[THS] Automobiles: Driving To Starvation

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19841.htm

Driven To Starvation

How the auto industry continues to destroy the environment and is now
abetting global hunger and poverty -

By William A. Cohn

30/04/08 "ICH" -- -In the wake of widespread food riots which have
resulted in fatalities and political turmoil in poor countries around the world,
on April 14th the head of the World Bank warned that 100 million people
are now at risk due to food shortages and escalating prices. Yet Robert
Zoellick’s proposed New Deal for Global Food Policy offers more of a band-
aid approach than a cure to the causes of such needless world hunger.
Oddly, the World Bank failed to call for an end to those ethanol and other
biofuels subsidies which have exacerbated global hunger and poverty by
prioritizing feeding cars over feeding humans.

Speaking at the United Nations on April 21st, Bolivian President Evo Morales
called his country’s food crisis “an external problem” caused by policies in
which “cars come first, not human beings.” Peruvian President Alan Garcia
joined in saying that biofuels harm the world’s poorest people. Morales
previously blamed the world’s leading polluters for causing the severe
weather which has ravaged Bolivia with floods since November 2007,
destroying more than 1.2 million homes. On April 22nd, the environmental
group Friends of the Earth released a report warning the EU of the perils of
expanding biofuels use in Latin America.

Josette Sheeran, head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), told the
BBC on April 22nd that WFP is now delivering food aid to an additional 100
million people who did not need assistance six months ago, “but today
simply can’t afford enough food for their family.” International organizations
have begun the unpleasant task of addressing the relationship between our
addiction to transport fuels and the plague of world hunger and poverty. As
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon convenes a high-level conference on the
food crisis this week, it appears that the long-anticipated resource wars are
heating up.

On April 28th, Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapportuer on the right to food,
called for a 5-year moratorium on the production of biofuels. He called the
present US and EU policies a “criminal path” which are a main cause of the
current worldwide food crisis. And things will only get tougher – the planet’s
population is expected to grow by 50% to 9 billion in some 40 years, and
the number of cars and trucks are expected to double to more than 2 billion
in 30 years. And twice as many jetliners are projected to be in the skies in
20 years. The International Energy Agency says the world’s total energy
demand will rise by 65% over the next 20 years. Corn ethanol, offered as a
quick fix to oil depenednecy, is now seen as energy inefficient and
environmentally destructive, as well as a cause of food scarcity.

Much of the global energy demand comes from cars. About 25% of the
world’s oil goes to the US, and of that, more than half goes to its cars and
trucks. US oil consumption has surged since the oil shocks of the 1970s and
1980s. In large part, this is because the US has some of the lowest gas
prices in the world, the lowest energy taxes and the least fuel-efficient cars.
Presidential candidates McCain and Clinton have played to voters short-term
instincts by calling for a suspension of the federal gas tax during the
summer travel season. Others, such as China, which has seen a seven-fold
increase in vehicles between1990 and 2006, to 37 million – a figure
projected to reach 300 million by 2030, feel that it is their right to follow
suit. Sadly, the US has set the example of denying the need for sacrifice
and change.

Exhausted

2007 was a breakthrough year in educating the public of the need for
dramatic action to avert the most disastrous consequences of global
warming, culminating in Al Gore and the scientists of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in
this regard.

Responding to public pressure, politicians have put forth reform proposals
which have met with resistance from affected industries. None have been
more successful at resisting mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and
adaptation to sustainable ecologically responsible business models than the
automobile industry. While the auto industry has killed the electric car, and
defied efforts to mandate greater fuel efficiency, it has embraced the
development of cars using hydrogen and biofuels. This has aligned it with
powerful economic and political interests in support of ethanol and other
biofuels as the central initiative in response to global warming. Critics
contend that these initiatives are designed simply to divert pressure for
change.

The consensus is that biofuels are causing greater environmental harm in
that they produce more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels
given the pollution caused in producing these so-called green fuels. As well,
we have seen resulting food shortages as farmers gear their crops for
transport fuels. The fallacy of the touted silver bullet biofuels policies is in
their failure to adopt a holistic approach to combating climate change. The
danger of course, beyond the human suffering it has caused, is that such
an omission wastes time and resources in addressing our precarious
ecological situation.

