If Green party leader Elizabeth May manages to win a House of Commons seat in the next election, there will be one fewer Commons voice supporting the government’s biofuel strategy.
May is campaigning to defeat sport minister Gary Lunn in the British Columbia riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands.
She said the government’s support of biofuel production based on farm crop feedstocks is wrong. The bulk of biofuel produced in or imported into Canada comes from farm-produced feedstocks.
The federal government has created a regulation requiring that gasoline contain on average at least five percent ethanol. It recently announced plans for a two percent mandate for biodiesel in diesel fuel and home heating oil.
“It makes no sense,” said May. “When you do the life cycle analysis, you are just not getting the benefit.”
She said her analysis is that the greenhouse gases emitted during planting, producing, harvesting, refining and transporting biofuel and its agricultural feedstocks exceed the reduction from using biofuel in fuel.
May said the biofuel policy is really a disguised farm policy promoted by lobbyists with Conservative connections.
“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.”
However, she said later generations of biofuel production using waste or a cellulosic base for ethanol or waste materials like french fry oil or stale-dated margarine for biodiesel production will make the industry a real environmental contributor.
The government claims biofuel will reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking one million vehicles off the road when the biofuel mandate is implemented.
