subtropical countries. Source:
> The Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species
>
> More articles
>
> Colombia finds biofuels bonanza in sugar cane
>
> By JOHN OTIS
> Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
> TOOLS
> Email
>
> Get section feed
> Print
>
> Recommend (1)
> Comments
> Yahoo! Buzz
> RESOURCES
> PHOTO GALLERY
> See a Colombian sugar plantation in action
>
> El Cerrito, Colombia — Between breaks to sharpen his machete under the
> equatorial sun, Gregorio Hurtado laid waste to row upon row of 9-foot
> sugar cane stalks.
>
> Like plantation labor of a bygone era, the cane harvest remains a
> backbreaking task. Even though Hurtado earns just $3 for every ton of
> the fibrous stalks he cuts, he's happy to have a job amid the chaos of
> Colombia's sugar industry.
>
> For that, he can thank several new ethanol plants towering above the
> sea of green cane fields that cover this patch of western Colombia.
> Even as low world prices and the weak U.S. dollar have hurt sugar
> exporters here, Colombia's biofuels industry is growing by leaps and
> bounds.
>
> Ahead-of-the-curve planning, technological breakthroughs and
> government incentives have helped Colombia emerge as the No. 2
> producer of ethanol in Latin America, behind Brazil, and a leader in
> the manufacture of biodiesel.
>
> "We took the initiative years ago and became a pioneer," Jorge
> Cardenas, president of the Colombian Biofuels Federation, said in an
> interview.
>
> With just over 100 million gallons annually, Colombian ethanol
> production is dwarfed by the billions of gallons churned out yearly in
> the U.S. and Brazil.
>
> Yet Colombia is a technological leader in the field and is
> experimenting with biofuel production using everything from sugar
> beets and palm oil to yucca.
>
> Colombian experts are helping companies in Guatemala, Honduras and El
> Salvador set up ethanol plants.
>
> Farther north, Louisiana Green Fuels, which is partially owned by
> Colombian investors, plans to launch what could become the first sugar
> cane ethanol plant in the U.S., near Lake Charles.
>
> The distillery, scheduled to open next year, will produce about 25
> million gallons annually. Three more plants are to be built by 2012.
>
> "The Colombian work ethic, engineering and appreciation for ethanol
> production have had a significant part to play in bringing this
> project to fruition," said Randal Johnson, a company spokesman.
>
> Colombia is also the hemisphere's largest producer of palm oil.
>
> Tons of oil are turned into biodiesel, which elsewhere is made from
> rapeseed oil.
>
> Biodiesel production will more than double this year to 218 million
> gallons, Jens Mesa Dishington of the Federation of Oil Palm Producers
> said in Bogotá, the capital.
>
> The world's sudden thirst for biofuels came at precisely the right
> moment for Colombia's sugar growers.
>
> Not only did world prices for the sweetener drop from nearly 15 cents
> to 10 cents a pound last year, but the weakening dollar meant less
> income for sugar exporters.
>
> In 2007, their profits plummeted by 44 percent, according to the
> Colombian Sugar Cane Growers Association.
>
> These days, however, mills are shifting much of the cane from sugar to
> ethanol production, which is far more profitable.
>
> More used for ethanol
> At the Providencia Sugar Mill, which is the size of several football
> fields, massive machines wash and shred cane stalks then press out the
> juices. These liquids are crystallized into sugar or fermented and
> distilled into ethanol.
>
> "We started out using 18 percent of the cane for ethanol, but in some
> months the figure has gone up to 40 percent," said Marucio Tello, who
> helps run the ethanol distillery at the Providencia mill, 15 miles
> northeast of Cali.
>
> Colombia was once the world's sixth-largest sugar exporter, but
> overseas sales have dropped by half since 2003. Meanwhile, five modern
> distilleries now produce enough to make the nation nearly
> self-sufficient in ethanol.
>
> The transition has helped the sugar industry avoid job cuts and mill
> closures.
>
> Nearly the entire crop is harvested by about 15,000 workers, most of
> whom wear metal gloves and shinguards to keep from gashing themselves
> as they slice down the fields with their thick-bladed machetes.
>
> "Biofuels have given us some breathing room," said Alvaro Amaya,
> director of the Center for the Investigation of Sugar Cane.
>
> Although neighboring Brazil has been producing huge quantities of
> ethanol since the 1970s, Colombia began to seriously consider biofuels
> in 2001 as oil reserves dwindled. Analysts predicted the country would
> need to start importing petroleum by 2012, and ethanol and biodiesel
> seemed like attractive alternatives.
>
> Huge potential
> Unlike in the United States and Europe, where most of the fertile
> acres are already under cultivation, Colombia still has vast tracts
> that could be turned into farmland to produce biomass without
> disrupting the national food chain.
>
> "The agricultural frontier could be expanded enormously," President
> Alvaro Uribe told a recent gathering of farmers. "There is land for
> everything: to increase food production and to increase biofuel
> production."
>
> Colombia already grows half a million acres of sugar cane, which is
> far more efficient than corn or other crops for producing ethanol.
>
> Newly developed strains of the plant helped Colombian farmers reduce
> the growing cycle from 17 to 12 months and extract 6 tons of sugar per
> acre, the highest sugar production rate in the world.
>
> The key incentive came when the government mandated that the national
> gasoline supply must contain 10 percent ethanol by the end of 2009, a
> figure that will increase to 25 percent by 2025.
>
> Meanwhile, palm groves first planted to produce edible oils have been
> expanded to supply newly built biodiesel plants. A new law mandates
> that the country's diesel must contain at least 5 percent biodiesel by
> year's end.
>
> "The oil was running out. That was the determining factor," said
> Cardenas, of the Biofuels Federation. "If there had been enough oil,
> we wouldn't have had the political will to do this. But with oil at
> more than $100 a barrel and reserves falling, people began to get
> worried."
>
> Getting into biofuels production "was like striking an oil deposit
> equal to 10 percent of the country's supply," added Johan Martinez of
> the Sugar Cane Growers Association in Cali.
>
> The Uribe government wants to expand the sugar cane crop from 500,000
> acres to 2.5 million acres to feed more than a dozen ethanol
> distilleries expected to come into produc-
> tion within the next five years.
>
> Eventually, the plan is to export ethanol to the United States. Unlike
> Brazilian ethanol, which faces a 54-cent-per-gallon import tariff,
> Colombian ethanol could enter the American market duty-free under the
> terms of trade agreement between the two nations that has yet to be
> approved by the U.S.
> Congress.
>
> Taking over
> Not everyone is thrilled with the expansion plans.
>
> At a recent meeting of regional leaders in Mexico, Nicaraguan
> President Daniel Ortega complained of rising food prices in poor
> nations and criticized Uribe for encouraging Central American
> countries to grow more sugar cane for ethanol than food crops.
>
> "For Nicaragua, it's a mortal sin to talk about biofuels," Ortega said.
>
> There have also been widespread reports from northern Colombia about
> peasant farmers who returned after being driven away by death squads
> to find their fields occupied by industrial-scale oil palm producers.
>
> Yet at the same time, industry backers are promoting biofuels as a way
> to generate more jobs in the impoverished countryside, where many
> down-and-out farmers plant coca, the raw material for cocaine.
>
> U.N. statistics showed that the coca crop in Colombia, the world's
> largest producer of cocaine, had expanded by 27 percent last year to
> 245,000 acres.
>
> Speaking at a recent biofuels conference, Agriculture Minister Andres
> Felipe Arias said: "Peasants who grow
> palm trees are not going to fall into the temptation to grow coca."
>
> john.otis@chron.com
>
>
> Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis
>
> Internal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive
>
> * Aditya Chakrabortty
> * The Guardian,
> * Friday July 4, 2008
> * Article history
>
> Corn used for biofuel
>
> A handful of corn before it is processed. Photograph: Charlie
> Neibergall/AP
>
> Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than
> previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report
> obtained by the Guardian.
>
> The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed
> analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an
> internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
>
> The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that
> plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It
> will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe,
> which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of
> greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.
>
> Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has
> not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.
>
> "It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White
> House," said one yesterday.
>
> The news comes at a critical point in the world's negotiations on
> biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialised countries meet next
> week in Hokkaido, Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and
> come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium
> on the use of plant-derived fuels.
>
> It will also put pressure on the British government, which is due to
> release its own report on the impact of biofuels, the Gallagher
> Report. The Guardian has previously reported that the British study
> will state that plant fuels have played a "significant" part in
> pushing up food prices to record levels. Although it was expected last
> week, the report has still not been released.
>
> "Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong
> evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises,"
> said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam. "It is imperative that we
> have the full picture. While politicians concentrate on keeping
> industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough
> to eat."
>
> Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty
> line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh
> to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and
> fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".
>
> President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from
> India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid
> income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases
> in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for
> the large price increases."
>
> Even successive droughts in Australia, calculates the report, have had
> a marginal impact. Instead, it argues that the EU and US drive for
> biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.
>
> Since April, all petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include 2.5%
> from biofuels. The EU has been considering raising that target to 10%
> by 2020, but is faced with mounting evidence that that will only push
> food prices higher.
>
> "Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would
> not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors
> would have been moderate," says the report. The basket of food prices
> examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The
> report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted
> for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for
> a 75% jump over that period.
>
> It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in
> three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel,
> with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about
> half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of
> biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for
> biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in
> grains, driving prices up higher.
>
> Other reviews of the food crisis looked at it over a much longer
> period, or have not linked these three factors, and so arrived at
> smaller estimates of the impact from biofuels. But the report author,
> Don Mitchell, is a senior economist at the Bank and has done a
> detailed, month-by-month analysis of the surge in food prices, which
> allows much closer examination of the link between biofuels and food
> supply.
>
> The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, which Brazil
> specializes in, have not had such a dramatic impact.
>
> Supporters of biofuels argue that they are a greener alternative to
> relying on oil and other fossil fuels, but even that claim has been
> disputed by some experts, who argue that it does not apply to US
> production of ethanol from plants.
>
> "It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices,"
> said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser,
> last night. "All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising
> higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change."
>
>
> Food price rises force biofuel U-turn
>
> By Colin Brown
> Friday, 4 July 2008
> Related Articles
>
> * More Environment News
>
> * Print Print
> * Email Email
>
> Search Search Go
> Independent.co.uk Web
> Bookmark & Share
>
> * Digg It
> * del.icio.us
> * Facebook
> * Stumbleupon
>
> What are these?
> Change font size: A | A | A
>
> Soaring world food prices look set to force Gordon Brown into a U-turn
> over the use of crops such as corn, rapeseed, palm and soya to produce
> fuel as an alternative to petrol and diesel.
>
> Biofuels were seen as the eco-friendly answer to global warming and
> rising fuel prices but a report to be published on Monday will force
> the Prime Minister to rethink his support for using crops to keep
> Britain's cars and lorries running.
>
> A second report will also force Downing Street to revise its policies
> on food and the environment – opening Mr Brown to the charge from
> environmental groups of going soft on the Government's green agenda.
>
> The Prime Minister has been warned in a report by Professor Ed
> Gallagher, head of the Renewable Fuels Agency, that the rush for
> biofuels has made a "significant" contribution to the soaring cost of
> food on the global markets. Corn ethanol and biodiesel derived from
> vegetable oil were widely seen as important ways of creating fuel and
> combating carbon emissions which contribute to global warming.
>
> The Gallagher review threatens to knock out an important plank in Mr
> Brown's environmental strategy. He introduced targets in April in
> Britain requiring all petrol and diesel to contain 2.5 per cent of
> biofuels with the intention of doubling it to 5 per cent by 2010. The
> EU is contemplating a 10 per cent target by 2020. Professor
> Gallagher's report will say the production of fuels from "biomass" –
> non-food crops – may be sustainable but it challenges the targets for
> producing fuel from other crops normally used for food.
>
> Greenpeace said biofuels initially "looked good on paper" but the
> Gallagher review would conclude that the risks are too great to impose
> higher targets.
>
> The campaign group called for a moratorium on targets, subsidies and
> tax breaks for biofuels consumption until it was clear that they could
> be produced from sustainable sources. Oxfam said: "It is clear that
> any additional pressure on limited land resources has the potential to
> drive further agriculture clearance of forests or other habitats and
> to drive up food prices."
>
> The vast majority of the European biodiesel was made from rapeseed
> oil, said Oxfam. "As we divert more and more rapeseed crop into fuel,
> European industry is buying increasing supplies of edible oils from
> overseas including palm oil.
>
> A second report by the Cabinet Office strategy unit is intended to
> launch a debate over how Britain uses its land more effectively to
> produce more food.
>
> In a further blow to the Prime Minister's "green" strategy, ministers
> are preparing to respond to the pressure from motorists – led by
> haulage owners who staged a noisy protest around Westminster this week
> – by bringing forward the announcement by the Chancellor Alistair
> Darling that the 2p rise in fuel duty in October will be scrapped.
>