Car crazy blowback

We live in a world that idolizes the car. Marketing tells us that the car gives
us power, status and independence and that she is sexy, responsive and
puts us in control. Cigarettes have been, and in parts of the world still are,
marketed in a similar manner. Yes, our culture has given us a preference
for the car. But our culture formerly gave us a preference for slavery and
child labor. Change was seen as undesirable because it would impose a
greater burden on us. Yet change happened suddenly when people
realized such practices were wrong and must stop – even if cotton, for
instance, would be more expensive.

An essential change in combating the direst global warming prospects is to
protect and preserve our dwindling and threatened rainforests. Such action
seems far-removed from the power of the common person. Getting away
from the car is within the immediate control of most people, and it can
produce a big impact. Christian Brand of the Environmental Change
Institute at Oxford University recently completed a study commissioned by
Tesco, the British supermarket chain, to analyze its employees carbon
emissions over a year – the emissions generated by car travel dwarfed all
other activities. The February 2008 report found that “Personal travel is
generally dominant over items like electricity use (with car and air travel
accounting for more than 75% and as much as 90% of personal emissions
for most, especially younger and higher income, people). Car travel is the
dominant factor.”

While people are switching their light bulbs and lowering their thermostats,
few have been willing to forego the car. A study by the British environment
agency Defra found that 75% of people were prepared to change their
behavior to limit climate change, “But not in the ways that count most: Only
5% of car drivers said they had driven less because of environmental
concerns.” Studies have shown that car ownership is a one-way door: once
a person has a car they won’t give it up, and they then tend to want a
bigger and better one – which means more pollution. Studies also show
that cars tend to be used simply because they are there.

According to Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy, it is time to slam the door on our
car addiction: “I listen when the scientists say that if we fail to mitigate
climate change, the environmental, social, and economic consequences will
be stark and severe. . . . There comes a moment when it is clear what you
must do . . . [we must] create a low-carbon economy. In saying this, I do
not underestimate the task. It is to take an economy where human comfort,
activity and growth are inextricably linked with emitting carbon and to
transform it into one which can only thrive without depending on carbon.
This is a monumental challenge. It requires a revolution in technology and a
revolution in thinking. We are going to have to rethink the way we live and
work.”

Greenhouse gas emissions and climate context

The successes and failures of IPCC 2007, the 4th assessment of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, can be measured in myriad
ways including a drumbeat of media coverage of carbon footprints and
green alternatives. One notable success is on the political front – following
Kevin Rudd’s resounding defeat of John Howard as Australian Prime
Minister, he quickly reversed national policy on climate-change, and in
December signed the Kyoto Protocol in Bali, thus leaving the United States
isolated as the only major country to reject it (On Feb. 26th, the White
House signaled its conditional consent to a mandatory international
agreement on climate change).

Lest we get too pleased with the developments of 2007 and early 2008, it is
instructive to put this in recent historical context. In 1992, at the “Earth
Summit” in Rio, the US and almost every country of the world endorsed the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The treaty, ratified by the
US Senate and other national legislatures, bound every industrialized
(Annex 1 – the US, Canada, Japan, Europe and then Eastern Europe)
country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of returning
emissions to 1990 levels. Excepting the Eastern bloc countries, whose
economies were crumbling, none of these Annex 1 countries progressed
towards compliance, but rather, emissions increased despite follow-up
negotiations in 1995 (Berlin), 1996 (Geneva) and 1997 (Kyoto).

The Kyoto Protocol, an addendum to the 1992 Treaty, which reduced the
commitments of the signatories, has the EU states commit to the goal of
reducing their greenhouse gas emissions (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide,
hydrofluorocarbons, perflourocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride) to 8%
below 1990 levels by 2012. The US and Japan had lesser targets, and the
US rejected the Kyoto Protocol following a $13 million anti-Kyoto advertising
campaign by The Global Climate Coalition, a lobbying group sponsored by
General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, ExxonMobil, Shell and Texaco. The authors
of Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future trace the nexus
between the auto and oil sectors, which they term the “industry of
industries,” and how the two have shaped the international landscape.

In 1993, Bill Clinton pledged that the US was committed to reducing its
greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, saying; “Unless
we act now, we face a future in which the sun may scorch us; where the
change of season may take on a dreadful new meaning; and where our
children’s children will inherit a planet far less hospitable than the world in
which we came of age.” Seven years later Clinton made essentially the
same speech, yet when he left office in 2001 greenhouse gas emissions
were 15% over their 1990 levels. The dire warnings of IPCC 2007 are not
new. Is time passing us by consigning us to the ash heap of history?

