What flows at the pump and billows out from the tailpipe is not the beginning and end of the discussion on biodiesel, or other ‘environmentally friendly bio-alternatives,’ to deleterious petrofuels. As with everything else in today’s commodified consumer culture, if you want an honest, fair and accurate cost/benefit, energy balance, life-cycle analysis, you’re going to have to dig deep into the dregs.

Biofuels are booming! The fleet and individual, market and conscience, incentives have people chomping at the proverbial bit to squeeze just a little more ‘green’ into their lives. Commercial biofuel products are becoming increasingly more available everyday, and proportionally more centralized, privatized and industrialized in their production, and distribution. Gaining quickly on the biodiesel fervor, and likely to surpass its trendy counterpart is ethanol, an alcohol fuel made predominantly from corn and sugarcane and widely celebrated with massive industry, government and special interest fanfare.

In the world of biodiesel, there first came the ‘homebrew’ phenomena. Biodiesel being a relatively simple alchemical process, the resourceful self-starter saw a way to power the old diesel pickup in the barn and buck the system at the same time! Naturally the cooperative organizational model soon seemed appropriate and folks started coming together to produce and distribute local, recycled and sustainable fuel for their communities. Not to let a profitable community niche go unspoiled, companies like World Energy Alternatives, LLC of Chelsea, Massachusetts, a privately owned company now controlling a considerable portion of the US biodiesel market, popped up and jumped on the bandwagon seeing the massive profits in production and distribution, read: control, of ‘alternative’ fuels, quickly establishing themselves as early corporate frontrunners in the budding industry. Seizing on their burgeoning power position in the countries transitional alternative energy market, World Energy and nefarious cohorts managed to have state and federal regulations magically relax in their favor, and suddenly squeeze out the viability of the independent producer. Not surprisingly then, World Energy has effectively cornered the US biodiesel market, read: consumer, and many are thanking them for the corner.

In a January 2005 press release, World Energy announced it’s “exclusive production agreement with Dow Haltermann Custom Processing (DHCP),”[i] a subsidiary of DOW Chemical Corp., legendary manufacturers of napalm and agent orange, and leaders under the ancillary Dow AgroScience in patented plant biotechnology as well. “We are very enthusiastic about our collaboration with Dow,”[ii] said Gene Gebolys, founder and president of World Energy.

The production and distribution of biofuels, biodiesel, ethanol and the like, is regulated by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the DOE (Department of Energy), two institutions with notorious track records for greasing the palms of big business and virtually wiping out independent producers. Contrary to popular belief, the goals of these institutions are not to promote public involvement or autonomous, local control of our valuable natural resources; nor is it to insure higher quality and more efficient sources of renewable energy; or least of all to stay the catastrophic pollution of our delicate biosphere; but rather, to further consolidate the energy market, production and distribution, in the lap of transnational corporate interests closely tied to the federal government and inextricably linked to US foreign policy; while keeping the public willingly nipping at the pump.

According to World Energy’s website (www.worldenergy.net), biodiesel is primarily made from, “virgin vegetable oils (primarily soybeans),”[iii] effectively redirecting the market ‘surplus’ of vegetable oil into another saleable form. Likewise with ethanol, virgin corn oil is converted into an alcohol-based fuel thereby transferring millions of acres of farmland from food-crop production, to fuel-crop extraction.

Why is there such an incredible surplus of domestic corn and soybean oil? Answer, because the agricultural regulatory agencies in much of the rest of the world have resolutely refused to accept US export of patented genetically engineered (GE) corn and soy products, i.e. the US ‘surplus’ commodity, for fear of widespread local plant and crop contamination, and resultant clashes over ‘intellectual property rights.’

In the August 2006 issue of ACRES U.S.A. in a feature interview with Josh Tickell, author of Biodiesel America, Tickell points out, “The reality is, there’s a lot of corn grown in the United States. It’s our number one crop and there’s lots of leftover corn, so that’s what ethanol is made of today.” Tickell goes on to note that, “ethanol tomorrow is going to be made of everything from poplar trees to wild grasses,”[iv] adding that, “within the next few years they’ll be switching over from conventional crops such as corn or sugarcane to unconventional crops such as poplar trees and switchgrass;”[v] unconventional is a polite word for it.

