EU plans tougher environmental criteria for biofuels

By Reuters

BRUSSELS: The European Union is to set tougher environmental criteria for biofuels after acknowledging that the drive for transport fuels produced from crops has done unforeseen damage, the European Commission said on Monday. The environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said in a BBC interview that the EU had initially underestimated the danger to rainforests and the risk of forcing up food prices from its policy of setting binding targets for the use of biofuels.

"We have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels and also the social problems are bigger than we thought they were,' he said. "So we have to move very carefully." "We have to have criteria for sustainability, including social and environmental issues, because there are some benefits from biofuels," Dimas added.

EU leaders set a mandatory target last March that at least 10 percent of transport fuel should come from biofuels by 2020. Dimas told the BBC that it would be better to miss the target than meet it by harming poor people or damaging the environment.

An EU energy spokesman, Ferran Tarradellas Espuny, told a news conference that the Commission would stick to the 10 percent target in implementation proposals to be unveiled on Jan. 23. "However, certainly we will do that in a way that's going to cause no damage or at least less damage than if we used fossil fuels to achieve the same target," he said. The spokesman said the biofuels used would have to achieve a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, blamed for global warming, and not damage rainforests, as well as meeting other unspecified criteria which would be announced next week.

Biofuels that failed to meet the standards would not be allowed on the European market, he said. EU officials said commissioners were still wrangling over the issue, part of a comprehensive package of energy and climate change legislation designed to make the 27-nation EU a world leader in the fight against global warming. A coalition of environmental and development pressure groups wrote last week to the EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs asking him to set much tougher standards for biofuel production or abandon the mandatory transport fuel target altogether.

"Large-scale biofuel production can cause negative indirect or knock-on impacts such as increasing food and feed prices and increasing water scarcity, which would lead to negative impacts on the world's poor," the 17 non-government organizations, including Oxfam and Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. Dimas, the environment commissioner, said the EU would introduce a certification scheme for biofuels and promised a clampdown on biodiesel from palm oil, which is leading to forest destruction in Indonesia. Among issues still being debated within the commission are to what extent the EU should favor imports of biofuels from countries like Brazil and to what extent it should use agricultural subsidies to produce them at home, officials said. Crops grown to make biofuels include corn, soybeans, rapeseed and sugar cane. Economists have said that subsidies to grow crops for biofuels could further increase the rising cost of food, while scientists say the benefits are not properly measured.

Scientists at Britain's Royal Society said in a report released Monday that a directive requiring fuel suppliers to use more biofuels would do little to combat climate change because it is not linked to targets for reducing greenhouse gases.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)