{"id":815,"date":"2009-01-13T10:08:42","date_gmt":"2009-01-13T10:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/?p=815"},"modified":"2017-09-05T17:54:16","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T21:54:16","slug":"biofuels-food-prices-and-deforestation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/biofuels-food-prices-and-deforestation\/","title":{"rendered":"Biofuels, food prices and deforestation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/men-with-money1.jpg\" alt=\"men-with-money1.jpg\" title=\"men-with-money1.jpg\" width=\"271\" height=\"270\" class=\"left off\"\/>I came across <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/world\/0,1518,563927,00.html\">this article recently<\/a> and I thought it was well worth sharing, despite this article being old hat in media time. The Guardian newspaper had access to a leaked internal report by the World Bank claiming that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Even environmental groups haven&#8217;t gone that far in their estimates. More and more corn is ending up in fuel tanks rather than on plates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The article also quotes World Bank President Robert Zoellick who believes action needs to be taken. <!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster &#8211; a silent tsunami or a perfect storm. It is a man-made catastrophe, and as such must be fixed by people.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It seems that the World Bank&#8217;s solution to the problem is simple: stop producing biofuels.<\/p>\n<p>However, it&#8217;s not just food prices that have condemned biofuels. Deforestation is another very undesirable effect of the production of this type of fuel as farmers in developing countries cut down carbon-soaking forests to make way for biofuel monocultures. Besides, some fertilizers used in the production of grains for biofuels release nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas that is up to 300 times more harmful than CO2.<\/p>\n<p>The World Bank tried to play down a bit the message in the report once it had leaked, but I guess a little too late. Since the date of the publication of this report last year, biofuels have come under increasing attack so now it&#8217;s a established fact that they are not an option in fighting climate change.<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n<h3 class='related_post_title'>Related Posts:<\/h3><ul class='related_post'><li>No Related Posts Found! Go find some...<\/li><\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across this article recently and I thought it was well worth sharing, despite this article being old hat in media time. The Guardian newspaper had access to a leaked internal report by the World Bank claiming that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. Even [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biofuel","category-miscellaneous"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9728,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions\/9728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}