We Can’t Have Our Ethanol and Eat It Too — Castro on Biofuels
Castro here mostly quotes Atilio Borón, as he acknowledges in the opening graf. It’s a good summary of the biofuels scam and its terrifying implications. The fundamental points he states openly and with refreshing honesty: “a scenario is being prepared where a head-on confrontation will take place between the 800 million prosperous car owners and the food consumers… Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.” It’s a pity that most American readers are so terrified by, or conditioned into reflex hostility to, the name of Castro, that they would almost certainly be unable to assimilate any of the information in this article under this byline. Already there is a strong denial movement among rightwing Americans that denounces global climate change as a Leftist propaganda trick, etc. — how to get people past this ideological blinkering and in touch with basic physics, geology, and biology is a daunting problem.
REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE DEBATE HEATS UP
Atilio Borón, a prestigious leftist intellectual who until recently headed the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), wrote an article for the 6th Hemispheric Meeting of Struggle against the FTAs and for the Integration of Peoples which just wrapped up in Havana; he was kind enough to send it to me along with a letter.
The gist of what he wrote I have summarized using exact quotes of paragraphs and phrases in his article; it reads as follows:
Pre-capitalist societies already knew about oil which surfaced in shallow deposits and they used for non-commercial purposes, such as waterproofing the wooden hulls of ships or in textile products, or for torches. Its original name was ‘petroleum’ or stone-oil.
By the end of the 19th century -after the discovery of large oilfields in Pennsylvania, United States, and the technological developments propelled by the massive use of the internal combustion engine– oil became the energy paradigm of the 20th century.
Energy is conceived of as just merchandise. Like Marx warned us, this is not due to the perversity or callousness of some individual capitalist or another, but rather the consequence of the logic of the accumulation process, which is prone to the ceaseless “mercantilism†that touches on all components of social life, both material and symbolic. The mercantilist process did not stop with the human being, but simultaneously extended to nature. The land and its products, the rivers and the mountains, the jungles and the forests became the target of its irrepressible pillage. Foodstuffs, of course, could not escape this hellish dynamic. Capitalism turns everything that crosses its path into merchandise.
Foodstuffs are transformed into fuels to make viable the irrationality of a civilization that, to sustain the wealth and privilege of a few, is brutally assaulting the environment and the ecologic conditions which made it possible for life to appear on Earth.
Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.
Capitalism is preparing to perpetrate a massive euthanasia on the poor, and particularly on the poor of the South, since it is there that the greatest reserves of the earth’s biomass required to produce biofuels are found. Regardless of numerous official statements assuring that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality shows that this, and no other, is exactly the alternative: either the land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.
The main lessons taught us by FAO data on the subject of agricultural land and the consumption of fertilizers are the following:
–Agricultural land per capita in developed capitalism almost doubles that existing in the underdeveloped periphery: 3.26 acres per person in the North as opposed to 1.6 in the South; this is explained by the simple fact that close to 80 percent of the world population live in the underdeveloped periphery.
–Brazil has slightly more agricultural land per capita than the developed countries. It becomes clear that this nation will have to assign huge tracts of its enormous land surface to meet the demands of the new energy paradigm.
–China and India have 1.05 and 0.43 acres per person respectively.
–The small nations of the Antilles, with their traditional one-crop agriculture, that is sugarcane, demonstrate eloquently its erosive effects exemplified by the extraordinary rate of consumption of fertilizers per acre needed to support this production. If in the peripheral countries the average figure is 109 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare (as opposed to 84 in developed countries), in Barbados the figure is 187.5, in Dominica 600, en Guadeloupe 1,016, in St. Lucia 1,325 and in Martinique 1,609. The use of fertilizers is tantamount to intensive oil consumption, and so the much touted advantage of agrifuels to reduce the consumption of hydrocarbons seems more an illusion than a reality.
The total agricultural land of the European Union is barely sufficient to cover 30 percent of their current needs for fuel but not their future needs that will probably be greater. In the United States, the satisfaction of their current demand for fossil fuels would require the use of 121 percent of all their agricultural land for agrifuels.