Unplugged

Resistance to real and sustainable solutions is still found at many levels,
including those industries whose growth has depended upon carbon
emissions. The award-winning 2006 documentary film Who Killed the
Electric Car by director Chris Paine asserts that the technology exists which
would allow us to dramatically reduce global warming emissions and our
dependence on costly foreign oil, and improve our respiratory health.

General Motors developed a prototype electric car which could go fast and
emit no exhaust fumes or carbon emissions. Like a mobile phone, it plugged
in at night, and would be ready to drive in the morning. The electricity
needed costs a fraction of the price of petroleum for the same travel
distance. The auto and oil industries lobbied fiercely to defeat laws aimed at
promoting the electric car. Why? Why kill such a potentially profitable new
technology? Marketing electric cars as ‘clean’ transport would mean
admitting their core product is dirty, and since electric cars run on a battery
rather than a combustion engine, and it threatened the business model of
the auto industry which profits by maintaining and replacing internal
combustion engines. The biggest criticism of the electric car was that after
60 miles the battery needed to be recharged (as well, there is the issue of
the source of the electricity which powers these cars – is it coal? or is it
clean and renewable?). So the engineer Stan Ovshinsky created a battery
that could run up to 300 miles at 70 mph on a single charge. According to
The Independent, the auto and oil companies then bought that technology,
and it has not been seen since.

In 1993, the US govt. agreed to subsidize the auto industry and to provide
it with military technologies that would enable US carmakers to build
prototype sedans capable of getting 80 mpg by 2003. As we know, the
goals of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles have not been
realized. The GM Precept (equipped with 2 electric motors), the aluminum
bodied Ford Prodigy, and the largely plastic Dodge ESX3 were wheeled out
with much fanfare at the 2000 North American Auto Show in Detroit, and
then wheeled away, never to be seen again. Then in 2002, after more than
a billion dollars of federal money had been spent, the Bush administration
Energy Secretary flanked by the top executives of GM, Ford and Dodge
announced the scrapping of the Partnership project explaining that the
administration and the automakers now aimed to produce vehicles that
would run on pure hydrogen.

Zero-emissions hydrogen fuel cell cars have been touted by General Motors,
Daimler Chrysler and lawmakers since 1990, but over the past five years less
than 200 of these clean cars have been built. Meanwhile, battery electric
cars have proven a more practicable and potentially enduring option, yet
regulators have defied logic by continuing to promote the more expensive
and cumbersome hydrogen alternative. Critics contend that the manner in
which the auto industry and its politicians keep changing the tune is just
smoke and mirrors, mere ploys intended to take the heat off and distract
the public.

Running on empty

Drivers have been burning fossil fuels at artificially low prices. The warning
of the renowned economist Sir Nicholas Stern that climate change is “the
greatest market failure the world has ever seen” has been heeded by
eminent economists and climate scientists. The operation of free market
forces can encourage sustainable allocation of resources only when goods
and services are priced properly. This can be achieved through heavy
taxation (like alcohol and cigarettes), regulatory standards (like fuel
efficiency for cars), or various cap and trade approaches. A carbon tax is
widely seen as the most effective way to place overall costs at their source.
(On pricing importance and challenges see “Big Foot,” The New Yorker,
Feb. 25, 2008)

Making carbon emissions more costly provides incentives for conservation
and investment in clean and renewable sources of energy. The 1972 Clean
Water Act provides a relevant example of how industrial and consumer
behavior can be modified towards ecological sustainability. The US today
manufactures more products using less water than it did in 1972. Prior to
then, people did not value water since it was free. Likewise, a heavy carbon
tax will make consumers more mindful of the cost and the value of scarce
resources. Yes, providing economic incentives for ecologically responsible
behavior is essential to combating climate change. Currently, affected
industries and the politicians they support are providing the wrong
incentives.

In late February, the Canadian province of British Columbia proposed a
carbon tax in its latest budget, which would be the first such tax in North
America. The US, Europe and others have been resistant to adopting a
carbon tax, despite a growing consensus that it is the best way to properly
price the consumption of energy. Leaders have generally denied the need
to make lifestyle changes which are seemingly essential to climate change
adaptation, opting instead for a technology-based approach as enabling us
to have our cake and eat it too. The European preference has been for cap
and trade schemes which have been criticized for being a form of eco-
colonialism which allows the rich to buy the right to impose their emissions
on the rest. This in turn leads to finger-pointing and provides those short-
sighted “leaders” in positions of power with excuses for inaction.