--
Avery Cohn | Ph.D. Student | Environmental Science, Policy & Management | UC Berkeley | avery.cohn@gmail.com | (510) 410-3731

Re: More interesting biofuels news

2008-07-09T16:23:00.001-07:00

Gretchen, Geoffrey, et. al.-

I found the following article posted on Weber Amaral's website when I googled the Portuguese translation of WTO+biofuels+Brazil (OMC+biocobusteveis+Brazil). The article, published several weeks ago in Folha de São Paulo, says that Brazil is attempting to fight some process-based standards being proposed by a Swedish diplomat for indirect land use change (ILUC) caused by biofuels, but they consider the WTO a forum of last resort They have sent Isiais Macedo to Brussels to discuss his life cycle analysis on the topic. In the interest of time I google translated the two versions of the article. The translation is pretty bad so non-Portuguese speakers should ask for clarifications if they'd like.

Finally, the basic logic/rhetoric of the ITAMARATY (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), as described in this article, very closely mirrors the conversation we had with an ITAMARATY rep. right around the same time. She attended our meeting at UNICA. Abby has her name and contact info. Abby could you reply to this post with her name and contact details?

http://www.polobio.esalq.usp.br/noticias-visualizar.php?Id=637

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/dinheiro/ult91u415927.shtml

Brasil tenta derrubar na UE "taxa verde" ao álcool (25/06/2008)

O Brasil mobilizou sua diplomacia para convencer a União Européia a não levar adiante uma lei que reduziria a vantagem ambiental dos biocombustíveis, comprometendo a imagem do álcool e a campanha do governo Lula para transformar o produto em commodity internacional. Num encontro com representantes da UE na segunda-feira, diplomatas brasileiros deixaram claro que não descartam recorrer à OMC contra a iniciativa.

O projeto que está atualmente em estudo no Parlamento Europeu prevê o corte de 24% na taxa de redução de emissões de gases poluentes de cada biocombustível, tornando-os menos atraentes. O álcool brasileiro, que emite 74% menos gases do que a gasolina, teria essa taxa reduzida para 50%.

A preocupação com os possíveis danos dessa lei a seus interesses levou o Brasil a reunir, em sua missão em Bruxelas, membros da CE (Comissão Européia), o braço executivo da UE, e representantes de nove países. Embora a reunião tenha sido de nível técnico, e não político, os interesses comerciais não puderam ser ignorados.

Elaborado pelo deputado sueco Anders Wijkman, o projeto cria uma taxa sobre o "uso da terra", com base numa idéia polêmica: a de que mesmo os biocombustíveis mais "verdes" provocam dano ambiental indireto, pois forçam o deslocamento de plantações e, nos piores casos, causam desmatamento. É exatamente a idéia que o Brasil tenta combater nos fóruns internacionais.

Para convencer as autoridades européias das vantagens ambientais do álcool, o Itamaraty levou a Bruxelas o professor Isaías Macedo, especialista em biocombustíveis da Unicamp. A UE respondeu convocando seu próprio expert, Robert Edwards. O Brasil mostrou números da eficiência do álcool de cana, mas não deixou de lado a ameaça velada de apresentar uma queixa à OMC.

