"Almost everything on the car can be made out of biodegradable or recyclable materials. All the plastic components can be made from plants and, although the chassis has to be made from steel for strength, steel is a very recyclable material. We already have the shell, brake pads, fuel and tyres sorted. My aim is to end up with a race car that’s 95 per cent biodegradable or recyclable. If we can build a high-performance car that can virtually be grown from seed, just imagine what’s possible for the average family car."The big hitch: they want to power the car with biofuels.
Consider this argument from George Monbiot:
The EU’s plans, like those of all the enthusiasts for bio-locomotion, depend on growing crops specifically for fuel. As soon as you examine the implications, you discover that the cure is as bad as the disease.
Road transport in the United Kingdom consumes 37.6 million tonnes of petroleum products a year. The most productive oil crop which can be grown in this country is rape. The average yield is between 3 and 3.5 tonnes per hectare. One tonne of rapeseed produces 415 kilos of biodiesel. So every hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of transport fuel.
To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United Kingdom. Switching to green fuels requires four and half times our arable area. Even the EU’s more modest target of 20% by 2020 would consume almost all our cropland.
If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the impact on global food supply will be catastrophic: big enough to tip the global balance from net surplus to net deficit. If, as some environmentalists demand, it is to happen worldwide, then most of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people.
People who own cars have more money than people at risk of starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel and poor people’s demand for food, the car-owners win every time.
No comments:
Post a Comment