Germany Defends Biofuels, Hedges Bets on Energy Goals

[phantom power]

Germany cannot reach its climate change goals unless it dedicates land to growing biofuels, Germany's agriculture minister Horst Seehofer said after talks in Berlin on Tuesday, May 6. Seehofer defended biofuels against growing criticism that they are responsible for food prices increasing globally, which has caused rioting and hunger in developing countries.

"There would also be hunger without biofuel," Seehofer said, who promised that the government would announce this summer what it will do to help ease the global food crisis.

(...)

Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel also promised Tuesday that Germany will stick to its biofuel strategy, which calls for increasing reliance on plant fuels by 2020. Gabriel acknowledged that the government's goal of having 17 percent of energy come from biofuel by 2020 might be overly optimistic and said the German parliament will decide in the near future whether to hold to a 2009 goal of having biofuel make up 6.25 percent of overall fuel consumption.

(...)

Call for relaxed meat restrictions

In a time of increasing prices for all types of food, Seehofer said the German government will seek to increase meat production by pushing through rule changes to allow ground-up animal remains can be fed to pigs and poultry.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3316860,00.html

[pscot]

1. People will starve even if we don't produce bio-fuels

so a few more starve as a result of bio-fuels. Is that such a big deal? AS for feeding animal parts to pigs and poultry, we call it Soylent-Ag. Have another chop.

[phantom power]

2. Herr Seehoffer seems to agree with you.

I guess it depends on whether we think reducing the number of starving people is a good idea or not, and how much we decide it's worth.

[pscot]

4. I was paraphrasing Herr Seehofer

for ironic effect. I think his calculus will probably be cropping up in policy discussions around the developed world. WE are likely to find ourselves behaving very badly as our situation becomes ever more dire.

[phantom power]

5. You evaded my irony meter.

Well played.

[Oerdin]

3. "There would also be hunger without biofuel,"

Yeah, but there would be less of it.

[JohnWxy]

6. Actually, as the stock market outlook has deteriorated money managers (lead by hedge fund mgrs) have

pulled out of stocks in corporations and put trillions of dollars into commodities - energy, materials and grain futures. It's the futures market that is driving up the prices. biofuels play a paart but a relatively small part. Consider the faact that wheat has gone up as much as corn, but nobody is making biofuels out of wheat(wheat has been affected by bad weather conditions in the Ukraine and Australia).. Of course, there is the argument made that farmers got out of other grains to grow corn. that is to some extent true but from 2006 to 2007 (when the big increase in corn acreage occurred) heat acreage went up about 5% and wheat harvested went up about 10%. One crop that did lose to corn (and wheat) was soy beans - but that isn't a major food item in the U.S. (in japan, yeah).

The demand for crops for biofuels just isn't big enough to cause this much of a price rise. It's because the economy is going down the tubes (thsi became pretty apparent to money managers as of last fall, but more and moreso as we got into 2008) this made them get out of stocks and into commodities.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x146583

"What we normally have is a predictable group of sellers and buyers—mainly farmers and silo operators," he says. But the landscape has changed since the influx of large index funds. Fund managers seek to maximize their profits using futures contracts, and prices, says Warner, "keep climbing up and up."

He's calculated that financial investors now hold the rights to two complete annual harvests of a type of grain traded in Chicago called "soft red winter wheat."


link to businessweek article:
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/apr2008/gb20080423_366709_page_2.htm