O conceito de Wijkman, membro do Comitê de Meio Ambiente do Parlamento, divide opiniões também dentro da Comissão Européia. Há uma queda-de-braço entre os setores de Energia e Transporte, que são favoráveis aos biocombustíveis, e o de Meio Ambiente, que os vê com desconfiança.

Os ambientalistas não conseguiram fazer a UE rever a meta de ter, até 2020, 10% do transporte rodoviário movido a biocombustíveis. Mantida a meta, abre-se um grande mercado para o biocombustível estrangeiro, principalmente o biodiesel, o mais usado na Europa.

A nova norma, se aprovada, atingiria outros biocombustíveis com mais força que o álcool, mas o Itamaraty acha que a imagem do mercado como um todo sofreria um golpe. "Seria uma pancada" nos biocombustíveis, reconhece um especialista no assunto. O Brasil também prefere manter um recurso à OMC como uma opção remota, pois acha que causar barulho em torno do assunto pode ferir seus interesses mais do que uma possível vitória.

Brazil seeks to overturn the EU "green rate" to alcohol (25/06/2008)

The United States mobilized its diplomacy to convince the European Union not to carry out a law that reduce the environmental benefit of biofuels, undermining the image of alcohol and the campaign of Lula's government to transform the product in international commodity. In a meeting with EU representatives on Monday, Brazilian diplomats made clear that not descartam recourse to the WTO against the initiative.

The project is currently under study in the European Parliament provides for a cut of 24% in the rate of reduction of emissions of pollutants from each biofuel, making them less attractive. The Brazilian alcohol, which emits 74% less gas than petrol, would have reduced the rate to 50%.

The concern about possible damage to its interests that law led Brazil to gather in their mission in Brussels, members of the EC (European Commission), the EU's executive arm, and representatives of nine countries. Although the meeting was of a technical, not political, commercial interests could not be ignored.

Developed by Swedish MEP Anders Wijkman, the project creates a tax on the use of land ", based on a controversial idea: that of biofuels that even more" green "indirect cause environmental damage, because forcing the displacement of plantations and in worst cases, cause deforestation. It is exactly the idea that Brazil tries to combat in international forums.

To convince the authorities of European environmental benefits of alcohol, the Itamaraty Brussels led to the teacher Isaias Macedo, a biofuel expert at UNICAMP. The EU responded calling its own expert, Robert Edwards. Brazil figures showed the efficiency of the sugar cane alcohol, but did not leave aside the implied threat to lodge a complaint with the WTO.

The concept of Wijkman, member of the Committee on the Environment of Parliament, also divided opinions within the European Commission. There is a drop-in-arm among the sectors of Energy and Transportation, which are favourable to biofuels, and the Environment, which sees with suspicion.

Environmentalists failed to make the EU revise the goal to have, by 2020, 10% of road moved to biofuels. Kept the goal, there is a large market for biofuel abroad, mainly biodiesel, the most widely used in Europe.

The new standard, if approved, would reach other biofuels with more force that alcohol, but the Itamaraty think the image of the market as a whole would suffer a blow. "It would be a pancada" in biofuels, acknowledges an expert in the subject. Brazil also prefers to maintain an appeal to the WTO as a remote option because it believes that cause noise around the issue may hurt their interests more than a possible victory.

Source: Leaf, 25/06/2008.

Iniciar impressão | Voltar para página

25/06/2008 - 09h43

Brasil tenta derrubar na UE "taxa verde" ao álcool

da Folha Online

A diplomacia brasileira ameaçou recorrer à OMC (Organização Mundial do Comércio) numa tentativa de derrubar um projeto de lei que reduziria a vantagem ambiental dos biocombustíveis na União Européia, conforme relata Marcelo Ninio, correspondente da Folha em Genebra, em reportagem publicada na edição desta quarta-feira (íntegradisponível somente para assinantes do jornal e do Uol).

O projeto de lei, que está em estudo no Parlamento Europeu, cria uma taxa sobre o "uso da terra", com base numa idéia polêmica: a de que mesmo os biocombustíveis mais "verdes" provocam dano ambiental indireto, pois forçam o deslocamento de plantações e, nos piores casos, causam desmatamento. É exatamente a idéia que o Brasil tenta combater nos fóruns internacionais.

Os biocombustíveis são hoje o grande "cavalo de batalha" do governo brasileiro em nível internacional. O presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, em suas viagens internacionais, têm procurado não deixar sem resposta às principais críticas sobre a produção de álcool a partir da cana-de-açúcar.

"[O] Brasil tem tecnologia de produção de um combustível que é o álcool, que emite menos gás carbônico do que os outros combustíveis. E era importante dizer isso porque tem uma verdadeira guerra comercial", afirmou o presidente, numa referência a sua participação na cúpula da FAO (Organização das Nações Unidas para a Alimentação e a Agricultura), em Roma, no início de junho.

As críticas aos biocombustíveis se estendem desde o campo econômico até a área ambiental. No final de abril, O relator da ONU (Organização das Nações Unidas) para o Direito à Alimentação, Jean Ziegler, chegou a afirmar que a alta dos alimentos se devia à transformação de alimentos em biocombustíveis e a especulação financeira.

The Brazilian diplomacy threatened to resort to WTO (World Trade Organization)
in an attempt to overthrow a draft law that would reduce the environmental benefit
Biofuels in the European Union, as reports Marcelo Ninio,
the Folha correspondent in Geneva in story published in this edition
Wednesday (fully available only to subscribers of the newspaper and Uol).

The draft law, which is under consideration in Parliament, creates a tax on
"use of land", based on a controversial idea: that the same biofuels
more "green" indirect cause environmental damage, because forcing the displacement of
plantations and, in worst cases, cause deforestation. It is exactly the idea that the
Brazil tries to combat in international forums.

Biofuels are now the great "horse of battle" of the Brazilian government in
internationally. The President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in his travels
international, have sought not to leave unanswered the main criticism of
the production of alcohol from sugar cane.

"[The] Brazil has technology for producing a fuel that is the spirit, which issues
less carbon dioxide than other fuels. And it was important to say that
because it has a real trade war, "said the chairman, in a reference
its participation in the umbrella of FAO (United Nations to
Food and Agriculture) in Rome in early June.

Criticism biofuels extends from the field until the economic area
environment. In late April, the rapporteur of the UN (United Nations)
for the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, reached a high of saying that the
food was due to food processing in biofuels and speculation
financial.

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 7:25 PM, Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith <gawsmith@ucdavis.edu> wrote:

If you do have such a cite, can the rest of us see it, too?

Geoffrey.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gretchen Gordon [mailto:graciela@riseup.net]
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 11:04 AM
To: Alastair Iles
Cc: Avery Cohn; Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith; Renata M. T. Andrade; Andy
Jones; Abigail Martin; Leticia Cesarino; Gretchen Gordon;
alastair.iles@gmail.com
Subject: Re: More interesting biofuels news

Hi,
Do any of you have a cite for Brazil saying it won~t stand for mandatory
sustainability reqs?
g