Consequently, the supply of agrifuels will have to come from the South, from capitalism’s poor and neocolonial periphery. Mathematics does not lie: neither the United States nor the European Union have available land to support an increase in food production and an expansion of the production of agrifuels at the same time.
Deforestation of the planet would increase the land surface suitable for agriculture (but only for a while). Therefore this would be only for a few decades, at the most. These lands would then suffer desertification and the situation would be worse than ever, aggravating even further the dilemma pitting the production of food against that of ethanol or biodiesel.
The struggle against hunger -and there are some 2 billion people who suffer from hunger in the world- will be seriously impaired by the expansion of land taken over by agrifuel crops. Countries where hunger is a universal scourge will bear witness to the rapid transformation of agriculture that would feed the insatiable demand for fuels needed by a civilization based on their irrational use. The only result possible is an increase in the cost of food and thus, the worsening of the social situation in the South countries.
Moreover, the world population grows 76 million people every year who will obviously demand food that will be steadily more expensive and farther out of their reach.
In The Globalist Perspective, Lester Brown predicted less than a year ago that automobiles would absorb the largest part of the increase in world grain production in 2006. Of the 20 million tons added to those existing in 2005, 14 million were used in the production of fuels, and only 6 million tons were used to satisfy the needs of the hungry. This author affirms that the world appetite for automobile fuel is insatiable. Brown concluded by saying that a scenario is being prepared where a head-on confrontation will take place between the 800 million prosperous car owners and the food consumers.
The devastating impact of increased food prices, which will inexorably happen as the land is used either for food or for fuel, was demonstrated in the work of C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, two distinguished professors from the University of Minnesota, in an article published in the English language edition of the Foreign Affairs magazine whose title says it all: “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poorâ€. The authors claim that in the United States the growth of the agrifuel industry has given rise to increases not only in the price of corn, oleaginous seeds and other grains, but also in the prices of apparently unrelated crops and products. The use of land to grow corn which will feed the faucets of ethanol is reducing the area for other crops. The food processors using crops such as peas and young corn have been forced to pay higher prices in order to ensure their supplies. This is a cost that will eventually be passed on to the consumer. The increase in food prices is also hitting the livestock and poultry industries. The higher costs have produced an abrupt decrease in income, especially in the poultry and pork sectors. If income continues to decrease, so will production, and the prices of chicken, turkey, pork, milk and eggs will increase. They warn that the most devastating effects of increasing food prices will be felt especially in Third World countries.
Studies made by the Belgian Office of Scientific Affairs shows that biodiesel causes more health and environmental hazards because it creates a more pulverized pollution and releases more pollutants that destroy the ozone layer.
With regards to the argument claming that the agrifuels are harmless, Victor Bronstein, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, has demonstrated that:
–It is not true that biofuels are a renewable and constant energy source, given that the crucial factor in plant growth is not sunlight but the availability of water and suitable soil conditions. If this were not the case, we would be able to grow corn or sugarcane in the Sahara Desert. The effects of large-scale production of biofuels will be devastating.
–It is not true that they do not pollute. Even if ethanol produces less carbon emissions, the process to obtain it pollutes the surface and the water with nitrates, herbicides, pesticides and waste, and the air is polluted with aldehydes and alcohols that are carcinogens. The presumption of a “green and clean†fuel is a fallacy.
The proposal of agrifuels is unviable, and it is ethically and politically unacceptable. But it is not enough just to reject it. It is necessary to implement a new energy revolution, but one that is at the service of the people and not at the service of the monopolies and imperialism. This is, perhaps, the most important challenge of our time, concludes Atilio Borón.
As you can see, this summary took up some space. We need space and time; practically a book. It has been said that the masterpiece which made author Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez famous, One Hundred Years of Solitude, required him to write fifty pages for each page that was printed. How much time would my poor pen need to refute those who for a material interest, ignorance, indifference or even for all three at the same time defend the evil idea and to spread the solid and honest arguments of those who struggle for the life of the species?