Get the lead out

While the auto industry purports to be developing hydrogen car technology,
it resists efforts to promote greater fuel efficiency from cars fired by fossil
fuels. Indeed, it has a long track record in this respect – one similar to the
deceptive practices of the tobacco industry. In February, Bob Lutz, the Vice-
Chairman of General Motors Corp, the largest US automaker, told a group
of reporters that global warming was a “total crock of shit” – a statement he
stood by in subsequent questioning. A 40-year auto industry veteran and
long-time campaigner against higher fuel efficiency standards, Lutz wrote in
2006 that forcing the auto industry to sell smaller cars would be “like trying
to end the obesity problem in this country by forcing clothing
manufacturers to sell smaller, tighter sizes.”

In Auto Mania historian Tom McCarthy uses archival records to examine a
series of decisions made by the auto industry since 1900. The earliest cars
were made to run on ordinary unleaded gasoline. In 1921, a team of GM
researchers discovered that by adding small amounts of lead to the fuel
supply they could solve the problem of engine knocking. The toxicity of led
was well known at that time, and so GM and Standard Oil, which had
formed a joint venture to manufacture leaded gas, launched a PR
campaign to convince the public that there was no alternative to leaded
gas. When the govt. took a hands-off approach leaded gas became the
standard at US filling stations.

It is estimated that by 1996, when the sale of leaded gasoline for use in
cars was banned in the US, seven million tons of lead had been released
from auto exhaust pipes into the air, and nearly 70 million American
children had been exposed to dangerous blood-lead levels. Lead is
especially dangerous for children, and high blood-lead levels can result in
physical and mental ailments including brain damage, anemia, liver and
kidney damage and even death. McCarthy characterizes the Partnership for
a New Generation of Vehicles as an evasive tactic to avoid the more
effective but politically riskier step of raising fuel-efficiency standards. The
average new car sold in the US today gets 20 mpg – the same as 15 years
ago, and less than Henry Ford’s Model T got when it went on the market
more than 99 years ago.

Noxious fumes

Studies by the World Health Organization (WHO) and NGOs have reached
alarming conclusions. In France, auto emissions kill almost 10,000 people a
year according to the Agency for Health and Environmental Safety. A WHO
report covering Austria, Switzerland and France found that some 40,000
people die every year as a result of auto emissions. “Human natural defense
mechanisms fail to prevent airborne fine particulate matter from
penetrating into the lungs,” the German Council for Environmental
Questions reported. The German Council found that auto particulate matter
is “the most important health problem linked with air pollution.” These
agencies propose a tax on cars proportionate to their fuel consumption and
the costs of their toxic emissions.

CO2 emissions from road transport in Europe increased by 26% from 1990
to 2004. Since 1993, the European Union has been working to reduce
passenger car CO2 emissions, but has encountered stiff resistance from
auto industry lobbyists. For instance, the German car industry, which has
lagged behind in reducing emissions, uses scaremongering tactics. In 2007,
DaimlerChrysler deputy chairman and board member Erich Klemm told
reporters that if the EU Commission proposal were approved, then factories
would need to be closed costing 65,000 workers their jobs.

Some 70 paid auto industry lobbyists are based in Brussels, including those
of the European Car Manufacturers Association and individual carmakers.
Thus in 2007 when the European Parliament sought to establish binding
targets for new passenger cars marketed in the EU, MEP Jorgo
Chatzimarkakis, a prominent member of the MEP-industry group the Forum
for the Automobile and Society stated, “we will not completely dismantle this
proposal, but we will shape it in such a way that it will protect both the
climate and the car industry.” Indeed, last December, the 33 carmaker
lobbyists accredited to the EU Parliament helped water down a long-awaited
European Commission proposal for curbing global warming pollution
generated by new cars. The final version was much weaker than the
original proposal, both in terms of carbon limits and penalties for offending
carmakers

Environment NGO Greenpeace issued the following statement on December
19, 2007: “Last week in Bali, the European Union stood up like a lion for the
world’s climate – this week the Union’s executive arm is going down like a
lamb and putting carmakers’ short-term profits before our common survival.
Car manufacturers are in the driver’s seat at the European Commission . . .
[which] has come up with a pathetic legislative proposal that fails to
demand any significant changes from the road transport sector, whose
carbon dioxide emissions are continuing to rise.”