> Jatropha may provide seeds for future energy use
>
> By Doreen Hemlock | South Florida Sun-Sentinel
> July 6, 2008
>
> ELIAS PINA, Dominican Republic - Could a scraggly tree now used as
> fencing in the tropics help slash the world's dependence on petroleum,
> producing income for farmers and a plant oil to substitute for diesel?
>
> South Florida energy experts want to find out. They're watching a host
> of projects in Latin America to grow jatropha and process its seeds
> into biodiesel. If those ventures take off, those countries could
> possibly reduce their petroleum imports, develop rural areas and
> export biofuel to Florida.
>
> The potential for business is huge. Fort Lauderdale-based Global
> Energy Trading Company, Getco, is among the jatropha pioneers in South
> America, with plans to invest tens of millions of dollars in Peru,
> Colombia and maybe Brazil. International Clean Energy of Palm Beach
> Gardens is testing different varieties to figure out which are best
> suited for South Florida conditions to yield the most biodiesel.
>
> But the big question is whether the projects can turn profits on
> large-scale production. So far, operations are too small and artisanal
> to gauge. It will take years — and lots more investment — to determine
> jatropha's viability as a global biofuel industry, experts said.
>
> Video
>
> Related links
>
> *
> Find it: Lowest gas prices in your neighborhood Find it:
> Lowest gas prices in your neighborhood
> *
> Calculator: Gas prices to cities nationwide
> *
> Quick tips: Easy ways to save on gas Quick tips: Easy
> ways to save on gas Photos
> *
> Fuel efficiency calculator
> *
> Latest update on the pain at the pump Video
> *
> Tips: Tracking prices across S. Fla., plus how you can save
>
> Agronomist Mathilde Laval is banking on jatropha to help the Dominican
> Republic, initially to improve the lives of subsistence farmers in
> Elias Piña, a dusty area on the border with Haiti where jobs and money
> are scarce. She works with a nonprofit group that is encouraging
> farmers to plant the trees, sell the seeds to be crushed into oil and
> then, use the oil in stoves instead of burning firewood.
>
> In the future, she hopes oil can be processed into biodiesel, offering
> rural areas a chance to meet more of their energy needs.
>
> Jatropha seems almost a miracle plant. It doesn't need much water or
> fertilizer. It grows even on denuded soil and hills. Animals don't
> like to eat it. It's too scrawny to cut down for firewood. It can grow
> for more than 40 years. And just selling the seeds for their oil
> should earn farmers in Elias Piña more than most earn — perhaps $800 a
> year for a 2.5-acre farm, Laval said.
>
> That's enough money to interest farmer Hector Tolentino. The
> 54-year-old now rides his horse farther each day to find enough
> firewood to cook his meals. Area residents have been cutting down
> trees for so many generations that the land is eroding and drying out.
>
> "If I could get jatropha oil at a reasonable price, I'd get a stove to
> cook on," said Tolentino, a thin man with a big smile.
>
> Native to the Caribbean area, jatropha has become coveted worldwide
> amid rising costs for petroleum and diesel. At least 720,000 hectares
> already have been planted in China, Guatemala, Malaysia, India and
> other countries. By 2014, that acreage could more than triple,
> according to London-based research firm New Energy Finance.
>
> Advocates say biodiesel from jatropha burns cleaner than fossil fuels.
> It can be used in vehicles without having to adapt the engines. And
> unlike corn processed into ethanol, it is not a food crop. Its
> harvesting for fuel won't put pressure on food prices.
>
> But there are many risks for producers trying to make profits on a
> large commercial scale.
>
> Trees can die from diseases, for example. A fungus recently attacked
> hundreds of jatropha seedlings at a nursery developed by Laval's
> group, said farmer Rafael Paulino, 54. He gets paid to plant seeds in
> plastic bags and help nurture them into seedlings that later will be
> transported for planting on farms — earning about $8 a day plus lunch,
> more than the going wage in the area.
>
> Producers still need to figure out which varieties yield the most
> seeds and oil for different areas depending on soil, rain and other
> conditions. And they must weigh costs, which can vary widely by region
> and country for labor, land and other basic inputs.
>
> There are also questions about creating environmental imbalances by
> planting a single crop over miles of land.
>
> "I can't recommend now that anyone plant 100,000 acres," conceded Omar
> Bros, co-founder of the nonprofit group, Dominican Institute of
> Integrated Development, where French agronomist Laval is leading the
> small-scale test project.
>
> But Getco of Fort Lauderdale is placing bigger bets, preparing to
> invest millions of dollars in South American plantations. Chief
> Executive James Fanning is buoyed by a 2007 report from investment
> firm Goldman Sachs that estimated jatropha could be processed into a
> barrel of fuel for about $43, about the same cost as sugar cane-based
> ethanol and roughly half the cost of ethanol made from corn. He knows
> the report bases its projections on relatively small jatropha farms in
> India, but figures even at higher costs, he can cash in.
>
> "With the price of oil where it is today, you don't have to be a
> rocket scientist to know there's a tremendous amount of money to be
> made," Fanning said during the recent JatrophaWorld conference in
> Miami.
>
> International Clean Energy of Palm Beach Gardens is more cautious.
>
> It's first testing different varieties and compiling data on plant
> yields, costs and other basics before considering investment in
> biodiesel on a large scale. Growing and testing seeds will take at
> least a year, said energy expert George Philippidis of Florida
> International University, who is working with the new company.
>
> "There's this fascination with jatropha now," Philippidis said. "But
> we need to manage expectations."
>
> Doreen Hemlock can be reached at dhemlock@sun-sentinel.com or
> 305-810-5009.
>
> Jatropha facts Grows in wastelands and can thrive in sandy or rocky
> soil. It can be planted in the desert, so it doesn't compete with food
> crops. Is a poisonous shrub . It has been used as a living fence to
> protect gardens and fields from animals. Originates in Central Americ
> a and has spread to other tropical and subtropical countries. Source:
> The Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species
>
> More articles
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> Colombia finds biofuels bonanza in sugar cane
>
> By JOHN OTIS
> Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
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> PHOTO GALLERY
> See a Colombian sugar plantation in action
>
> El Cerrito, Colombia — Between breaks to sharpen his machete under the
> equatorial sun, Gregorio Hurtado laid waste to row upon row of 9-foot
> sugar cane stalks.
>
> Like plantation labor of a bygone era, the cane harvest remains a
> backbreaking task. Even though Hurtado earns just $3 for every ton of
> the fibrous stalks he cuts, he's happy to have a job amid the chaos of
> Colombia's sugar industry.
>
> For that, he can thank several new ethanol plants towering above the
> sea of green cane fields that cover this patch of western Colombia.
> Even as low world prices and the weak U.S. dollar have hurt sugar
> exporters here, Colombia's biofuels industry is growing by leaps and
> bounds.
>
> Ahead-of-the-curve planning, technological breakthroughs and
> government incentives have helped Colombia emerge as the No. 2
> producer of ethanol in Latin America, behind Brazil, and a leader in
> the manufacture of biodiesel.
>
> "We took the initiative years ago and became a pioneer," Jorge
> Cardenas, president of the Colombian Biofuels Federation, said in an
> interview.
>
> With just over 100 million gallons annually, Colombian ethanol
> production is dwarfed by the billions of gallons churned out yearly in
> the U.S. and Brazil.
>
> Yet Colombia is a technological leader in the field and is
> experimenting with biofuel production using everything from sugar
> beets and palm oil to yucca.
>
> Colombian experts are helping companies in Guatemala, Honduras and El
> Salvador set up ethanol plants.
>
> Farther north, Louisiana Green Fuels, which is partially owned by
> Colombian investors, plans to launch what could become the first sugar
> cane ethanol plant in the U.S., near Lake Charles.
>
> The distillery, scheduled to open next year, will produce about 25
> million gallons annually. Three more plants are to be built by 2012.
>
> "The Colombian work ethic, engineering and appreciation for ethanol
> production have had a significant part to play in bringing this
> project to fruition," said Randal Johnson, a company spokesman.
>
> Colombia is also the hemisphere's largest producer of palm oil.
>
> Tons of oil are turned into biodiesel, which elsewhere is made from
> rapeseed oil.
>
> Biodiesel production will more than double this year to 218 million
> gallons, Jens Mesa Dishington of the Federation of Oil Palm Producers
> said in Bogotá, the capital.
>
> The world's sudden thirst for biofuels came at precisely the right
> moment for Colombia's sugar growers.
>
> Not only did world prices for the sweetener drop from nearly 15 cents
> to 10 cents a pound last year, but the weakening dollar meant less
> income for sugar exporters.
>
> In 2007, their profits plummeted by 44 percent, according to the
> Colombian Sugar Cane Growers Association.
>
> These days, however, mills are shifting much of the cane from sugar to
> ethanol production, which is far more profitable.
>
> More used for ethanol
> At the Providencia Sugar Mill, which is the size of several football
> fields, massive machines wash and shred cane stalks then press out the
> juices. These liquids are crystallized into sugar or fermented and
> distilled into ethanol.
>
> "We started out using 18 percent of the cane for ethanol, but in some
> months the figure has gone up to 40 percent," said Marucio Tello, who
> helps run the ethanol distillery at the Providencia mill, 15 miles
> northeast of Cali.
>
> Colombia was once the world's sixth-largest sugar exporter, but
> overseas sales have dropped by half since 2003. Meanwhile, five modern
> distilleries now produce enough to make the nation nearly
> self-sufficient in ethanol.
>
> The transition has helped the sugar industry avoid job cuts and mill
> closures.
>
> Nearly the entire crop is harvested by about 15,000 workers, most of
> whom wear metal gloves and shinguards to keep from gashing themselves
> as they slice down the fields with their thick-bladed machetes.
>
> "Biofuels have given us some breathing room," said Alvaro Amaya,
> director of the Center for the Investigation of Sugar Cane.
>
> Although neighboring Brazil has been producing huge quantities of
> ethanol since the 1970s, Colombia began to seriously consider biofuels
> in 2001 as oil reserves dwindled. Analysts predicted the country would
> need to start importing petroleum by 2012, and ethanol and biodiesel
> seemed like attractive alternatives.
>
> Huge potential
> Unlike in the United States and Europe, where most of the fertile
> acres are already under cultivation, Colombia still has vast tracts
> that could be turned into farmland to produce biomass without
> disrupting the national food chain.
>
> "The agricultural frontier could be expanded enormously," President