Patented GE varieties of corn, soy and canola, oil and feed crops alike, have been spreading like wildfire across the world’s agricultural fields for years to the ire of desperate farmers and consumers, while avariciously padding the bank accounts of some of the world’s largest chemical, pharmaceutical, biotech and seed companies. The same ACRES U.S.A issue reports, “Syngenta (a year 2000 hybrid of agribusiness giants Novartis and AstraZeneca) recently asked South Africa and several other countries to allow the import of GM (genetically modified) corn to make ethanol,” and continues, “Syngenta’s Event 3272 application is the first GM application in the world for commercial approval for a nonfood (fuel) use of a crop.”[vi]

Far more rapacious varieties of GE poplar trees and switchgrass are presently coming down the pike! Drooling Gene Giants like Syngenta, Monsanto, and Ceres, Inc. are anxiously waiting to pounce on the global biofuel scene. Setting the stage for this new era of GE propagation is the USDA’s pending approval of a GE plum tree known as ‘C5’ which would be the countries first widely released temperate GE tree.[vii]

Dr. David Suzuki, a world renowned Canadian geneticist emphatically states, “Genetically engineered trees, with the potential to transfer pollen for hundreds of miles carrying genes for traits including insect resistance, herbicide resistance, sterility and reduced lignin, have the potential to wreak ecological havoc throughout the world's native forests."[viii] Wreaking ecological havoc and reaping astronomical profits, power, and control has come to define the new industrial capitalist paradigm, coupled with a wholly inequitable ‘free’ trade system and backed by the machinations of war, it is the rising tide we call neoliberalism.

With the increased potential for massive cross-pollination among a wide variety of wild grass and tree species, biotechnology giants inadvertently, read: deviously, consolidate private ‘ownership’ and control of the world’s food and fuel crops by contaminating them with their patented and protected technology.

Unlike the foresight-challenged United States, much of the rest of the world has been more skeptical and deliberately cautious on the issue of genetic engineering, having the prescience to see the threat GE technology as pollution poses to their irreplaceable ecosystems. In 2002, the authorities of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique even went so far as to deny the import of US food aid in the midst of a widespread hunger crises because the ‘food’, mostly whole corn kernels, was genetically engineered, and the risk that some kernels might end up being planted in the ground subsequently contaminating local varieties was too high. As an inexplicably perverse side note, the Bush administration has even tied the acceptance of GE food exports to AIDS relief packages and international trade security[ix], all while leading nations around the world do nothing to interfere.

The egregious corporate and government interests behind this dangerous new technology have found their veritable sheep’s clothing with the advent of biodiesel and the emerging ethanol frenzy. Now they can steal into bed with well-meaning ‘green’ organizations and their constituencies, still pushing their same unsafe, untested, and unregulated seed onto an unknowing global populace; only this time in a package a public clamoring for ‘alternatives’ and ways to burgeon their local agricultural economies can’t resist; biofuels, agribusiness’ new Trojan Horse. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

‘Endless War,’ as the Bush Administration crafts it, pre-emptive invasion, occupation, sanctions, and the ongoing neocolonial operations in Latin America, all to secure fierce US corporate control of petroleum and other natural resources, has woke a few people up from the calm, oil-secure stupor of the late 90’s. This and the drastic spike in the price of America’s greatest addiction, have urged the 21st century environmentalist to ratchet up the pressure in the push for ‘alternative energy,’ especially biofuels. Without having to retool the geographic nightmare of urban/suburban, highway/byway, certainly not ‘free’-way archetype of democratic, industrial, first-world sustainability we’ve consecrated for ourselves and are parasitically spreading, we can just replace one fix with another without ever having to address the actual “royal addiction,”[x] conspicuous consumption. We can’t, in the same breath, decry the evils of oil, pollution, global warming and the corporate domination of our precious natural resources in a Peak Oil climate, and then embrace, as George Monbiot puts it, “the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel;”[xi] genetically engineered, carbon intensive ‘alternatives,’ from the same greasy hand haloed in the golden glow of biofuels. Monbiot continues, “In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.”[xii]

Any accounting of renewable alternatives as being Global Warming’s silver bullet, or the answer to the ‘domestic energy security situation’, or the antidote to our grave ‘royal addiction,’ is inevitably going to be narrow and shortsighted at best. An honest and comprehensive life-cycle analysis will have to account for such a plethora of vital and organic interconnections that it becomes virtually impossible to catalogue the myriad menacing risks and possibilities; instead becoming an exercise in the other great ‘royal addiction,’ rationalization.

The potentially devastating ecological and health effects of the genetic engineering of plants have been widely prognosticated, however, as impudently stated in an infamous quote from Phil Angell, Monsanto Director of Corporate Communications, “Monsanto should not have to vouch for the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible."[xiii] One can assume this applies equally to its foray into the world of GE fuel-crops as well.