Euro-hypocrisy

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso warned EU leaders on
March 13th that the EU would be left with “zero credibility” if it yields to
pressure to renege on the commitments it made last year to combat global
warming. As the Commission’s mid-March meeting in Brussels got
underway, Germany and France were seeking concessions to heavy
industry and Berlin was seeking exemptions for its carmakers. Echoing
Daimler Chrysler as she made the claim that those countries that
manufacture big cars should not be treated any worse than countries that
make smaller cars, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated, “I will be
standing up particularly for jobs in Germany’s car sector.” “Let them eat
cake” has now become “let us drive SUVs.” There is much that could be
done but for the Pavlovian resistance to change. For instance, a simple
climate-fix is for carmakers to use lightweight material, such as carbon-fiber
composites, because weight (not size) accounts for 75% of the energy
needed to propel a car.

The Czech Republic, Germany, France, Austria and Italy want a pledge that
heavy users of energy will be exempted from the Commission’s measures so
that they will not lose investment. Talk about a loophole large enough to
drive a truck through! Germany, with Europe’s biggest economy, also
expressed concerns that its carmakers would suffer under the Commission’s
proposal which subjected makers of heavy polluting luxury vehicles (like
BMW, Mercedes Benz and Porsche) to heavy fines if they fail to reduce their
carbon emissions.

The EU professed to be at the forefront of combating climate-change.
Recall Ms. Merkel’s strong statements of leadership on the issue upon taking
office as Chancellor and EU President (and in August pushing the G8 to
commit to halve global carbon emissions by 2050). The March 31st
Newsweek report on “Europe’s Worst Double Talkers,” looks at how
Germany has talked green while “German policymakers in Berlin and
Brussels are taking a different tact altogether,” concluding that the “rhetoric
is failing to stand up to the reality.” The report notes the unusually close
relationship between industry and government in Germany, and looks at
the revolving door between government and the auto industry, with its
powerful lobby. EPM Claude Turmes says “the German government defends
German private companies, rather than the common interest.”

Overdrive

A new car that gets 20 mpg and which is driven 100,000 miles will produce
more than 11 metric tons of carbon (a metric ton weighs 2,205 pounds).
Every gallon of gasoline consumed produces about 5 pounds of carbon,
meaning that in a 40 mile commute a SUV releases about a dozen pounds
of carbon into the air. As Elizabeth Kolbert notes in her book Field notes
from a catastrophe: Man, nature and climate change, “Carbon dioxide is a
persistent gas, it lasts for about a century. Thus, while it is possible to
increase CO2 concentrations relatively quickly, the opposite is not the case.”
There is a growing recognition that every SUV bought today diminishes the
prospects of human life in the future. We thus confront a moral imperative
to break our self-destructive habits.

Greenhouse-gas emissions have risen dramatically in the past two centuries,
and levels today are higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years.
Climate-change is a global problem which demands global solutions. The
rapid-growth of China and India surely means many millions of new car
owners. Car ownership in these countries is extremely low relative to US
standards (there are 9 personal vehicles per thousand eligible drivers in
China and 11 in India, compared with 1,148 in the US – yes, more than a
car per driver). Rapid income growth in these states means that many
millions more will soon be able to buy cars.

In January 2008, Tata Motors of India unveiled its Nano, the world’s
cheapest car, calling it the “people’s car” made of plastic and glue rather
than welded steel and selling for 100,000 rupees ($2,500 USD). Nano is
priced to get Indians, of which there are more than a billion, into a car. The
Nano is expected to force other automakers to cut prices and to develop
cheap cars, bringing millions more drivers onto the roads. A super-cheap
auto will encourage people to rely on their car rather than mass transit.
“This car promises to be an environmental disaster of substantial
proportions,” says Yale environmental expert Daniel Esty. As the authors of
Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future write, “Just consider
the scale of the potential problem – for instance, the effects on global
warming of 750 million more cars in India and China, belching carbon
dioxide.” By most estimates, China has already surpassed the US as the
world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

Indian climatologist and IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri criticizes the
climate impact of Nano: “Before we unleash this kind of animal on the
streets of India, we ought to explore the public transportation options.” The
Nobel Prize winner says the Nano “is clearly a carbon-intensive option. We
need to impose a price on that carbon.” He proposes making drivers pay
carbon tolls.

Given the information and scenarios for the future put forth by IPCC 2007,
the issue is clearly how we get from here to there – both in terms of how
we transport ourselves and in achieving needed climate-change mitigation.
Some analysts maintain that the technology exists to double fuel efficiency.
Passenger vehicles in the US now account for 40% of its oil use and 10% of
global oil use. But the political will to reduce carbon emissions has been
lacking. In fact, the will has been to stifle solutions aimed at promoting a
sustainable energy policy (recall that in January 2001 upon taking office
President Bush sought to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
and appointed Dick Cheney to head an energy commission charged with
establishing US energy policy, yet the administration has steadfastly refused
to disclose who served on and consulted the Commission).

