It’s just that when it comes to some specific issues, if you had your way some terrible perverse outcomes would be generated, including substantially increased emissions, loss of rainforest and other biodiversity, the elimination of virtually the only sustainable building material and starvation.

You hit the nail right on the head here. But the terrible perverse outcome that is occuring right now is destruction of native forest, cool termperate rainforest and water catchments, their biodiversity, and their carbon stores, for 85% woodchips and 2% furniture grade timber (Vicforests figures), against the wishes of 80% of the Australian public.

Existing plantations can provide 100% of the sustainable building material provided, mostly they do already. Not much hardwood in houses these days - probably only battens for tiles, the rest is now all pine.

And how are we going to starve by protecting our forests? We don’t eat forests.

It is past time for this lunacy to end, and for politicians like Rudd and Garrett stop pretending that giving money to Indonesia and PNG to protect their forests (which is not necessarily a bad thing) does not absolve their guilt in allowing exactly the same decimation of forests to proceed in NSW, Victoria (1m tonees of woodchips per year) and Tasmania (4m tonnes of woodchips per year).

A referendum on the issue would settle matters. But we really don’t get to vote on anything that matters do we?

Oh I will bite on Mackey et al.. It’s garbage in, garbage out with that study I’m afraid. If you want to make a whole lot of unreasonable assumptions, you can get the results you need. But even then, ONLY if you refuse to count the stored carbon in the removed timber. Within the narrow, fanciful world they constructed, it was good science. In the real world of forests, it was worse than useless, it was highly misleading.

It’s a pity you and others like you hold the erroneous views you do, it really is. I am entirely with you ideologically, I think the world is in a terrible shape and far more care needs to be taken with the environment. It’s just that when it comes to some specific issues, if you had your way some terrible perverse outcomes would be generated, including substantially increased emissions, loss of rainforest and other biodiversity, the elimination of virtually the only sustainable building material and starvation. But you think you’ve got the moral high ground, so that’s OK.

The destruction I am referring to is the ongoing clearfelling for woodchips of Victoria’s remaining high conservation native forests and water catchments, including Melbourne’s.

This practice has severe environmental and biodiversity impacts, as anyone that vists a logged area can see, and no amount of weasel words can hide.

Melbourne’s water catchments are being logged despite scientific evidence that this reduces the quality and quantity of water from us to drink and use. This also increases the fire risk in the catchments by removing mature moist forests.

The logging is far from minuscule - most of the Thomson catchment has now been decimated.

My figure for emissions comes from this published scientific research:

A study by Dean, C., Roxburgh, S., Mackey, B. G., (2003) shows that natural forests still retain large amounts of carbon when compared with managed commercial forests or converted to plantations. [link]

The problem is that the Brumby government is under the thrall of the CFMEU (factional numbers) and big business such as Papelynx, so they are prepared to trash our catchments and reduce our water supplies, ignoring the best interests of the people of Melbourne who they are supposed to represent.

But let’s not go there eh? We’re both quite sure of the veracity of our arguments, and aren’t going to convince the other. I gave up on you in a previous thread.

I’m pretty neutral about woodchips as fuel. It doesn’t seem like a forward enough step, seems like hybrid cars, we should move towards next generation technology rather than stopgaps like that. But yeah, it is a renewable fuel that can be taken from plantations and forests with minimal impact, so in some situations of course it’s going to be appropriate. Sure beats gas. Of course, sawmills have been using it for years.

Good biomass is genuine waste such as straw and other crop residue. But I am aware you on are ön the other side” on this issue Wilful.

Do also support Martin Fergusonś ideaa of burning forest woodchips for electricity too?

Incidentally, this destructive native forest logging is also depleting water supplies from cathcments aroossVictoria, including Melbourneś catchments and the Murray Darling system. Time to stop I think, with rainfall now down by 75%.

Anyway, we can live in hope.

Back to kindergarten for them all.

The world is running out of oil. So it is getting more expensive. Increasing supply will only expedite this process.

Petrol will be $2 per litre by the end of this year, and probably $3 per litre by the end of 2009.

We need alternative sustainable transport modes and fuel, not the bs that Rudd and Nelson are giving us.

Use of motor cars is elastic. Look at everyone jumping on the trains and riding their bikes.

I read somewhere on the internet recently that the price-elasticity of supply of oil is now much lower than it used to be.

Maybe you saw this paper in Energy Economics - behind a paywall for non-uni users.

The important bit from the paper

The demand for crude oil has low, short-run price elasticity: -0.06 (significant) in 1918–1999, -0.08 (non-significant) in 1918–1973 and -0.02 (non-significant) in 1973–1999 (Table 2). These results clearly show that: (i) crude oil demand is highly price-inelastic in the short run, as energy consumption is essentially determined by fixed capital; (ii) large price changes in 1973–1999 were not able to have a short-run effect on demand; and (iii) despite a long period, the short-run nature of this parameter has not significantly changed. The demand for crude oil is responsive to economic activity in the short run; the income elasticity was 0.53 (significant) in 1918–1999. Clearly, economic activity has become more energy intensive, as implied by the income elasticity, which rose from 0.42 (significant) in 1918–1973 to 1.45 (significant) in 1973–1999. The extreme price inelasticity explains large changes in prices due to a supply or demand shock. The price inelasticity also explains the importance of taxation in oil-importing countries in curbing demand and reducing crude oil prices. An income elasticity averaging 0.42 during 1918–1973 explains the lack of pressure on prices, particularly during 1950–1973, which was a period of steady and fast world economic growth. The high income-elasticity in 1973–1999 explains in part the volatility of oil prices that follows a slowdown or an expansion of world growth.