Some very important opinions and points of view were discussed at the Hemispheric Meeting in Havana. We should talk about those that brought us real-life images of cutting sugarcane by hand in a documentary film that seemed a reflection of Dante’s Inferno. A growing number of opinions are carried by the media every day and everywhere in the world, from institutions like the United Nations right up to national scientific associations. I simply perceive that the debate is heating up. The fact that the subject is being discussed is already an important step forward.
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 9, 2007, 5:47 p.m.
Ms Kitty:
Perhaps there would be more room for biofuels, ethanol in particular, if the farmers replaced tobacco (and drugs). Those things don’t feed or fuel anyone. Just a thought.
The best sources for fuel that are clean and plentiful are all around us, and free for the harvesting; sun and wind. Large companies are not going to invest a lot into these because it’s harder to meter and control.
We really need small businesses to step up to the plate and design and sell power sources that are affordable, clean and off the grid. Therein lies our freedom. I’ve been looking, but the start up costs are out of my range.
12 May 2007, 1:43 pmLegume Sam:
I am glad to have read this. DailyKos.com is full of biofuel advocates who need to read this, too.
13 May 2007, 12:37 amG.:
Soylent Green is appearing more and more imminent.
13 May 2007, 8:57 amStan:
Ms Kitty is onto something, at least in as far as getting off the grid constitutes a dramatic reduction in our dependency on a system we might oppose.
But bio-fuel is not going to provide any panacea; and its production is more than waste, it is dangerous to the ecological health of that other bio, the biosphere.
Its unlikely we can capitalism our way out of it, even with restrictions on the size of enterprises. ALL capitalism is based on turning money into money-plus, which translates into that weirdly-named econ-phenom, “growth.”
Market relations — especially as they become more disembedded from local accountability — are antithetical to the thing “we” need to do, which is the opposite of growth, that is, shrinking.
13 May 2007, 8:08 pmxenia:
Indeed, the ultimate, perhaps unpleasant conclusion is that many, even most Americans will have to severely restrict their driving time. The prevalence of cars is one of the major reasons why I and others like me have left the country to live elsewhere, as I have over the years consciously and perhaps excessively decided never even to learn how to drive. Granted, I had somewhat of a space to make that decision (no money though, just family support).
While elsewhere there is at least semi-functional to excellent public transportation, in the US it is miserable; it cannot even compete with Kenya. But this situation cannot last, as I am told that there are more and more poor people who can barely afford a car.
Some kinds of public services, however inadequate and rickety (for our rulers would not give us any better), will have to be established for people to get to work and buy food even if they are carless.
This gradual change of mobility patterns will affect housing and many other areas of public life as well in years to come. The question is only how many other human beings on this planet will have to starve or be bombed for the sake of cars until then.
13 May 2007, 8:55 pmDeAnander:
“it cannot even compete with Kenya” — xenia
or Curitiba. or any of a number of allegedly “backwards” third world locales. how long before the US is the poster-child backwater failed-state, pointed to as an example of incompetence, corruption, stupidity and bad planning?
14 May 2007, 1:34 amStan:
Following up on my hit-and-run from last night with another hit-and-run today.
The reclamation and rehabilitation of land bases, soil that is, in the US is a concrete and not merely theoretical necessity; since the restriction of energy supplies in a spatially-expanded, built environment like ours has implications for the basics (eating, and sleeping indoors). A huge portion of that lived-upon land is subdivided into quarter-acre parcels (or smaller) in the suburbs/exurbs.
What has to be “grown” is not money, but viable live soil… and we have to think about how that gets done in cities and ‘burbs. The key here is the humble earthworm.
14 May 2007, 6:32 amcharlene grant:
I think it’s truly unfortunate that the human race will add another 76 million to its numbers so soon (per article). Unfortunately, the poor South contributes even more to this population increase than does the rich North. Until, the Socialists acknowledge the need for population control, I will be unable to feel much pity for “the poor,” who increase their numbers so much each and every year.
If rich car drivers are unfriendly to the earth, then so are those who would by their sheer proliferation crowd out all life from the earth except that of their own kind.
