Washington, D.C., April 22, 2008—Activists who fear catastrophic effects from global warming have long predicted that deforestation would be one of the many impacts. As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today considers the possible connection between forests and climate change, the Competitive Enterprise Institute urges members to remember the very real negative impacts that global warming policies are already having on forest health.
“For years, one of the most frequently proposed solutions to consumption of oil and gas in developed countries was the use of biofuels – particularly ethanol – that are distilled from plant material,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell. “Now that government subsidies and mandates have made biofuels a reality, the chickens have come home to roost. Millions of acres of forest land that would have been left undisturbed or dedicated to food production have been given over to biofuels production.”
The rush to biofuel production has not only contributed to large scale deforestation around the world, it is also causing the prices of staple foods like corn and rice to skyrocket in the developing world. The results have come to constitute not just an environmental, but also a humanitarian crisis.
“Recent food riots from Mexico to Egypt to the Philippines have shown the predictable results of burning an ever larger share of the world’s food supply for fuel,” said Energy Policy Analyst William Yeatman. “Whatever speculative impacts climate change might have on forests decades from now, they are unlikely to match the unintended impact human beings are having already in the name of fighting global warming.”
Having witnessed the human tragedy wrought by their recommended policies, some biofuels advocates have recently renounced fuels made from food crops, instead endorsing formulas made from plant cellulose. This “cellulosic ethanol” could eventually take some pressures off of the world food supply, but again, only at the cost of even greater exploitation of forest land for biofuel production.
“As a global warming policy, the bio-fuels craze is clearly counter-productive,” said CEI Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis. “For example, the Clean Air Task Force reports that in Indonesia, almost 12 million hectares of peat land have been drained, cleared, and burned, much of it to make room for palm oil plantations. In the process, about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 are released annually, making Indonesia the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China and the United States.”
CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. For more information about CEI, please visit our website at www.cei.org.