> Alvaro Uribe told a recent gathering of farmers. "There is land for
> everything: to increase food production and to increase biofuel
> production."
>
> Colombia already grows half a million acres of sugar cane, which is
> far more efficient than corn or other crops for producing ethanol.
>
> Newly developed strains of the plant helped Colombian farmers reduce
> the growing cycle from 17 to 12 months and extract 6 tons of sugar per
> acre, the highest sugar production rate in the world.
>
> The key incentive came when the government mandated that the national
> gasoline supply must contain 10 percent ethanol by the end of 2009, a
> figure that will increase to 25 percent by 2025.
>
> Meanwhile, palm groves first planted to produce edible oils have been
> expanded to supply newly built biodiesel plants. A new law mandates
> that the country's diesel must contain at least 5 percent biodiesel by
> year's end.
>
> "The oil was running out. That was the determining factor," said
> Cardenas, of the Biofuels Federation. "If there had been enough oil,
> we wouldn't have had the political will to do this. But with oil at
> more than $100 a barrel and reserves falling, people began to get
> worried."
>
> Getting into biofuels production "was like striking an oil deposit
> equal to 10 percent of the country's supply," added Johan Martinez of
> the Sugar Cane Growers Association in Cali.
>
> The Uribe government wants to expand the sugar cane crop from 500,000
> acres to 2.5 million acres to feed more than a dozen ethanol
> distilleries expected to come into produc-
> tion within the next five years.
>
> Eventually, the plan is to export ethanol to the United States. Unlike
> Brazilian ethanol, which faces a 54-cent-per-gallon import tariff,
> Colombian ethanol could enter the American market duty-free under the
> terms of trade agreement between the two nations that has yet to be
> approved by the U.S.
> Congress.
>
> Taking over
> Not everyone is thrilled with the expansion plans.
>
> At a recent meeting of regional leaders in Mexico, Nicaraguan
> President Daniel Ortega complained of rising food prices in poor
> nations and criticized Uribe for encouraging Central American
> countries to grow more sugar cane for ethanol than food crops.
>
> "For Nicaragua, it's a mortal sin to talk about biofuels," Ortega said.
>
> There have also been widespread reports from northern Colombia about
> peasant farmers who returned after being driven away by death squads
> to find their fields occupied by industrial-scale oil palm producers.
>
> Yet at the same time, industry backers are promoting biofuels as a way
> to generate more jobs in the impoverished countryside, where many
> down-and-out farmers plant coca, the raw material for cocaine.
>
> U.N. statistics showed that the coca crop in Colombia, the world's
> largest producer of cocaine, had expanded by 27 percent last year to
> 245,000 acres.
>
> Speaking at a recent biofuels conference, Agriculture Minister Andres
> Felipe Arias said: "Peasants who grow
> palm trees are not going to fall into the temptation to grow coca."
>
> john.otis@chron.com
>
>
> Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis
>
> Internal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive
>
> * Aditya Chakrabortty
> * The Guardian,
> * Friday July 4, 2008
> * Article history
>
> Corn used for biofuel
>
> A handful of corn before it is processed. Photograph: Charlie
> Neibergall/AP
>
> Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than
> previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report
> obtained by the Guardian.
>
> The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed
> analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an
> internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
>
> The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that
> plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It
> will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe,
> which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of
> greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.
>
> Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has
> not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.
>
> "It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White
> House," said one yesterday.
>
> The news comes at a critical point in the world's negotiations on
> biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialised countries meet next
> week in Hokkaido, Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and
> come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium
> on the use of plant-derived fuels.
>
> It will also put pressure on the British government, which is due to
> release its own report on the impact of biofuels, the Gallagher
> Report. The Guardian has previously reported that the British study
> will state that plant fuels have played a "significant" part in
> pushing up food prices to record levels. Although it was expected last
> week, the report has still not been released.
>
> "Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong
> evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises,"
> said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam. "It is imperative that we
> have the full picture. While politicians concentrate on keeping
> industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough
> to eat."
>
> Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty
> line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh
> to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and
> fuel prices as "the first real economic crisis of globalisation".
>
> President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from
> India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: "Rapid
> income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases
> in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for
> the large price increases."
>
> Even successive droughts in Australia, calculates the report, have had
> a marginal impact. Instead, it argues that the EU and US drive for
> biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.
>
> Since April, all petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include 2.5%
> from biofuels. The EU has been considering raising that target to 10%
> by 2020, but is faced with mounting evidence that that will only push
> food prices higher.
>
> "Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would
> not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors
> would have been moderate," says the report. The basket of food prices
> examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and this February. The
> report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted
> for an increase of only 15%, while biofuels have been responsible for
> a 75% jump over that period.
>
> It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in
> three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel,
> with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about
> half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of
> biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for
> biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in
> grains, driving prices up higher.
>
> Other reviews of the food crisis looked at it over a much longer
> period, or have not linked these three factors, and so arrived at
> smaller estimates of the impact from biofuels. But the report author,
> Don Mitchell, is a senior economist at the Bank and has done a
> detailed, month-by-month analysis of the surge in food prices, which
> allows much closer examination of the link between biofuels and food
> supply.
>
> The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, which Brazil
> specializes in, have not had such a dramatic impact.
>
> Supporters of biofuels argue that they are a greener alternative to
> relying on oil and other fossil fuels, but even that claim has been
> disputed by some experts, who argue that it does not apply to US
> production of ethanol from plants.
>
> "It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices,"
> said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser,
> last night. "All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising
> higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change."
>
>
> Food price rises force biofuel U-turn
>
> By Colin Brown
> Friday, 4 July 2008
> Related Articles
>
> * More Environment News
>
> * Print Print
> * Email Email
>
> Search Search Go
> Independent.co.uk Web
> Bookmark & Share
>
> * Digg It
> * del.icio.us
> * Facebook
> * Stumbleupon
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> What are these?
> Change font size: A | A | A
>
> Soaring world food prices look set to force Gordon Brown into a U-turn
> over the use of crops such as corn, rapeseed, palm and soya to produce
> fuel as an alternative to petrol and diesel.
>
> Biofuels were seen as the eco-friendly answer to global warming and
> rising fuel prices but a report to be published on Monday will force
> the Prime Minister to rethink his support for using crops to keep
> Britain's cars and lorries running.
>
> A second report will also force Downing Street to revise its policies
> on food and the environment – opening Mr Brown to the charge from
> environmental groups of going soft on the Government's green agenda.
>
> The Prime Minister has been warned in a report by Professor Ed
> Gallagher, head of the Renewable Fuels Agency, that the rush for
> biofuels has made a "significant" contribution to the soaring cost of
> food on the global markets. Corn ethanol and biodiesel derived from
> vegetable oil were widely seen as important ways of creating fuel and
> combating carbon emissions which contribute to global warming.
>
> The Gallagher review threatens to knock out an important plank in Mr
> Brown's environmental strategy. He introduced targets in April in
> Britain requiring all petrol and diesel to contain 2.5 per cent of
> biofuels with the intention of doubling it to 5 per cent by 2010. The
> EU is contemplating a 10 per cent target by 2020. Professor
> Gallagher's report will say the production of fuels from "biomass" –
> non-food crops – may be sustainable but it challenges the targets for
> producing fuel from other crops normally used for food.
>
> Greenpeace said biofuels initially "looked good on paper" but the
> Gallagher review would conclude that the risks are too great to impose
> higher targets.
>
> The campaign group called for a moratorium on targets, subsidies and
> tax breaks for biofuels consumption until it was clear that they could
> be produced from sustainable sources. Oxfam said: "It is clear that
> any additional pressure on limited land resources has the potential to
> drive further agriculture clearance of forests or other habitats and
> to drive up food prices."
>
> The vast majority of the European biodiesel was made from rapeseed
> oil, said Oxfam. "As we divert more and more rapeseed crop into fuel,
> European industry is buying increasing supplies of edible oils from
> overseas including palm oil.
>
> A second report by the Cabinet Office strategy unit is intended to
> launch a debate over how Britain uses its land more effectively to
> produce more food.
>
> In a further blow to the Prime Minister's "green" strategy, ministers
> are preparing to respond to the pressure from motorists – led by
> haulage owners who staged a noisy protest around Westminster this week
> – by bringing forward the announcement by the Chancellor Alistair
> Darling that the 2p rise in fuel duty in October will be scrapped.
>