14 May 2007, 2:43 pmJoe:
Ms Kitty is obviously not educated in the laws of thermodynamics and fuel conversion. To have wind power and sun power require generators,steel towers, worked wood, plastic, glass, copper lines, storage batteries and much more. You cannot have these on a large scale without processed fuel such as petroleum.
14 May 2007, 10:40 pmUnder oil starvation wind power, solar power, coal power and wood power will go to those who still have the gasoline engines and fuel to make it all work.
Ms Kitty have you ever tried to cut down trees with an axe then saw them up into 22″ pieces for a wood stove with a burn box of 24inches?
Cutting up 8 ricks of wood is not possible even with a hand saw unless you know how to sharpen the saw periodically [need steel tools made with petroleum]; the axe is made of steel, gasoline powered chain saws do not operate without gas and oil.
If you think that some technology is going to save the situation you are denying reality and in fact are just waiting for death in costume.
There is no substitute on any major scale for petroleum.
Now start thinking from this point.
Then get a physics book and read about entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. joe
Charles:
How does the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics impinge on the petroleum situation ?
16 May 2007, 9:59 amLegume Sam:
Look, folks, the “situation with oil” is conditioned by the realities of capitalism, as global society has a capitalist structure.
All talk about technology, petroleum, and overpopulation is talk about the symptoms of capitalist development, as Fidel Castro well knows. Capitalist development, though it chews up the world in order to satisfy the profit-motives of the wealthy, is based on the extraction of a surplus from labor for the sake of this profit. To a certain extent, workers work, they do labor, for themselves; but beyond that, workers work for the greater profit of capitalists, who rule the world in order to hold the system together. Marx spells out their performative role and basic incentive as follows:
Get it? There are two sets of players in this game: the working class, which builds our global capitalist civilization for the sake of its own survival (”necessary labor”), and the owning class, which receives (most of) the surplus as a “creation out of nothing,” i.e. as profit. And that’s how it works. The results? In the American economic context, you have the top 1% who own half of all non-home capital assets, and then you have, to varying degrees, everyone else.
If we want to do something about the “problems” created by technology and petroleum and overpopulation, we have to step back and understand what it is about capitalism that causes it to manifest these problems at this time in history. Don’t you think?
Not only can we say that production under such a system is production for the capitalists, who are (under capitalism) the real beneficiaries of production. We can also say that the industry’s destruction of ecosystemic integrity does not affect the basic role-playing game here. The workers still try to stay afloat; the owners still collect the surpluses.
Now, one solution to this problem would be global revolution, in which the workers seize control of the system for the sake of ecosystemic integrity, without which there is no future for humankind. But if there’s some sort of revolution afoot these days, it sure is developing slowly, if at all. One thing we can concentrate on, however, as we try to get control over our relations with the Earth’s ecosystems, is how our understanding of ecology is conditioned by capitalism.
For as Marx and Engels suggested in The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Or, as they further suggest, “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” in society. So “environmental problems” are what they are because they are, from the get-go the product of a ruling class perspective. That bottom half of the world’s population that lives off of less than $2/ day could care less about “alternative energy,” for instance; they’d like to benefit from any energy at all. But let’s continue:
But not in the same proportion. Remember, the “overpopulated” masses (as seen, of course, from an elitist perspective: in reality, it is the rich who far more than anyone else who “overpopulate” the planet) are “overpopulated” in the way they are precisely in order to create a labor pool so that the “rich car drivers” can be unfriendly to the earth from the get-go. An observation of the daily lives of GM’s workers in Ciudad Juarez should be enough to confirm this point.
Of course we will be in trouble with industrial society if, under “oil starvation,” we continue to maintain a society that doles out privileges solely to “those who still have” as opposed to those who don’t. Nevertheless, Joe’s examples are ahistorical; axes were made long before the petroleum society, and industrial society ran on coal before it, too.
Anyone who actually followed this advice would soon discover that the 2nd law of thermodynamics applied to closed systems. The Earth is an open system.