Energy policy, developed behind closed doors, has even overridden anti-
bribery laws (see Peter Maass, “The Fuel Fixers,” New York Times
Magazine, 12-23-07) prompting British and US officials to call off bribery
investigations and prosecutions in deference to a need for scarce oil. As
well, secretive energy policy based on antiquated obsolete premises has led
to costly wars precipitated by a perceived need to maintain access to
foreign oil. Such reliance on old school thinking will surely necessitate ever-
more brutal overseas interventions. As Peter Maass concludes, “The choice
is simple: Make painful but necessary changes to reduce our addiction to
oil, or sink deeper into our moral sludge.”

Fossil fools

In a March 26th editorial, the International Herald Tribune lamented that
the Bush administration’s “shortsighted policies . . . mean the country is far
too dependent on oil that is both ruinously expensive and ruinous for the
environment,” concluding that “the era of cheap oil is truly over” and “the
nation has to replace the oilmen in the White House.” The IHT also called
for greater fuel efficiency, noting that until last December US fuel efficiency
standards had not been raised for 30 years, and that US per-capita
emissions of carbon dioxide are twice that of Germany and Japan and three
times that of France.

A 2002 report by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the
health risks from automobile emissions bears the words “don’t cite, don’t
quote” on each page. This caution was prompted by fears that the auto
industry would sue the EPA, which had sought strict limits on emissions in
1977 but had to relent under pressure from the auto industry. More
recently, the EPA has become a willing accomplice of the auto industry’s
efforts to thwart emission controls. The December 21, 2007 New York Times
editorial “Arrogance and Warming,” opined, “The Bush administration’s
decision to deny California permission to regulate and reduce global
warming emissions from cars and trucks is an indefensible act of executive
arrogance that can only be explained as the product of ideological blindness
and as a political payoff to the automobile industry.”

In late December, the EPA told 17 states, including New York, New Jersey,
Connecticut and California, that they could not set their own more stringent
standards for carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks. Denying a
two-year-old application from the states to act pursuant to the 1974 Clean
Air Act, the agency said that it was up to the federal govt., not the states, to
regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. The Bush administration
thus prevailed for the time being, despite the April 2007 Supreme Court
ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that the states could act. The director of the
Environmental Defense Fund noted, “The Administration’s denial of
California’s request relies on a flawed argument that the federal courts have
already rejected.”

Carmakers lobbied using the arguments they made against the catalytic
converter and other changes that made cars cleaner, saying the proposed
emissions standards were not technologically feasible, would cost too much,
would deny consumer choice, and now added that the states have no right
to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The EPA, using the auto industry’s
rationale, said that it was up to the federal govt., not the states, to regulate
CO2 emissions from vehicles. This was the first time the EPA fully denied
California a waiver under the Clean Air Act.  EPA staff reported that the
agency’s head ignored their conclusions, instructing them to provide the
legal rationale for his decision. One staffer told a reporter, “California met
every criteria . .  . on the merits, the same criteria we have used over the
last 40 years.” Insiders at the EPA suggested to the Los Angeles Times that
Dick Cheney was behind the action. The states had adopted tougher fuel
efficiency and tailpipe standards, scheduled to be phased in between 2009
and 2016, to cut global warming emissions by 30 percent. In January 2008,
California sued the US govt. asserting that it is “ignoring the will of millions
of people who want their govt. to take action in the fight against global
warming.”

Once again, as in the Dept. of Justice lawsuit against the tobacco
companies, administrative agency political appointees acted at the behest of
the White House and against the findings of their own experts. Commenting
on the March 14th disclosure that Bush had issued an executive order to
the head of the EPA on its anti-smog rule, John Walke, clean air director at
the Natural Resources Defense Council, said “Never before has a President
personally intervened at the 11th hour, exercising political power at the
expense of the law and science, to force the EPA to accept weaker air
quality standards than the agency chief’s expert scientific judgment had led
him to adopt. It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political
interference.” Why such obstruction?