NYT: Venture Investors Wrap Up an Unusually Bleak Quarter

2008-06-30T11:50:00.000-07:00

posted by Dustin

June 28, 2008

Venture Investors Wrap Up an Unusually Bleak Quarter

By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — So far this has been a challenging year for companies hoping to go public. But it has been even rougher on venture capitalists who were hoping to get a big payday from such an offering.

In the second quarter of this year not a single company backed by venture capitalists has gone public. It is the first time that has happened since 1978, according to a venture capital industry group.

General weaknesses in the financial markets have kept many companies from taking the plunge. But venture capitalists say they have started to back technologies like alternative energy that take relatively long to gestate before they are ready for the public market.

Some other venture capitalists say the industry is struggling to find its direction and has never fully recovered from the dot-com bust.

That may come as little surprise to the well-heeled individuals and institutions that give their money to venture capitalists seeking big returns. Some of these investors have criticized venture capitalists for failing to provide substantial returns on a broad basis since 2000.

Public offerings serve a critical role for venture capitalists by giving them a way to sell, at huge profits, stakes in the start-up companies they invest in and build. So the offering drought is being taken very seriously by the venture capital industry. The National Venture Capital Association, an industry group, said it planned to discuss the issue on Tuesday in a media blitz on television news outlets.

"It's a big story," said Emily Mendell, a spokeswoman for the group. She declined to discuss the problem further, saying that the industry would release its official analysis on Tuesday, after the end of the quarter.

Nancy Pfund, a veteran venture capitalist with DBL Investors in San Francisco, said the absence of venture-backed offerings in the quarter was surprising, but the reasons behind it were not hard to understand.

She said there were two overriding factors. Wall Street is being very selective in taking companies public, and blessing only those with particularly high revenue and growth projections. And venture capitalists are wary because they worry that their returns will be limited in a depressed market.

"It's not a good time to go out," she said. "No one's going to appreciate the value you've created, and it's such a high bar."

Ms. Pfund is an investor in a number of alternative energy start-ups, like Solar City, which does solar panel installation. She said the company had blossomed and was on pace to more than double last year's revenue of $26 million, but she said that it, like a lot of energy start-ups, was simply too early in its development to go public.

Indeed, some venture capitalists are arguing that the pipeline for public offerings has dried up in part because of the considerable shift in the industry's interest in the last three years into "green" technologies, which was taking time to bear fruit.

But Paul Kedrosky, an investor and the author of Infectious Greed, a venture capital-centric blog, said that there were deeper, more systemic problems for venture capitalists in addition to the cyclical challenges. He said part of the problem was that the industry was backing companies that lack widespread investor appeal, like YouTube clones and dating and social networking sites.

"There is nothing that the industry is producing that investors want," Mr. Kedrosky said. "The stuff they're investing in is idiosyncratic — it's fun and appealing to them but Wall Street doesn't care."

"The Valley is operating in its own little world, and the capital markets don't care about the things that are getting the Valley excited."

Over all, the market for public offerings has been in a funk. So far this year there have been 36 offerings, down from 130 during the same period last year, according to Renaissance Capital, a research firm based in Greenwich, Conn.

"Deal volume has fallen off a cliff," said Paul Bard, head of research for Renaissance.

The public offerings this year raised $27 billion, but Visa's offering accounted for $18 billion of that. Mr. Bard said there was likely to be a sharp drop in the amount raised this year from last year's $60 billion.

Mr. Kedrosky said the problems were particularly acute for venture capitalists — and that leaves them with some answering to do to their own investors.

"Here's an industry struggling in a big way to hang onto its investors, let alone find new ones," Mr. Kedrosky said. "They've been hanging on by their fingernails."

The lack of a good way to cash out just makes things worse, he said. "There is no venture industry if there is no I.P.O. market."

Another Inconvenient Truth: How biofuel policies are deepening poverty and accelerating climate change

2008-06-26T09:27:00.001-07:00

posted by Dustin Mulvaney

Biofuels are presented in rich countries as a solution to two crises: the climate crisis and the oil crisis. But they may not be a solution to either, and instead are contributing to a third: the current food crisis. Meanwhile the danger is that they allow rich-country governments to avoid difficult but urgent decisions about how to reduce consumption of oil, while offering new avenues to continue expensive support to agriculture at the cost of taxpayers. In the meantime, the most serious costs of these policies – deepening poverty and hunger, environmental degradation, and accelerating climate change – are being 'dumped' on developing countries.

http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp114_inconvenient_truth

Also...

Biofuel farming accused of driving up food prices

Updated Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:26pm AEST

Oxfam says the competition between fuel and food is dragging more than 30 million people into poverty.

Oxfam says the competition between fuel and food is dragging more than 30 million people into poverty. (user submitted: Greg O'Brien)

Biofuels were supposed to make up a big part of the answer to two of the great challenges of our age: climate change and energy security.

To many governments grappling with soaring oil prices and growing fears about climate change, tailoring incentives to engineer a switch from oil-based fuels to those made from food seemed like a good idea.

But increasingly, there are fears that biofuels may be creating as many problems as they solve.

Oxfam says the renewable fuels are not as climate-friendly as first thought.

The international aid agency blames the biofuel policies of developed countries for a 30 per cent spike in food prices which are dragging more than 30 million extra people into poverty.

"As more science has come to light and as people have looked at this issue more carefully, I think our conclusion is that changing to biofuels in transport in countries like Australia, Europe, America is not good for the planet," says Oxfam Australia's Jeff Atkinson.

In its global report, Another Inconvenient Truth, Oxfam argues the benefits to the climate of using biofuels have been overstated.

It says many farmers have cleared further into forests and wetlands to accommodate the crops, and others have moved out of food production to make room for biofuel feedstock.

"Of course changing from petrol to biofuels in one's car is going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but to look at the whole picture you have to look at how these biofuels are produced and where they are produced and many of them are produced in developing countries of course," Mr Atkinson said.

"But what's happening is that there is competition between fuel and food."

"Take the corn crop in the US for example, which would normally be grown for food, a lot of that is now being grown for fuel instead and factors like this of course are driving up food prices."

That rise is as much as 30 per cent, Oxfam says.

But Bob Gordon from Renewable Fuels Australia rejects the notion that biofuels are entirely responsible for the global food shortage.