The problem with oil is that the energy potential (once manifested as sunshine) locked up in the world’s oil reserves is being burnt (by capitalist society) at a rate that far outpaces any effort we might make to duplicate this burning activity (85 million bbls./day as of 2005) using “alternative sources” for any extended period of time.
So what would the world energy situation look like if we were to get rid of capitalism, and create a society in which there is no real distinction between “those who still have” and those who don’t while drastically reducing ecological footprints all around? I don’t think anyone has, under capitalism, even asked this question with any degree of seriousness, never mind offering an answer.
16 May 2007, 11:11 amxenia:
Also, Mrs. Charlene and others who harbour similar thoughts should simply look at statistics first: a SUV-ed couple in New Jersey pollutes and consumes at least ten times more water, plastic, etc. than a six member family at a village in the Niger Delta. Who is depriving whom of space, food and fresh air, I wonder?
17 May 2007, 9:50 amCharles:
Tell it like it is, Legume Sam !
17 May 2007, 3:10 pmStan:
The 2nd Law operates universally and at all times as a general law; and negentropic activity in any place is balanced by a double measure of entropic activity elsewhere.
The earth is not an open system, but a partially closed system with (for our purposes) a consistent outside input of solar energy that provides the basis for the most substabtial negentropic activities (like photosynthesis).
The significance of the 2nd Law with relation to oil and other fossil hydrocarbons in this system is how exploitation (a socially determined phenom) of these energy stores has generated a malthusian energy cliff. We are confronted with a planet that has a finite carrying capacity.
A simple way to remember what this means is, “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
That said, it is grimly apparent that the ruling class would rather run most of us over this cliff than risk the loss of their power… which is the essence of exterminism. If you look at per capita energy consumption nation by nation, it is clear that many are already over the cliff, and those of us who are spared to continue with the bacchanalia are being spared to support the imperial core.
When we are no longer useful, we go over too… or consent to be ruled by the next batch of Mussolini-wannabes. The other Law is the Law of Unintended Consequences. That one can work for us.
23 May 2007, 7:19 pmCharles:
My only thing about the 2nd Amendment , I mean Law (smile) of Thermodynamics is that we should not blame the 2nd Law for human generated climate change through global warming and petroleum and other fossil fuel depletion (nor for nuclear weapons). The Devil didn’t make us do it, and The Second Law didn’t make us do it ( Just like guns,germs and steel didn’t make the Europeans conquer the world). It is a human generated culture, philosophy, belief system, value system, most succinctly termed capitalism that “makes”us do it. In ruining our own ecological systam, we are not following the inevitable dictates of a law of physics on heat patterns of change. This would be objectivism, physics determinism, vulgar materialism. Human society’s motions cannot be reduced to physics ( including thermodynamics) or biology. We are not carrying out any inevitable biological laws either. We are carrying out the laws of motion of capitalism, as elucidated by Marx in _Capital_, and by others, , etc. political economic laws. These are cultural laws or tendencies. Capitalist laws of motion and therefore environmental destruction is not naturally inevitable, and capitalism is not just the way of nature, including not just the thermodynamical ways of nature.
Capitalism can’t violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics nor any natural laws. But the environmental revival we need and seek is not in conflict with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
The ever growing GDP law of capitalist ideology, a cultural law, is part of Stan’s Malthusian energy cliff dynamic, I believe. We must always grow by this belief. Well, but our resources, in particular petroleum and other fossil based fuels are shrinking ! Don’t need calculus to understand that soon the ends won’t meet, and the means won’t meet the ends of all the folks on earth.
Thus we can only save the species from the disasters of environmental pollution by a revolution in the politial economy…or so the theory goes.
But I’m for save us by any means necessary.
24 May 2007, 12:06 pmMaybe the capitalists are going to experience a miracle and stop following the laws of capitalism, not run most of us over the Malthusian energy cliff. :>)
Legume Sam:
May I recommend:
1) A basic formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of which this is one: “in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state.” There is indeed energy entering and leaving the Earth’s ecosystems, from the Sun. The problem, of course, is that solar energy can only be used to regenerate the ecological order at a rate established by the rhythms of photosynthetic absorption.
