There is an interesting news item on BBC NEWS talking about a recent report by the European Commission on the increasing proliferation of biofuel in Europe and especially Great Britain.
Essentially the report states three problems with biofuels:
- Planting for the production of biofuel has a huge impact on the environment. Think of all the machines that are required to farm the cropland.
- In order to have enough space for more cropland, soil needs to be disturbed, i.e. forests may vanish in favor of cropland and land formerly used for food production may be reallocated to producing biofuel. Which leads to the most important and severe issue with biofuel:
- With rising demand for biofuel, food prices will inevitably rise as well. The food producing industry is going to have to compete with the petroleum industry because both need cropland to plant palms, soybeans, and whatever else can be used to produce food or biofuel. This development will especially hurt the population of developing countries.
Essentially this means that while biofuel sounds like an awesome idea at first, it does not turn out to be overly cool in the end.
On a more general level, I have recently been thinking about fuel-based transportation quite a bit and have to come to the conclusion that cars and similar vehicles are an incredibly stupid idea:
- Road traffic is dangerous. In the WHO European region 127.000 people died in road traffic crashes in 2004. I doubt this number has dropped significantly since then.
- Road traffic is bad for the climate. Cars and trucks are an important factor for the increase in global warming. (Not as bad as the industry, but also not neglectible.)
- Road traffic is bad for people’s health. Traffic contributes significantly to air pollution.
- Roads dominate urban architecture. Ever wondered how beautiful your city would look like without streets?
It will be interesting to see how transportation looks like in a few decades. Maybe it will happen in the underground, based on some fancy, climate-neutral technology? Perhaps we’ll have flying taxis like in The Fifth Element? Or will someone eventually get around and figure out how to make Teleportation an industrial-strength technology? Who knows. In the meantime I’ll go out and breath some fresh, aerosol-enriched air.
[Disclaimer: I own a car.]