It depends upon which end of commerce you are talking about. Heavy haulage does not have a lot of room to move. They can use D10, they can add fairings, they can optimise loads, they can use biodiesel when available, they can back load unback-loaded trucks to save trips.
Courier class commerce can fit valve lifter kits (same principle as the car ad with all of the drums), they can go gas, it is technically possible to have up to 4 vans directly linked but controlled from the front vehicle saving fuel and driver time. But the interesting one is something that I heard just this morning. Apparently at the recent biofuels conference in Brizzy (I think) the Brazillian contingent mentioned that they have been using E85 for years. This drew the question of where do they get their E85 compatible engines? From Australia, General Motors Holden have been producing E85 compliant engines for export to Brazil for some years. So what else can you do? Get your next van fitted with an Australian GM E85 motor. The higher the petrol price climbs the greater the advantage, as ethanol should not increase above a certain value and will be carbon tax exempt.

I am talking about commercial transport. How can they reduce their consumption quickly and stay in business?

Tradies are big money earners these days, the cost of fuel is probably less of a worry for many of them. This resource town is chock full of tradies and I don’t know a single one that roars around in a V8 ute.

I would be willing to bet that if you extracted the amount of land currently being used for biofuel production globally, it would be a negligible percentage of the available arable land. On the UN rapporteur I read the guys statement and it read to me as being highly politically charged to the point of being misleading, in my opinion. Listening to John Michelthwaite just now he, if I heard correctly, put the food shortage issue on the step of Asian demand, correlating the CNN guy’s opinion. But he went on to say that the problem was also to do with not eneough globalisation. He had no answer to the food poverty issue though.

My comment to globalisation is to the village level of food and fuel management. In Kenya there was a programme to help land owners (typically 400 square meters of land for a family) to be self sufficient even with that small parcel. I believe that as oil prices blast past the affordability of third world rural communities local fuel production for local use will be essential, following the Kenyan model but for whole communities. I think that globalisation is not sustainable if the entire worlds population attempts to participate equally. Moving forward into global warming and peak oil local economies will be more dominant. Think about the implications of Mahamad Yunis’s social banking expansion plan and how that fits together with a world bank driven globalisation drive.
Good point on the marginal lands communities. Ethiopia comes to mind. People at this level are not trying to run motor vehicles. They might be trying to run pumps for irrigation though. And in that scenario biofuels are exactly what they will be using.

Your last point though does not recognise that an internationally tradeable fuel is more marketable than food. Every argument on free trade that I have heard right up to now has blasted home the idea that third world countries need to access to Europe’s food demand. Presumeably this means that they have surplus food product to trade. Suddenly there is an agricultural product that can be freely traded at world market prices and for some reason this is immediately bad. Coming back to the UN guy, he does not add up. This whole issue smacks of political opportunism. John Michelthwaite (”Economist”) made the point that globalistion is the force that undermines those who seek to take control of resources for personal gain. He is perfectly correct that this is the real threat to the poor and starving of the world, look no further than Mugabe and Zimbabwe to see how this works. But globalisation is not the only way to solve that problem.

It is increased food importing by China and India, made possible by these country’s new industrial wealth, that is driving the price of food up. And note that it is the price of the food that is creating the problem not principly the availability of it.

You seem to be suggesting that the food crisis is simply a demand thing. Yes, demand is increasing but somehow, you seem to be envisaging an endless supply of arable land to plant the food that isn’t being grown where the palm oil and fuel-bound corn is growing. That’s just not the way it is any more.

And then there’s the issue of where the food is produced. There are hundreds of millions of people who get their food from their own plot or one in the same village or they starve. This is your ‘deglobalised world’ (actually not-yet-globalised is probably more accurate). They don’t have the luxury of sorting out their energy security if they can’t feed themselves.

And if oil does make it to $4, why do you imagine that wheat, rice and maize won’t be following a similar trajectory?

Of course, biofuels are not the sole cause of the food crisis but when you put our ‘underlying travelling need’ up against the developing world’s ‘underlying eating need’ biofuels really are an indefensible use of arable land.

Debbieanne,

It most definitely is. Biofuels can be made from most plant matter. And very importantly biofuels can be made by anybody, anywhere where there is sufficient source material. If you have a lot of grass clippings year round then there are very affordable systems to convert that into ethanol. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that Solar Thermal Power systems harvest more energy per hectare than can be achieved from most plant based energy harvesting systems. But the advantage of bio fuels obviously is that they suit our current vehicle fleet. Future vehicle fleets will be able to use electricity more flexibly, if our governments make it possible for CSP, along with the other alternative energy systems, to be installed.

Contrary to what some commentators are suggesting, biofuels are not creating the food shortages. It is increased food importing by China and India, made possible by these country’s new industrial wealth, that is driving the price of food up. And note that it is the price of the food that is creating the problem not principly the availability of it. The head of CNN (presumeably a well informed person) highlighted this very point some weeks ago. Local (third world) communities who use a portion of their productive land for local fuel production are far better off than communities who do not, and this can only become more true as world energy prices escalate.

Is it currently possible to make biofuels from plants other than food sources? Or is this not a viable solution either?

It’s not just a matter of diverting food crops to make fuel. The land used to grow palm groves for palm oil would be used to grow food, thats the main problem. In many third world countries they are uprooting food crops to plant palm groves.

Furthermore, there are limits to the amount of non-food plants that can be converted to biofuel. There’s not that much surplus biomass out there that we can just turn into fuel without the biosphere starting to complain…

Boy from Flynn: but businesses can get a lot more efficient in their fuel use as well. To take a simple example, there are more than a few tradies who drive around in V8 Falcadore utes.