What global society is doing today, at a rate of 85 million bbls./day, is burning away 300-million-year-old reserves of regenerative capacity, with disastrous ecological effects. Consumption and production rates have thereby sped up to unsustainable rates. One way or another, the rhythms and rates established by photosynthetic capacity will become once again the norm for Earth-societies.
2) An analysis of the operation of entropy in far-from-equilibrium states. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ Order Out Of Chaos is a good place to start. Ecosystems, societies, and other larger orders can be seen as dissipative structures of which capitalism is one.
3) A second look at Paul Prew’s essay The 21st Century World Ecosystem, in which he argues:
This essay, in my opinion, brings the theories of Prigogine and Stengers in line with those of Marx.
4) An evaluation of Teresa Brennan’s prime directive: “we shall not use up nature and humankind at a rate faster than they can replenish themselves and be replenished.” I’m sure that if Brennan were alive today she would be able to say something more specific than what she said in Globalization and its Terrors about the trajectory of the First World.
5) A discussion of Deborah Tannen’s The Argument Culture to plumb the extent to which masculine aggression informs the debate postures which attempt to enforce opinions upon social consciousness.
24 May 2007, 4:18 pmStan:
Great links. Thank you. I’m a Prigogine fan too.
24 May 2007, 6:24 pmCharles:
5) A discussion of Deborah Tannen’s The Argument Culture to plumb the extent to which masculine aggression informs the debate postures which attempt to enforce opinions upon social consciousness.
^^^^
CB: In the U.S., there is also an opposite masculine trope: the socalled strong, SILENT, type; men of few words and all action. In this American cultural myth, women talk ( and argue) , and men are quiet, don’t know how to express feelings, don’t argue, don’t get upset.
31 May 2007, 1:12 pmDeAnander:
In other words, when talking is high-status — bloviating, pronouncing, negotiating, bargaining — then it’s a Guy Thing and women who try to do it are stigmatised as unwomanly; and when talking is low-status — gossip, trivial chatter, social axle-greasing, phatic blithering — then it’s a Girl Thing and men are not supposed to partake in it.
31 May 2007, 3:48 pmCharles:
In other words, when talking is high-status — bloviating, pronouncing, negotiating, bargaining — then it’s a Guy Thing and women who try to do it are stigmatised as unwomanly; and when talking is low-status — gossip, trivial chatter, social axle-greasing, phatic blithering — then it’s a Girl Thing and men are not supposed to partake in it.
Comment by DeAnander —
^^^^^
CB: Yea, that’s a total and “complex” theory, with contradiction and everything.
1 June 2007, 10:54 amCharles:
If I might be so bold, I’d hypothesize that men are overwhelminingly in the wrong in _physical_ aggression against women ( and men) rape and domestic violence, etc. However, women have equal ability to hurt feelings with words. In fact, silence can hurt as much as words in the area of emotional feelings. Men do not predominate in perpetrationg emotional abuse. I ask, isn’t the essence of the problem with verbal “aggression” hurting someone’s feelings , emotional feelings not bodily feelings ?
1 June 2007, 11:05 amLinda c:
Thanks to everyone that has added remarks to this thread. It is wonderful and gives “small town” girls - lots to consider.
This has been one of the most eye opening conversations that I have read in a long time. I’ve been away from Stan’s site for a while - now I remember why I visited before.
I’ve made notes to take away with me to contemplate
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Thanks Linda; tip the hat to De for this post and plenty more.
8 June 2007, 2:21 pmRandy Morris:
Yeah Charles, it sucks to be verbally abused by a female, but as men our long-term emotional damage is mitigated to a huge degree by tour social position of domination. A man’s verbal abuse of a woman could at any moment be followed by virtually socially-sanctioned physical abuse; I would wager 99% of the verbal abuse of men by women goes no further than the verbal.
Unless all women started carrying sidearms, in which case all men (still among the living) would start rethinking their communication techniques.
Breastfeed in public and carry a gun! Viva!
Randy
8 June 2007, 8:34 pm