The Conservative government calls its biofuel policy an environmental initiative, but Green party leader Elizabeth May isn’t buying it.
“As it now stands, it’s a policy to provide an additional subsidized base to canola and corn and it’s an agricultural policy,” she said.
“The driver really isn’t reducing greenhouse gases.”
May said Green party analysis, along with that of many other environmentalists, is that farm crop-based biofuel production produces more greenhouse gas emissions than it removes when emissions from planting, harvesting, transportation and processing are taken into account.
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“Our objection is primarily that it fails to reduce greenhouse gases on a life-cycle basis,” she said.
Using agricultural products to produce fuel also affects world food supplies, although May said it is an oversimplification to argue that biofuel caused the world food crisis in poor and hungry nations.
“It clearly is much more complex than that and includes the fact that you have climate crisis, extreme weather events and manipulation of markets.”
May said later generations of biofuel that use waste products and cellulosic feedstocks will be a real environmental policy, but that is not the case now.
“Corn-based ethanol is, we think, a disguised subsidy to large scale production of corn with the potential of distorting global food markets,” she said.
“But if you were to take the corn husks off the field to make cellulosic ethanol, we think that’s a pretty green
solution, so switch grass and cellulosic ethanol will be a good solution.”
Making biodiesel out of waste french fry oil or stale-dated margarine would also be environmentally meaningful.
Federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz and environment minister Peter Kent recently announced a regulatory requirement that biodiesel and home heating oil will require an average minimum of two percent biodiesel.
They sold it as part of the government’s greenhouse gas reduction commitment and said it could come into effect July 1.
Ritz also said it was aimed at helping farmers.
“The new renewable fuel content in biodiesel and heating oil will give our farmers another market for their crops and demonstrates how agriculture can contribute to reducing Canada’s environmental footprint,” he said in the government announcement.
