Green Man shoots down an ecojet

(How environmentally friendly is a plane using biofuel?)

Releasing the carbon

The first Diesel engine ran on vegetable oil but nearly all of it's successors have used fossil oil. This carbon rich liquid formed when plants, algae and micro-organisms fell to the sea floor and got trapped in other sediments layer by layer over millions of years, sequestering the carbon they absorbed from the atmosphere during their life.

When we burn this to use the heat, we release the carbon back into today's atmosphere, where it has increased the carbon dioxide levels significantly, increasing the ability of the atmosphere to retain the sun's warmth, causing global warming and climate change. If we switch to vegetable oils, we are using a carbon rich liquid from plants which have absorbed carbon dioxide recently, and our burning of it releases it back into the air, so giving it the description 'renewable'.

Not a panacea

But these renewable biofuels aren't the panacea that we'd like them to be. The crop has to be grown somewhere.. and with finite land, these oil crops replace rainforest and orang-utangs or fields of food. Most farmed plants give a higher return if they receive fertiliser, pesticides or are irrigated, and these practices have their own carbon footprint which detracts from the overall efficiency of the whole process.

Once the plant has produced its oily seeds, they have to be harvested, transported, processed and transported again. In some cases, these production costs consume more energy and resources than the resultant fuel gives us. There are social costs too. Because of huge demand in the US to grow corn (maize) for ethanol, the price of the grain has shot up, and there have been riots in Mexico because of increased food costs. Land given over to biofuels (plus poor weather last year) has resulted in a wheat shortage this year, so expect our food costs to go up too. These issues are exacerbated by an increasing population who mostly want to westernise their diet with more meat.... another wasteful exercise! So expect more food riots, expect famine, even war.

No rosy outlook

I'm not being a doom-monger, I'm being a mathematician, just looking at the facts and seeing how they add up, I'm being realistic. The outlook is not that rosy. We as individuals may think we can do little or nothing to do anything about it but as it's individual actions which make up this global scenario, it's us individuals who can make a difference to how we live and what our individual impacts are.

We can choose to travel more, or less. We can choose to eat a local, seasonal, vegetable-rich diet or one with much higher 'food-miles' and 'embodied energy'. We can join groups of like-minded individuals who club together and try to make a difference and we can lobby our leaders to make changes. And I applaud Sir Richard Branson for at least trying to make a positive difference.

The simple life

I'm not prepared to live in a way which overtly contributes to climate change or reduces rainforests to monocultures, and this is why I cycle and don't fly, burn 'renewable' logs not gas and eat potatoes not poultry. I do travel by train and hope that one day my 'essential' travel needs are also fuelled by renewables, something that Virgin is also working on.

But the biggest thing we can do is to travel less, consume less and lead simpler lives. This shouldn't be seen as a sacrifice, it should be considered an advance, something to be proud of which makes you feel good and contributes to our individual and global health.