BBC Blog Network

User Profile

SamW87

Listed below are comments made by SamW87 between Tuesday, 29th April 2008 and Friday, 17th April 2009.

«Newer
Older»

Worth voting for an MEP? 5:24pm on 17 Apr 2009 I for one am glad that many in the UK will not be voting. A higher voter turnout would just mean more blindly patriotic, xenophobic votes for conservative parties opposed to the EU. This delusional belief that the UK is vastly superior to the EU truly baffles me. True, much of the EU needs reform and better thought; so why not vote for a party which is committed to this from a pan-European perspective.

If the masses of reactionary British don't vote in the elections it will be only of benefit for the UK.
Biofuels: bad for the environment? 6:09pm on 01 May 2008 ElizHart, very good point there about Kyoto actually making the problems worse - that's something that's definitely worth thinking about and reading around about, especially with regard to the deforestation.

That's not to say that's it's worthless though, just that it's been gone about the wrong way. I'm always fearful of criticising what are percieved as environmental successes, in case the public turn round and start blaming the well meaning environmentalists in the first place.

Going back to the rainforests for a moment though, it may have been bad for them had Kyoto not gone ahead anyway. Take Malaysia for example. Their extensive palm oil plantations which have so decimated the rainforest could very well have been rubber plantations instead (in another, non-Kyoto world). Rubber production, once a mainstay of the Malaysia economy took a backseat in the Malaysia economy as palm oil because the thing to have, but due to high oil prices (being used for synthetic rubber) (and them staying high for the forseeable future), rubber plantations are now once again big money. Whenever it's a choice between money or forest, history shows what usually wins.

That's not to say I'm trying to take the blame off biofuels, it's just that biofuels are just another aspect of the worldwide economy which is inadvertently (or otherwise) helping to undermine efforts to reduce our impact.
Biofuels: bad for the environment? 10:37am on 29 Apr 2008 In respons to jon112uk, the reason why 'environmentalists' are keen to block this is because biofuels (at current production levels) are an environmental nightmare!
Do you really think that waste and offal can produce enough biofuel for a country? Even combined with their own agricultural resources this is far from enough.
The world consumes vast amounts of oil, and changing this over to biofuels requires far more land than we have on the earth, let alone only using waste products. I doubt the UK has enough marginal land to run even 5% of the UK on biofuels. Locally produced 'biofuels' require just as much, if not more, energy put into them in the form of fertilisers and pesticides than we get back from burning them in our cars.

The issue is not biofuels itself, it's that we need such vast amounts of it, that it HAS to be produced on an industrial, energy intensive scale (and, saving energy was the idea wasn't it?) - much like current wheat production, etc. That's what makes it a problem.
Aside from rainforests being cut down, etc - any monoculture intensively produced crop (be it sugar cane, corn or oil palm) requires herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers to keep it viable. Without intensivity the amount demanded by our oil hungry countries just won't be produced - and by making it intensive we destroy the very nature of the 'benefits' of it.

As far as I can see the only way to make burning fuel more "green" is to reduce the amount we burn, and no politician is going to suggest that and stay in power. Instead they get hold of well meaning ideas like biofuels and corrupt the very meaning and purpose of it in an attempt to find a quick fix which allows us to carry on with business as usual.

«Newer
Older»

^ Back to top

BBC MMVI

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

BBC.co.uk

BBC Blog Network

Find and talk to the BBC's bloggers.

User Profile

SamW87