Note: this action is now closed, and appears for the record only. Thank you to everyone who took part!
Updated 2.12.2006.
Below is our recommended letter to MEPs concerning the upcoming vote on the EU’s biomass and biofuel policy taking place in week commencing 11 December 2006, or later if postponed (or as a Word .doc). Please send a copy to your MEP, or - even better - use it as a basis to write in your own words.
**************************************
Dear ..........,
Vote on the Energy committee's recommendations on Biomass policy, w/c 11 December or later
In the week commencing 11th December, or later if postponed, you will be asked to vote on the Energy committee's recommendations concerning EU Biomass policy. I urge you to make the right decisions for the world’s rainforests, the global climate, the future of thousands of species, human rights and food security.
The European Biofuel directive was intended as an environmental measure that would cut greenhouse gas emissions. However, vast amounts of land are required to produce biofuels. Homegrown biofuels are unable to compete with tropical imports. Expansion of these imports frequently displaces rainforest and other precious ecosystems, causing huge unaccounted-for greenhouse gas releases, as well as human displacement and other human rights abuses.
Palm oil, the cheapest source of biodiesel, requires humid tropical conditions for growth, so the available productive land for expansion of the crop, whether in Africa, S. America or S.E. Asia is typically rainforest. According to Friends of the Earth, oil palm plantations have caused 10m hectares of deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. Local oil palm producers, who plan further forest clearances, cite rising EU biodiesel targets as their strongest business case (http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/060224/15/3yy2x.html). FoE Indonesia have identified Europe's growing biodiesel as one of the two key threats to Borneo's rainforests (www.eng.walhi.or.id/kampanye/hutan/konversi/060412_palmoilplantation_/).
The associated CO2 emissions are enormous. Indonesia's annual forest and peat fires, which are mostly deliberately lit to clear forests for plantations, are currently causing around 15% as much CO2 emissions annually as all human fossil fuel burning. Wetlands International recently estimated that for every tonne of palm oil grown on Indonesia's extensive carbon-rich peatlands, 20 tonnes of CO2 are emitted from degradation of the peat bed, even excluding fires. Even if one considers only the change in vegetation, converting a hectare of rainforest into oil palms discharges in the order of 65x as much CO2 as can be recouped from using the oil as biodiesel (according to data from the ASB study, 2000). Yet in Indonesia, plantation land is frequently abandoned, depleted, after a single 25-year growing cycle.
Increasing tropical soya and sugar-ethanol production is also leading to deforestation across much of dS. America. The Brazilian government has declared its intention to speed up large numbers of infrastructure projects across the Amazon, many of them to facilitate growing soya exports. Most of Europe's soya imports are from Brazil, and NASA have shown that the price of soya directly correlates with the rate of deforestation in the Amazon. It also speeds up deforestation in Paraguay and Argentina. Meanwhile, the expansion of sugar cane in Brazil is impacting on the Atlantic rainforest, the Pantanal forest and wetlands, and Cerrado (savannah), all of which are significant carbon sinks, with internationally important biodiversity.
Curbing deforestation, with its associated CO2 emissions, is highly important towards the goal of avoiding 2°C warming. This was noted both by the UK government 2005 report "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" and the Stern Review. The EU should be working strategically to curb deforestation and not accelerate it, whether intentionally or not.
For temperate production, considerably greater CO2 savings can be achieved by using the same land to grow solid biomass to replace coal, than produce liquid biofuels to replace mineral oil.
A Danish official told the Lords biofuels inquiry: "Denmark has stringent targets for CO2 reductions but does not choose to invest in biofuels as the method to achieve it...the Danish government view the use of biomass for the production of heat and electricity as a “more cost-effective way of reducing CO2” than biofuels". Denmark therefore both grows ands imports considerable quantities of biomass (as the Commons EFRA select committee noted), but has announced only a 0.1% biofuel target for vehicle fuels. Still, Denmark risks prosecution by the EU for this approach.
Please will you support the following policies in the forthcoming vote, and submit your own amendments if necessary:
1. There must be an EU-wide ban on imports of biofuels linked to loss of highly prized habitat, in particular a presumption against the bioenergy use of palm oil, sugarcane-ethanol/butanol and soya oil sourced in tropical rainforest belt countries (i.e. unless a country has verifiably ceased deforestation). Specifically, there should be a EU ban on the use of biofuels from palm oil from several countries including Malaysia and Indonesia, and from soya and sugar cane from Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
2. For biofuels to be sustainable, they must, overall, lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions than petrol or diesel, and exclude those linked to rainforest and peat destruction. They must not be grown at the expense of old-growth forests, wetlands or natural grasslands, and must have no negative impact on biodiversity, water and soil, on food supplies, nor on the human rights of local communities.
3. There must be a moratorium on the EU Biofuel Directive with its targets and obligations placed on member states, to avoid this having negative consequences for emissions reduction aims, rainforests and global food supplies.
4. The EU must actively work with other major market nations for biofuels to regulate the international trade in biofuel commodities, so as to stop rising oil prices causing a new dash to destroy the world's remaining rainforests and other highly prized ecosystems.
5. The European set-aside scheme should not be abolished, since that is simply incompatible with the EU's objective of halting biodiversity loss by 2010.
Many thanks in advance,
Yours sincerely,
.....................
Kenya >