Exxon Mobil earned a record $40.6 billion in 2007, besting its own 2006
record for profits earned by a company. Bush and Cheney have financial
interests in the oil and gas industries as well as in corporations like
Halliburton which provide ancillary services. Despite growing recognition of
the serious threat posed by global warming, in 2008 the US govt. will spend
88 dollars on the military for every dollar it spends on climate-related
programs according to the 2008 study by the Institute for Policy Studies
entitled Military vs. Climate Strategy. “While we spare no expense to wage
war, we seem to have no money to spare on averting climate disaster,” says
the report’s author.

Bio-fuelish

Legislation in the US and EU has turned ethanol into big business which has
spawned industry lobbying groups such as the “American Coalition for
Ethanol.” In March 2007, EU leaders pledged to raise the share of biofuels
in transport from 2% to 10% by 2020. DaimlerChrysler and other
automakers have promoted clean, green biofuels as a response to
environmental pressure groups. In January 2008, however, the EU
Commission’s in-house scientific unit completed a study which found that
EU biofuels promotion policy’s environmental costs outweigh its potential
benefits. Likewise, in the US, where some 200 govt. biofuels subsidies cost
taxpayers $7 billion per year, General Motors and other carmakers have
promoted biofuels.  Biofuels are also promoted as national policy in Brazil,
China, India and elsewhere.

Almost every European or American who owns a car is already partly
running his engine on ethanol, as the law de facto imposes forced blending
of an increasing percentage of ethanol into regular gasoline. Carmakers and
others have thus jumped on the ethanol bandwagon by producing cars that
can run on any blend of gasoline and ethanol. Every liter of ethanol
produced in the US enjoys a govt. subsidy of some 50 cents. Towards what
end? UC Berkeley Professor David Pimentel found that ethanol production is
neither economical (absent state subsidies it would not be viable) nor
ecological. His 2005 findings have gained much recent support.

Two studies published in February 2008 in the venerable journal Science
conclude that almost all the biofuels used today cause more greenhouse
gas emissions than conventional fuels when the pollution caused by
producing these fuels is taken into account. These studies looked for the
first time at the comprehensive emissions effects of the vast lands that are
being geared towards biofuels development, and found that the resulting
rainforest and other destruction of natural ecosystems has dramatically
increased the release of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

Princeton University environment and economics scholar Timothy
Searchinger, the lead author of one of the studies, characterized the net
increase of greenhouse gas emissions as substantial. His study finds that
despite EU restrictions on the type of biofuels produced (most of the
biofuels produced in Europe is biodiesel made from vegetable oils), biofuels
promotion in the US and Europe is transforming land use and indirectly
destroying natural habitats. Brazilian farmers, for instance, are deforesting
the Amazon to produce soya beans for US consumers whose farmers have
shifted to producing corn-based ethanol. And, according to a February
report of Friends of the Earth, the increasing demand for palm oil created
by the EU biofuels policy is causing the destruction of Indonesia’s forests
and the livelihoods of indigenous peoples, and leading to other human
rights abuses there.

As stated by a UN Environment Programme spokesperson, “There was an
unfortunate effort to dress up biofuels as the silver bullet of climate
change.” Overlooked was the effect on land use and its ecological
consequences. As Princeton’s Searchinger noted: “The land-use problem is
not just a secondary effect. It is major. The comparison with fossil fuels is
going to be adverse for virtually all biofuels on cropland.” This is not to
suggest that biofuels have no potential to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, but simply that present biofuels initiatives are ineffective and
must be rethought. Indeed, the unintended consequences of biofuels
promotion are many.

Hungry for change

With the price of essential food staples rising dramatically, people have
begun asking why energy policy favors feeding automobiles rather than
people. The US govt. response to climate-change is inappropriate at many
levels, including its misguided incentives to promote corn-based ethanol as
the primary substitute for foreign oil. This massive agribusiness subsidy
does not reduce carbon emissions, but it has reduced nutrition for the poor
and middle class, who have been hit hard by the steep rise in food prices in
recent months as farmers have been given the incentive to gear their crop
production towards the automobile.

Ethanol plants are projected to use half of America’s 2008 corn harvest
(even if the entire corn crop were used it would replace only 7% of US oil
consumption), and the diversion of corn usage from food to fuel is resulting
in higher food prices (e.g., theApril 11th IHT reports that corn doubled in
price in the last 2 years, and The Economist reports that world wheat prices
rose 25% during the last week of February 2008 to its highest price in 28
years) and widespread food shortages as soaring prices have led farmers to
replace crops such as wheat with corn. The resulting shortage of wheat and
many other related foods has exacerbated poverty, hunger and starvation
not just in America, but globally (see “The Fight between Fuel and Food,”
Risk Management Magazine, April 2007). As well, the severe weather which
has resulted from climate-change has disrupted agriculture and food
production.

