by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
We must have gone totally insane to put fuel before food, whether it is corn (maize) being grown for biofuel or miscanthus, or whatever.
Somehow it would appear that automotive fuels have greater priority to those that claim to be our “leaders” than food security. Can we really not think beyond the motorcar and are we going to put driving before food? It would appear that those “leaders” most certainly do.
We can neither eat our gars nor the fuel on which they run, whether made from mineral oil or from plants and we must make the choice and make this clear to those that pretend to be our rulers.
Furthermore, aside from using valuable farm land, or in the case of palm oil for bio-diesel destroying the rainforests of Asia, biofuels will do nothing whatsoever to reduce carbon emissions and pollution, it is just a change from fossil fuel to another one to be burned in combustion engines.
Additionally, bio-diesel particle emissions, the ones held responsible for the increase in asthma, have been found to be several times greater than those from fossil suel diesel.
We are jumping from the proverbial frying pan right into the fire, and losing out as regards to farming areas at the same time. Has everyone gone insane?
It would, however, appear that everything is being done to maintain the motoring madness instead of getting people out of their cars and onto or into alternative means of getting about.
The British capital London has been told to cut air pollution by 2020 or face hefty fines and the cutting of pollution, whether in London or elsewhere, is not going to happen if we keep on motoring as we do right now and, as far as diesels are concerned, it will only get worse with bio-diesel. Time to wake up!
It is good to see though that many young people in the early part of the second decade of the twenty-first century are going car-less and are walking, cycling or using public transport instead. This is, to a degree, due to the ever increasing cost of running a motorcar as with tax and all that aside from the purchase price but also because they begin, and it is but a beginning only, so far, to understand that motoring is not a sustainable way.
There are still too many people who are not comprehending this, as yet, and firmly believe that mineral oil derived fuels and others will continue to make personal private motoring, which many see as a (human) right even by now it seems, possible.
This is, however, an illusion conjured up to them by those – unfortunately – in power with their snouts firmly embedded in the trough of the oil and motor industry.
You can't eat your car, or roads, neither most bio-fuel crops. We have to understand that we either can drive and by this very action destroy the Planet or change our ways and eat. Both at the same time soon will no longer be possible.
And here we are coming back to the issue of the way ever since World War Two the car has been put on a pedestal and we have separated ourselves not only further from Nature but also, as far as where we live further from our places of work and thus have become dependent and reliant on the car to get from home – often many tens of miles away – to work and back.
With mineral oil, if I may call it that, running out all over the place cheap and plentiful petroleum products are about coming to an end and no amount of tinkering, such as with hydraulic fracturing – fracking – for shale oil and shale gas is going to make any difference in that quarter. It is just going to prolong the agony and the destruction of ecosystems.
We must transition now to a oil-free future, and that included one free of biofuels, which still pollute and possibly even much more, to one without the internal combustion engine. And even methane produced by anaerobic digestion be best reserved for use in our electricity generating plants and for cooking and heating than for use in motor vehicles.
It is time – high time indeed – that it was realized that the time of personal motoring is over, is history and that the motorcar is and will have been but a blip in the history of mankind. The future is car-less, at least internal combustion engine car-less. And the sooner this was being realized the better and the futility of biofuels (and fracking) be abandoned.
© 2013
