The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [114]
Moreover, it takes about 130 gallons of water to grow, and five gallons of water to distil a single gallon of maize ethanol – assuming that only 15 per cent of the crop is irrigated. By contrast, it takes less than three gallons of water to extract, and two gallons to refine, a gallon of gasoline. To meet America’s stated aim of growing thirty-five billion gallons of ethanol a year would require using as much water as is consumed each year by the entire population of California. Be in no doubt: the biofuel industry is not just bad for the economy. It is bad for the planet, too. The chief reason it gained such a stranglehold on American politicians is because of the lobbying and political funding supplied by big companies.
Now, given that I am a fan of the future, I must not dismiss the first generation of biofuels prematurely. There are better crops coming along, whose ability to shoot themselves in the ecological footprint may not be so marked. Tropical sugar beet can generate huge yields using less water, and plants like jatropha may yet prove good at getting fuel from waste ground – if genetically engineered. And surely, algae, grown in water, have a chance to outyield them all without requiring irrigation, of course.
But do not forget the single most important problem with biofuels, the one that makes them so capable of making environmental problems worse – they need land. A sustainable future for nine billion people on one planet is going to come from using as little land as possible for each of people’s needs. And if food yields from land continue to increase at the current rate, the current acreage of farmland will – just – feed the world in 2050, so the extra land for growing fuel will have to come from rainforests and other wild habitats. Another way of putting the same point is to borrow the familiar environmentalist lament that the human race is already, to quote the ecologist E.O. Wilson, ‘appropriating between 20 and 40 per cent of the solar energy captured in organic material’. Why would you want to increase that percentage, leaving still less for other species? Ruining habitats and landscapes and extinguishing species to fuel a civilisation is a medieval mistake that surely need not be repeated, when there are coal seams and tar shales and nuclear reactors to hand.
Ah, for one good reason, you reply: climate change. I will address that issue in chapter 10. For now, simply note that if it were not for the climate-change argument, you could not begin to justify the claim that renewable energy is green and fossil energy is not.
Efficiency and demand
Civilisation, like life itself, has always been about capturing energy. That is to say, just as a successful species is one that converts the sun’s energy into offspring more rapidly than another species, so the same is true of a nation. Progressively, as the aeons passed, life as a whole has grown gradually more and more efficient at doing this, at locally cheating the second law of thermodynamics. The plants and animals that dominate the earth today channel more of the sun’s energy through their bodies than their ancestors of the Cambrian period (when, for example, there were no plants on land). Likewise, human history is a tale of progressively discovering and diverting sources of energy to support human lifestyle. Domesticated crops captured more solar energy for the first farmers; draught animals channelled more plant energy into raising human living standards; watermills took the sun’s evaporation engine and used it to enrich medieval monks. ‘Civilisation, like life, is a Sisyphean flight from chaos,’ as Peter Huber and Mark Mills put it.