"It is oil that is the primary driver and you'll find that the United States, you'll find that the European governments and everybody accepts that," Mr Gordon says.

"The issue with biofuels is that we have to play it carefully if we're going to use biofuels as a fuel alternative, and only one fuel alternative."

He says the current crop of biofuels is just the first step in the transition from an oil-based economy.

"Biofuels do require land use. We need to be careful about that," Mr Gordon says.

-Adapted from a report by Ashley Hall for AM

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/25/2285446.htm?section=world

Biofuels' expansion into the cerrado

2008-06-04T19:46:00.001-07:00

I also ran into this blog which has something about the expansion of biofuels into another biome whose importance for biodiversity and indigenous peoples is being increasingly acknowledged in Brazil, the "cerrado".

http://redecerrado.blogspot.com/2008/04/cana-de-acar-invade-zona-biodiversa-do.html

Leticia.

Biofuels' expansion into the cerrado

2008-06-04T19:43:00.001-07:00

http://redecerrado.blogspot.com/2008/04/cana-de-acar-invade-zona-biodiversa-do.html

Leticia.

Connecting sugar and oil prices

2008-06-04T19:29:00.001-07:00

http://economia.uol.com.br/cotacoes/ultnot/2008/03/19/ult1939u235.jhtm

Sorry that this one is in Portuguese.

Leticia.

Food Report Criticizes Biofuel Policies

2008-05-30T00:26:00.001-07:00

posted by dustin mulvaney

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/business/worldbusiness/30food.html?em&ex=1212292800&en=54e32228302fba3c&ei=5087%0A

May 30, 2008

Food Report Criticizes Biofuel Policies

By ANDREW MARTIN

Agriculture Secretary Edward T. Schafer is preparing to walk into a buzzsaw of criticism over American biofuels policy when he meets with world leaders to discuss the global food crisis next week.

Mr. Schafer took the offensive at a press conference on Thursday that discussed the food summit, planned for Rome. He said an analysis by the Agriculture Department had determined that biofuel production was responsible for only 2 to 3 percent of the increase in global food prices, while biofuels had reduced consumption of crude oil by a million barrels a day.

"We think that policy-wise in the United States of America — and certainly in the rest of the world — as we see the price of oil and petroleum escalate dramatically beyond anyone's imagination, that one of the ways to deal with that is to produce biofuels which are renewables, better for the environment and help lower that cost," he said.

Mr. Schafer's remarks came as ethanol and biofuels are coming under increasing criticism from foreign leaders and members of Congress, as grocery prices climb in the developed world and malnutrition and hunger threaten to spread in the poorest nations.

Just hours before his comments, a major report was released in Paris that urged countries to reconsider biofuels policies in the wake of soaring food prices.

"The energy security, environmental and economic benefits of biofuels production based on agricultural commodity feed stocks are at best modest, and sometimes even negative," says the report, prepared by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "Alternative approaches may be considered that offer potentially greater benefits with less of the unintended market impact."

The Agriculture Department's own longtime chief economist, Keith Collins, who retired in January, said that ethanol was the "foot on the accelerator" of corn demand — an essential feed for animals, as well as a part of many diets — and merited renewed debate. He said Congressional mandates for ethanol would require farmers to grow more corn for conversion to biofuel, at the expense of feed corn and other food crops.

"You're building in tremendous increase in demand," said Mr. Collins, who emphasized that he was not necessarily against ethanol. "It's an increase that is going to feed into food prices."

The United Nations report, the global agriculture outlook through 2017, said prices for farm crops will remain substantially higher over the next decade because of fundamental changes in demand, though they will gradually decline from current highs.

Because the recent spike in crop and food prices has been caused in part by temporary factors like drought, the report predicted that prices should decrease as weather conditions return to normal and crop yields improve.

"At least we hope they are temporary," said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the O.E.C.D., alluding to the potential impact of lasting climate change on agricultural production.

In addition to reviewing ethanol policies, the report said governments should reconsider trade policies like export bans that do not allow farmers to take advantage of higher global prices for agriculture commodities.

The report also encouraged countries that have balked at allowing genetically modified crops to reconsider their use as a way to improve yields.

The expected causes of higher-than-average prices during the next decade include a doubling of biofuel production, higher fuel costs that increase the cost of producing crops and transporting food, and greater demand for food and animal feed in richer developing countries where incomes are rising, the report says.

Prices for vegetable oils are expected to remain the highest, 80 percent above the average from 1998 to 2007; wheat, corn and skim milk powder are anticipated to be 40 to 60 percent higher; sugar, 30 percent; and beef and pork, about 20 percent. Biofuel production should account for about a third of the expected increases in prices for vegetable oils and grains.

But the authors of the report cautioned that crop prices may be more volatile because of less predictable weather patterns, speculators in agricultural futures markets and low levels of stockpiles of grains.

The projected increases in crop prices would have the most serious impact in poor countries.

The authors of the report encouraged increased investment in agriculture research and outreach programs in the least developed countries after years of declining support.

"Agricultural development was not given sufficient priority over the last decades, and its importance was underestimated," said Jacques Diouf, secretary-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In a related matter, the World Bank on Thursday announced that it would increase spending on agriculture and food programs to $6 billion in the coming fiscal year, which begins on July 1, up from $4 billion.

The funds include $800 million that has already been earmarked for Africa and an additional $1.2 billion that will be spent on such things as nutrition programs for schoolchildren and pregnant women, and seeds and fertilizer for small-scale farmers to improve harvests.

"These initiatives will help address the immediate danger of hunger and malnutrition for the 2 billion people struggling to survive in the face of rising food prices," the president of the World Bank Group, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a statement.

Mr. Zoellick said $200 million of the $1.2 billion would be used as grants for countries most vulnerable to the food crisis.

centro de monitoramento de agrocombustíveis

2008-05-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.reporterbrasil.org.br/agrocombustiveis/index.php

For your information!!!

more info on teh Conferencia Internacional de Biocombustíveis

2008-05-25T19:25:00.001-07:00

For your information!

Cheers

Renata

Conferência Internacional de Biocombustíveis

O governo federal irá realizar em novembro, na cidade de São Paulo, aConferência Internacional de Biocombustíveis. Serão cinco dias de debate com a participação de representantes de 190 países, entre eles Estados Unidos, China, Índia e Austrália.

A organização da Conferência Internacional de Biocombustíveis elegeu na segunda-feira (7), a coordenação-geral do evento que será exercida por um Grupo de Trabalho Interministerial (GTI), composto pela Casa Civil, ministérios das Relações Exteriores, de Minas e Energia, do Meio Ambiente, da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento, da Ciência e Tecnologia, do Desenvolvimento Agrário, BNDES, Apex e Secom.

biodiesel and environmental and social impacts In Brasil report

2008-05-25T17:35:00.001-07:00

Hi Biofuelheads,

This is a very important project led by the Centro de Monitoramento de Agrocombustivel and the reportBrasil...

we shall try to talk to them asap...

http://www.reporterbrasil.org.br/documentos/o_brasil_dos_agrocombustiveis_v1.pdf

cheers

Renata

New Trend in Biofuels Has New Risks

2008-05-21T13:15:00.001-07:00

posted by Dustin Mulvaney

May 21, 2008

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

ROME — In the past year, as the diversion of food crops like corn and palm to make biofuels has helped to drive up food prices, investors and politicians have begun promoting newer, so-called second-generation biofuels as the next wave of green energy. These, made from non-food crops like reeds and wild grasses, would offer fuel without the risk of taking food off the table, they said.

But now, biologists and botanists are warning that they, too, may bring serious unintended consequences. Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.

At a United Nations meeting in Bonn, Germany, on Tuesday, scientists from the Global Invasive Species Program, the Nature Conservancy and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as well as other groups, presented a paper with a warning about invasive species.

"Some of the most commonly recommended species for biofuels production are also major invasive alien species," the paper says, adding that these crops should be studied more thoroughly before being cultivated in new areas.

Controlling the spread of such plants could prove difficult, the experts said, producing "greater financial losses than gains." The International Union for Conservation of Nature encapsulated the message like this: "Don't let invasive biofuel crops attack your country."

