The Law of Unintended Consequences and Biofuels Subsidies
Ronald Bailey | January 8, 2008, 1:45pm
Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) argue that American biofuel subsidies are boosting deforestation in the Amazon. How? STRI's staff scientist William Laurance explains the cascade of effects that occur as the result of $11 billion per year in corn subsidies.
The US is the world's leading producer of soy, but many American soy farmers are shifting to corn to qualify for the government subsidies. Since 2006, US corn production rose 19% while soy farming fell by 15%.
The drop-off in US soy has helped to drive a major increase in global soy prices, which have nearly doubled in the last 14 months. In Brazil, the world's second-largest soy producer, high soy prices are having a serious impact on the Amazon rainforest and tropical savannas.
"Amazon fires and forest destruction have spiked over the last several months, especially in the main soy-producing states in Brazil," said Laurance. "Just about everyone there attributes this to rising soy and beef prices."
High soy prices affect the Amazon in several ways. Some forests are cleared for soy farms. Farmers also buy and convert many cattle ranches into soy farms, effectively pushing the ranchers further into the Amazonian frontier. Finally, wealthy soy farmers are lobbying for major new Amazon highways to transport their soybeans to market, and this is increasing access to forests for loggers and land speculators.
Remember the First Law of Ecology is "everything is connected to everything else." That especially applies to markets.
Whole STRI article here.
Ventifact | January 8, 2008, 4:34pm | #
Remember the First Law of Ecology is "everything is connected to everything else." That especially applies to markets.
Most environmentalists reject market economics.
A lot of the alternative energy groups I've worked with are extremely pragmatic, green, and seem to be mainly interested in getting off the grid and producing their own energy. "Eco-libertarianism" does exist. Interesting to see how this will play out.
That half the words
ecology and
economy are identical is, as I'm sure you didn't doubt, no coincidence. Not only did ecology make use of the same Greek root
oikos for
home as economy, the seminal ecologist Darwin drew heavily from the economic treatise of Malthus when putting together his own ideas (i.e., umm,
On the Origin of Species etc.).
Many environmentalists reject market economics, but even among those who do as a moral preference, some embrace market economics as a practical engine for driving the change they seek. Just yesterday I was downtown in Seattle (WTO funland?) and wandered into an office for a company that certifies and advertises buildings as green (including some real highrise stuff, not just dorky cabins). They had 3 basic criteria for their certification (laid out more particularly in 10 practical considerations), and one of the three was profitability. They are not in the business of pushing the wrong way against the prevailing pro-market orientation of our country, or alienating potential allies/customers. And that's a meaningful slash.
"Eco-libertarianism" is a tricky bit to me though, because an emphasis on self-reliance is a de-emphasis on market trade. (Let's ignore questions about the validity of "libertarianism" without market trade.) The loss with such eco-libertarianism is in the efficiency of specialization and economies of scale (which overlap). The same manpower and other economic resources spent rigging and maintaining small-scale green operations would generate more environmental benefit if coordinated through the larger scales and specializations of a market. Even those who are uninformed or delusional enough to like biofuel as a "solution" don't think Manhattan should grown its own supply rather than importing it.
Unfortunately, popular social-environmental consciousness has identified a scattered sampling of environmentally harmful things in our world, and as those are the only ones most people are aware of, they are disproportionately villified and avoided, to the point that their avoidance actually leads to more negative environmental impact than simply using the original "bad" thing would have. Two of the biggest "baddies" are: lots of packaging on consumer goods and transport, especially for food.
A few days back I ran across a flier advertising "waste-free" Christmas gifts. They were "experiences instead of stuff." It doesn't take too much to think it through and realize that attending a football game, with all that goes into making a pro game happen, will entail the use of massive amounts of electricity, among other things. The "waste" comparison is ludicrous, except that we are made aware of plastic wrapping we throw away without being prompted to imagine how other forms of amusement impact the environment.
Similarly for food, some things grow well in some places, and much better other places, and only weakly in still other places. If you live in a place where 10 acres are needed to generate the tomatoes that could be grown on 1 acre in another state, or where more chemicals are needed to make the farming viable, you are making an unnecessary drain on the land resources of the world as a trade-off against the environmental impact of transportation in hauling produce in from a more fertile place. Is it worth it -- who knows? No one stops to consider, and I suspect it's often far from worth it.
