(skip this header)

Saturday, December 27, 2014

seattlepi.com Businesses

« Back to Article

Energy farming worsens global warming

Updated 10:00 pm, Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Larger | Smaller
Email This
Page 1 of 1

The rush of the world's largest corporations to squeeze car fuel out of food is an effort to force industrialization on the tropics and end small family farming in the industrialized North.

Converting corn and sugar cane into ethanol, and oil palm and soybeans to diesel fuel, is bad for nature and society. Such a scheme invigorates feudalism, extends the use of petroleum and waters down the moral responsibility of corporations to stop causing global warming.

Corporations -- especially those manufacturing cars, selling petroleum and industrializing agriculture -- hype farm fuels to confuse the public about global warming. They even persuade the political classes of the world to subsidize them. In 2007, the subsidies for ethanol and crop diesel in the United States rose to more than $7 billion.

But these giant farm companies do cause global warming. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization documented in 2006 that the livestock industry alone is responsible for 18 percent of the greenhouse gases raising the temperature of the planet.

Despite global warming, such countries as Russia, the United States and Arctic nations are gearing up for another massive plunder of that ice region for oil.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy reported in May 2007 that the world's energy use, especially petroleum, is likely to rise by 57 percent between 2004 and 2030. Renewable energy, including farm fuels, will be about 9 percent of what the world will use by 2030.

The obsessive addiction of industrial culture to petroleum explains why the world is ignoring global warming. U.S. farm fuel boosters use the slogan that agricultural oil refineries will make the country less dependent on the Arabs' petroleum.

Yet the effort of extracting oil from food is wrong because farmers in the United States and Europe overproduce crops on vulnerable land.

Second, agricultural fuels are ushering another violent season for deforestation and feudalism, especially in the tropics.

Indonesia is accelerating its palm oil plantations by drying and burning its peat lands, blighting the lives of hundreds of thousands of small farmers who complain of becoming "ghosts" on their own land, the spines of the oil palm piercing them nearly to death.

Draining and burning peat lands is responsible for the release of vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

In Latin America, Asia and Africa, peasants and indigenous people are forced off their lands or become slaves in big oil palm and soya plantations. Powerful corporations are dividing the land of these countries, eyeing the land's potential for growing crops for oil. This new scramble for land threatens the Amazon and other forests with destruction, while impoverishing hundreds of millions of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.

Brazil brags the Amazon will make her the Saudi Arabia of "green" energy. Paraguay is dreaming of being the Kuwait of farm diesel.

Brazil backs up her hubris with land; growing soya on more than 40 million acres of land and setting aside an additional 160 million acres for this diesel crop. Brazil also cultivates ethanol crops on more than 12 million acres, while planning to expand the land devoted to sugar cane to more than 60 million acres. Most of this land comes from pastureland and from burning the Amazon, a catastrophe for millions of Brazilians and a calamity for global warming, neutralizing any benefits of ethanol and farm diesel.

Brazil's rapaciousness is no different from that of any other producer of farm fuels.

The rush for green energy in the United States forces small family farmers out of agriculture; the petroleum-hooked agribusinesses building animal factories and ethanol refineries on their land.

Energy farming is deception, making the warming of the Earth worse while threatening small-scale farming with extinction.

Crops are only good for eating.