To reach their conclusions, the scientists compared the list of the most popular second-generation biofuels with the list of invasive species and found an alarming degree of overlap. They said little evaluation of risk had occurred before planting.

"With biofuels, there's always a hurry," said Geoffrey Howard, an invasive species expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "Plantations are started by investors, often from the U.S. or Europe, so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don't want a negative assessment."

The biofuels industry said the risk of those crops morphing into weed problems is overstated, noting that proposed biofuel crops, while they have some potential to become weeds, are not plants that inevitably turn invasive.

"There are very few plants that are 'weeds,' full stop," said Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of EuropaBio, an industry group. "You have to look at the biology of the plant and the environment where you're introducing it and ask, are there worry points here?" He said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully because they would not want growth they could not control.

The European Union and the United States have both instituted biofuel targets as a method to reduce carbon emissions. The European Union's target of 10 percent biofuel use in transportation by 2020 is binding. As such, politicians are anxiously awaiting the commercial perfection of second-generation biofuels.

The European Union is funding a project to introduce the "giant reed, a high-yielding, non-food plant into Europe Union agriculture," according to its proposal. The reed is environmentally friendly and a cost-effective crop, poised to become the "champion of biomass crops," the proposal says.

A proposed Florida biofuel plantation and plant, also using giant reed, has been greeted with enthusiasm by investors, its energy sold even before it is built.

But the project has been opposed by the Florida Native Plants Society and a number of scientists because of its proximity to the Everglades, where giant reed overgrowth could be dangerous, they said. The giant reed, previously used mostly in decorations and in making musical instruments — is a fast-growing, thirsty species that has drained wetlands and clogged drainage systems in other places where it has been planted. It is also highly flammable and increases the risk of fires.

From a business perspective, the good thing about second-generation biofuel crops is that they are easy to grow and need little attention. But that is also what creates their invasive potential.

"These are tough survivors, which means they're good producers for biofuel because they grow well on marginal land that you wouldn't use for food," Dr. Howard said. "But we've had 100 years of experience with introductions of these crops that turned out to be disastrous for environment, people, health."

Stas Burgiel, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said the cost of controlling invasive species is immense and generally not paid by those who created the problem.

But he and other experts emphasized that some of the second-generation biofuel crops could still be safe if introduced into the right places and under the right conditions

"With biofuels we need to do proper assessments and take appropriate measures so they don't get out of the gate, so to speak," he said. That assessment, he added, must take a broad geographical perspective since invasive species don't respect borders.

The Global Invasive Species Program estimates that the damage from invasive species costs the world more than $1.4 trillion annually — five percent of the global economy.

Jatropha, the darling of the second-generation biofuels community, is now being cultivated widely in East Africa in brand new biofuel plantations. But jatropha has been recently banned by two Australian states as an invasive species. If jatropha, which is poisonous, overgrows farmland or pastures, it could be disastrous for the local food supply in Africa, experts said.

But Mr. De Greef said jatropha had little weed potential in most areas, adding: "Just because a species has caused a problem in one place doesn't make it a weed everywhere."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/science/earth/21biofuels.html?ei=5087&em=&en=397ffb6474843513&ex=1211515200&pagewanted=print

Mexico's flood survivors blackmailed into biofuels

2008-05-21T13:14:00.001-07:00

posted by Dustin Mulvaney

13 May 2008 11:11:00 GMT

Written by: Gregory Berger and Ben Wisner

Reuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.

A Mexican couple wades through floodwaters in Villahermosa, Tabasco, the state neighbouring Chiapas, November 2007. REUTERS/Manuel Lopez

Did you know that Mexican farmers who lost everything in floods last year are being forced to grow African oil palms for biodiesel?

I was in southern Mexico covering another story, and found flood victims being offered loans and grants by the Mexican government to resume their farming activities, but with a catch. They need to agree to stop growing corn and beans - their traditional crops - and replace them with the oil palms that are native to West Africa.

I was told this by multiple, reliable sources who wish to remain anonymous for fears of their own safety.

The town of San Juan de Grijalva in the southernmost state of Chiapas was completely destroyed last November when a nearby hill collapsed into the Grijalva river, a major waterway. The impact caused a wave of over 50 feet (15 metres) which destroyed every structure in the small town of a few hundred people.

San Juan's residents now are being relocated away from the Grijalva river into purpose-built settlements. These so-called "rural towns" are central to the scheme to make the region - from southern Mexico down through Central America - an exporter of biodiesel.

Chiapas state congressman Luis Darinel Alvarado, a member of the congressional Agrarian Reform Committee, confirmed the policy of African oil palm production.

Governments throughout the region - Guatemala, Honduras and Panama, for example - have biofuel dollar signs in their eyes as petroleum rises above $120 a barrel.

In 1999, after Hurricane Mitch had battered the banana industry in Honduras the previous year, 30 million kilos (66 million pounds) of palm oil were exported as it took over as one of the country's major commercial corps.

Chiapas is geographically and historically linked with Central America. New industrial development of Chiapas and Central America is tied together under the controversial Puebla Panama Plan (PPP) was introduced the start of the millennium under former Mexican President Vicente Fox and recently revived under President Felipe Calderon.

The initiative includes overhauling infrastructure, establishing new industries, and changing agricultural practices to favour new international trade relationships. These new "rural towns" of flood victim residents tending oil palm plantations fall precisely in line with the plan's vision.

Critics say that the push for Puebla Panama is a major factor in the rise of reported paramilitary violence against supporters in Chiapas of the Zapatista movement, an armed movement who rose up in 1994 fighting for local people's rights.

The Zapatistas actively oppose the Puebla Panama Plan, arguing that it will destroy indigenous communities and devastate the ecosystems of Chiapas, which has more biodiversity than any other region of Mexico.

African oil palm has also promoted as a "substitute crop" by U.S. government agencies assisting countries such as Bolivia and Colombia in eradicating coca leaf cultivation, used to produce cocaine.

Small-scale farmers have lost their land, and in Colombia the resulting large-scale African oil palm producers have been linked with paramilitary organisations.

All this is happening as we witness a steep rise in worldwide food prices stirred up by a "perfect storm" of factors. One of the factors identified by the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food and others is the shift of farm land from food crop production to biofuel production.

Competition with U.S. industrial corn producers under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has driven many small Mexican farmers out of business.

Even before the current crisis, the maize-based staple - flat corn patties called tortillas - became more costly as a result. Conscious of this recent history, displaced flood victims are likely to have second thoughts about relying on biofuel production for income to buy food. Rural Mexicans traditionally value their ability to grown their own food and are adverse to risk.

There are certainly pros and cons to African oil palm production. However, the displaced farmers from San Juan Grijalva should be able to decide themselves whether they want to grow them.

Farmers may see its advantage if oil palm is grown on small-scale, mixed farms, marketed in an honest way, and used as a local energy source.

But under coercion and in the face of rapidly changing market conditions for both biofuel and food, they probably fear the worse and feel trapped between a rock and a hard place.

Scientific American - April

2008-05-18T20:26:00.001-07:00

I'll try this for the first time, hope it works...

About a promising 'second generation' biofuel.

Switchboard, from NRDC › Nathanael Greene's Blog › In hand wringing over biofuels mandate, safeguards at risk

2008-05-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

S Publish Post witchboard, from NRDC › Nathanael Greene's Blog › In hand wringing over biofuels mandate, safeguards at risk: "'The solution to a lot of the global warming concerns, particularly the land-use emissions concerns, and the solution to getting biofuels out of the food price equation are the same thing,' he said."

Always?

a very useful blog we shall add to ours... on biofuel... just amazing

2008-05-07T13:39:00.001-07:00

http://brasilbio.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2008-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-02%3A00&updated-max=2009-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-02%3A00&max-results=50

it is one of the most complete site on the issue...check the maps for biodiesel and ethanol refineries. Let´s choose which ones to visit...

I am in touch with the owner Manoel, and hopefully he can join us... when you come to visit BSB in June.

cheers

Renata