Food stocks are dwindling worldwide. On March 6th, the executive director
of the UN World Food Programme, Josette Sheeran, said that as a result of
climate change, high food and oil prices and low food stocks, the world
economy “has now entered into a perfect storm for the world’s hungry”
which will likely increase in the coming years and continue for the
foreseeable future resulting in major social disruptions. On March 7th,
noting that “the world’s poorest are hit hard,” Ms. Sheeran warned the EU
that its biofuels policy had driven food prices to record levels. We are in a
vicious cycle whereby our addiction to transport fuel produces severe
weather which threatens food production, and then the effort to find
alternative transport fuel adds further to global hunger and poverty. Critics
contend that all the convoluted solutions of the oil and auto industries are
designed to avoid a simpler one – reducing the consumption of transport
fuel.

Biofuels policy is socially inequitable as well as ecologically irresponsible -- it
shifts the financial burden of fuel consumption from those actually
consuming it at the fuel pumps to the whole of society since only the
relatively affluent drive a car, but everybody needs to consume food. As
well, promoting ethanol shifts the cost of fuel consumption from
industrialized to developing countries because corn is a primary source of
nutrition. And this costly endeavor is increasingly being shown not to fulfill
its stated purpose – to mitigate climate change. To the contrary, it seems to
be exacerbating ecological destruction as well as social dislocations and
human suffering.

On April 11th, the head of the World Bank reported that “In just two
months, rice prices have skyrocketed to near historical levels, rising by
around 75% globally.” Mr. Zoellick also noted that the price of wheat has
risen 120% over the past year and that the poor spend as much as 75% of
their income on food. The World Bank estimates that food prices overall
have risen by more than 83% over the past three years. Also on April 11, a
European environment advisory panel urged the EU to suspend its targets
for biofuel use in transportation fuels, concluding that Europe’s rush to
biofuels was causing deforestation in Southeast Asia and higher grain
prices. And the April 15th New York Times reported that at the April 12-13
G7 conference several finance ministers and central bankers called for a
reconsideration of recent biofuels policies. An economist commenting on the
food crisis told the Times, “Ethanol is about the only lever we have to pull,
but none of the politicians have the courage to pull it.”

Reality check

There are no silver bullets for fixing the ecological harm caused by our
greenhouse gas emissions. Just as the ethanol solution failed to take an
integrated approach (conveniently, negligently, or just unwittingly
overlooking its actual environmental impacts), other green alternatives to
fossil fuels such as the hydrogen car tend to overlook the fact that the
production of hydrogen requires using energy. Half the electricity
generated in the US comes from burning coal (and coal is the largest
source of energy in China), so if that energy comes from coal, then the
carbon emissions have not been fixed – just rearranged. So, unless the
electricity which fuels hydrogen or electric cars comes from clean and
renewable sources, the best car of the future is likely no car at all.

The laws of thermodynamics present humanity with the inconvenient truth
that the use of matter and energy produces waste products (just as you
can’t make something from nothing, you can’t make nothing from
something). These waste products, including carbon, have reached a level
that clearly threatens the natural ecosystem which sustains us. David
Pimentel, now professor emeritus at Cornell where he has led studies on the
energy impacts of ethanol and other biofuels, wrote on March 18th, “The
science is clear: The use of corn and other biofuels is an ethically,
economically, and environmentally unworkable sham.”

As noted by the global community at the 1992 Rio and 2002 Johannesburg
Earth Summits, “present day production and consumption patterns are
unsustainable.” If we wish to protect biodiversity and our progeny, our
energy policies must evolve from the way we have become accustomed to
doing things towards allocating resources with a broad global perspective
on impacts and sustainability. Our present biofuels policies have not yet
done that.

We are in a vicious cycle whereby our addiction to transport fuel produces
severe weather which threatens food production, and then the effort to find
alternative transport fuel adds further to global hunger and poverty. Critics
contend that all the convoluted solutions of the oil and auto industries are
designed to avoid a simpler one – reducing the consumption of transport
fuel.

William A. Cohn, lecturer on law, ethics and logic at the University of New
York in Prague, wishes to thank UNYP students Florian Schmid and
Alexander Kolb for their assistance and Dr. Eric Zencey of Empire State
College for his valued insights on ecology