The risk of massive deforestation and desertification by way of industrial monoculture GE tree plantations are also being broadly protested. “In Brazil plantations are referred to as "green deserts," due to their reputation for destroying biological diversity. In South Africa they are known as "green cancer" because of the tendency of the eucalyptus in the plantations to spread wildly into other areas. In Chile plantations are called "green soldiers" because they are destructive, stand in straight lines, and steadily advance forward.”[xiv] To the corporations who patent, plant and profit from their proliferation they are surely known as ‘green jackpots’!

The international organization Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production finding that, “between 1985 and 2000 the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia”[xv] And in his article Worse Than Fossil Fuel, George Monbiot points out that even the British government is keen enough to take precautions, “the main environmental risks are likely to be those concerning any large expansion in biofuel feedstock production, and particularly in Brazil (for sugar cane) and South East Asia (for palm oil plantations).”[xvi]

Biotech corporations, and their government and regulatory counterparts, re-engineer the truth far better than they re-engineer nature. The great biodiesel myth is more of an intentional omission, this is that biodiesel needs to be made from virgin oils, trees, corn, grass, etc., a point fostered by the fuel-crop trade associations across the country, and the manufacturers and patent holders of genetically altered varieties of these same oil crops. What they also fail to mention is that when cultivated conventionally, monocultured and monocropped, they take up vast amounts of agricultural land that isn’t going to feed people, and are heavily fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide and of course OIL (the old black crude dirty kind) dependent. Above all, most of these crops in the ground today are of one GE variety or another, patented as the intellectual property of one chemical/seed/biotech corporation or another, and only leased to the farmer for one season conferring any and all liability associated with the technology on him. Sound like a healthy alternative? Who then is liable for the desert left in their wake?

If it is to be considered an alternative to anything, biodiesel should be made only from post consumer waste vegetable oil, and should always determine a place for every byproduct from the production process to be incorporated wisely back into the dynamic cycle of sustainable energy production. As such, biodiesel can play a small role in alleviating our immediate oil consumption, to the tune of about 5%, “just free off the top, the fat of the land,”[xvii] as Josh Tickell puts it, but it does not pose an answer to it. The alternative fuel ethanol has always been produced from virgin oil-crops, and is in no way a sustainable or wise use of land and resources, being principally GE, and heavily resource intensive, extractive and exhaustive. According to Tickell, “…at the end of the day most of the biodiesel made in this country is going to be made in industrial facilities;”[xviii] industrial farms, industrial factories, industrial politics, industrial policies, etc.

The perilous list goes on and on, considerably longer than the life-cycle of any transnational corporation, and threatening a web of life far more intricate than even the most clever rationalization.

The push for ‘green alternatives’ in our current Peak Oil/Global Warming climate of fear and uncertainty is gaining a great deal of momentum right now and is going relatively unchecked. Government and industry have not failed to see the immediate and long-term profitability of biofuel production and distribution, and are voraciously capitalizing on emerging technologies to tighten their imperial grip on the world’s resources, wallets and fears. That golden biofuel glow has so many generally well-intentioned people ‘sold on the concept,’ while not entirely understanding what the underlying concept is. With their green-blessings this time, our delicate energy and natural resources are being further consolidated in the hands of a few transnational corporations, and our farmers and farmlands are being irrevocably polluted, desertified and sold out to Big Biotech yet again in this great altruistic quest for ‘alternatives.’

It is certainly high time we capitalize on this fresh zeal for ‘greener’ energy by moving forward with sound and logical reasoning towards stewarding a sustainable future, not choosing between the lesser of two evils. The public is being duped by a massive industry campaign to greenwash the GE issue in its latest ‘renewable’ face. This time, if they can’t feed the world with it, they can at least drive them into the ground! Now more than ever, we need to educate each other and organize for real change; the stakes are getting too high.

The truth is, biofuels are NOT the answer we’ve been waiting for, if anything, produced locally and logically, they represent only a small step in a better direction. Will the next world war be fought over vegetable oil? Or water? Will we displace more people around the globe and level more forests to grow GE corn, grass, and trees to fuel our same virulent consumer culture? We will wait and see, or we will create the future we want to see. The alternative we need to be seeking is one to our current paradigm of insatiable consumption, bourgeois comforts, and self-congratulation. Sorry, but the messiah has not yet come, and had she, she wouldn’t be driving a biofuel-vehicle, she would be walking.

Michael Feiner

*This article was previously published in an earlier form under the title, “Not the Biodiesel You Think It Is,” Rural Vermont - Farm Policy Network News, (September, 2004) No.26, http://www.ruralvermont.org/publications.html.

Michael E. Feiner lives in Vermont where he works as a freelance writer, organizer, and farmhand. He is focused on ‘living change’, working to bring our global community into balance with a truly ecological and just future.