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Global recession? Must be time for the media’s alternative-energy backlash
Joseph Romm, Gristmill
My father used to say of his profession that newspaper editors are the people who come down from the mountaintop at the end of the battle and shoot the wounded.
A massive credit crunch and a drop in the price of fossil fuels can mean only one thing to the editors of the traditional media — an excuse for their favorite activity in the whole world, the backlash story.
Faster than you can say “Joe the Plumber” isn’t a licensed plumber, his name isn’t Joe, and he has a tax lien against him, you can be sure that if the media ever lets itself fawn over you for even a nano-second, it will turn its coverage on a dime and run the minute a few whispy short-term clouds appear in the horizon.
And so we have the New York Times story, “Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds,” which is supposed to be a clever headline, but the NYT, which accompanies the story with a picture of wind turbines, seems to have missed the irony that wind turbines like strong winds.
… What’s funny about all of these backlash pieces about this recent former media darling is that for most of the 1990s when I was at the U.S. Department of Energy, we couldn’t buy a story about clean tech. Good news stories really aren’t news. That’s why for all the talk about the liberal media, the traditional media is really conservative. It is a very status quo institution with the long-term thinking of an erection.
The fundamentals that guarantee clean tech will be the biggest job-creating and wealth-creating industry haven’t changed. We still need to replace most of the energy infrastructure of the developed world in the next four decades with clean energy, while at the same time, build from scratch a clean energy infrastructure for the developing world. We still have a supply-demand mismatch in the oil sector that has brought us to the precipice of peak oil, as even the world’s largest oil companies now acknowledge.
(23 October 2008)
Peter Meisen on BP/Economist renewable energy debate (video)
Marc Strassman, Etopia News
Peter Meisen, President and Director of the Global Energy Network Institute, talks about a recent debate on the adequacy of existing renewable technologies to solve the climate/energy crisis & other current energy & climate change subjects
(23 October 2008)
Kenya: Biofuels Boom and Bust
John David Bwakali, IPS
The Kenyan government has hailed bio-diesel as an innovation that combines green politics with poverty reduction. But recent drops in biofuel prices have caused concern about the sustainability of alternative fuel production.
Rural farmers who have invested all their savings into growing oil seeds now fear they have opted for the wrong venture.
Over the last few years, the Kenyan government, NGOs and industry have pushed the production of bio-diesel — which is environmentally sustainable because it emits fewer toxic air pollutants and greenhouse gasses than petroleum-based fuels — and many small-scale farmers have placed their hopes into oil seeds as a new avenue to earn money. Initially, biofuel projects seemed to be a success, with farmers more than doubling their usual income.
.. However, the farmers’ luck ran out in April when biofuel prices suddenly plummeted from an average of $10 per kilo to less than $0.5 per kilo. Biofuel research companies, producers and NGOs supporting the production of environmentally friendly diesel had created an artificially high demand for the seeds, which resulted a high pricing structure that could not be maintained in an open market in the long-term.
In addition, the development of regulatory policy frameworks and local infrastructure needed to manufacture bio-diesel took longer than expected. As a result, Kenya has only few biofuel processing plants that struggle to keep up production with seed supply, and many rural farmers cannot afford the costs of transporting their seeds to the nearest factory.
Siteyia’s storeroom in Ngurumani, for example, is now filled to the brim with Jatropha, but she has no buyers for her seeds. The Kenya Eco-Energy project, to which she initially sold the seeds, has run out of capacity, and the nearest oil seed processing plant in Central Kenya is more than 200 kilometres from her village, too far for her to transport the seeds herself.
Although the production of biofuels creates environmental sustainability, farmers will not be able to continue investing in them if they don’t have a market to sell their produce. Numerous Kenyan farmers who have put their little savings into the planting of oil seed producing trees have now lost their initial investments.
(24 October 2008)
Political pressure keeps ethanol cash flowing
Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Kevin Allison, Financial Times via ninemsn (Australia)
By most rational measures, the corn-based ethanol industry should be on its knees. Its six biggest public companies have lost more than $8.7bn (€6.7bn, £5.3bn) in market value in the past three years alone.
The fuel has had little impact on either greenhouse gases or US dependence on foreign oil, in spite of an estimated $80bn in taxpayer subsidies that were supposed to address both issues.
The global financial crisis has given fresh ammunition to critics who say the US can no longer afford such government largesse, and there is no let-up in the clamour to blame biofuels for exacerbating world hunger.
(22 October 2008)
