Sir Peter Crane discussed the importance of developing biofuels to replace our existing fossil fuels, but also warned about the possibilities of creating a larger environmental problem if the plans for agriculture are not carefully examined.
"There are big opportunities with biofuels, but there are also big problems too," he said. "It's not a free lunch. The world should wake up to the dangers of the mass production of biofuels, which are increasingly seen as a major solution to global warming."
According to Sir Peter Crane, extensive production of biofuel crops, such as oil palms, could destroy remaining areas of rainforest and bring about a new cycle of worldwide intensive agriculture involving vast applications of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, and requiring enormous amounts of water. He voiced a concern which has already been highlighted by some environmental group -- mass expansion of biofuel production might lead to a new round of rainforest destruction, especially with crops such as the oil palm. Oil palm needs warm humid conditions and is largely grown in Southeast Asia on land from which rainforest has been cleared. "Expansion of oil palm production is going to have to be handled extremely carefully to ensure that it doesn't start to eat into the remaining pieces of rainforest that still exist," Professor Crane said. He went on: "We're going to have to get biofuels off land that's already degraded, perhaps land that's not valuable for other purposes, for conservation or for agriculture. And we've got to do it without creating other problems with the kinds of inputs that in the past have gone into intensive agriculture."
The production of road transport fuels made from crops, which do not add to the greenhouse gases causing global warming, is now starting to take off around the globe, and is likely to grow vastly. He mentioned it will be one of the main agricultural developments of the 21st century.
The attraction of biofuels in the fight against climate change is that they are "carbon neutral". Unlike the fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal, which when burned add to the net amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide which biofuels produce when ignited has been absorbed from the atmosphere by the crops used to make them, and so the net atmospheric effect is not increased. The best known biofuels are ethanol and biodiesel. Ethanol is a petrol substitute made from sugar cane, sugar beet or maize, widely used in Brazil and coming into use in other countries. Biodiesel is made from oil palms, oilseed or recycled vegetable oil.
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Professor Sir Peter Crane is the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor at the University of Chicago. A former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew and of the Field Museum in Chicago, he is a fellow of the Royal Society, a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He earned his PhD in Botany from the University of Reading, UK. He also served on the faculty of the University of Reading from 1978 to 1981. In 1981 he moved to Indiana University, and joined the Field Museum in Chicago in 1982. From 1992 to 1999 he served as Director of the Field Museum with overall responsibility for the Museum's scientific programs, and established the Office for Environmental Programs and the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change. From 1999 to 2006 Peter Crane was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, one of the largest, most prestigious and influential botanical gardens in the world. His research deals with understanding largescale patterns and processes of plant evolution. |
