Introduction: perfect storms

In 2009, John Beddington, the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, adopted the term 'perfect storm' to describe a future global confluence of food, water and energy insecurity (2009). While Beddington captured something of the unprecedented nature and threat of the future, the choice of 'storm' as a sort of metaphorical de-anthropomorphism ran somewhat counter to the usual humanizing of extreme weather events; for we need to be absolutely clear that the processes and interactions that will lead to food, water and energy insecurity are primarily driven by us, our exigencies and the choices we make. A great many of these interactions hinge on our trajectories of development and wielding of new knowledge and new technologies.

It is becoming increasingly apparent, and increasingly globally apparent, that we must learn how to better harness science and technology to these ends, and accordingly we need to understand the complex, interrelated contexts and processes that lead to new technologies, new priorities and new directions that will serve our future and deal with, rather than exacerbate, present and future risks. Biofuels – liquid fuels that are directly derived from renewable biological resources and especially from purpose-grown crops – throw many of these issues into the sharpest relief. One of the most striking features of biofuels as a global solution is their huge potential to entirely reshape livelihoods, patterns of resource consumption, environments and agro-food production systems; there is a cost for every benefit, and that is often invisible under the veneer of technological promise.

Much as the technological optimism of biofuels shifts responsibility towards the immediate futures of others, biofuels risk exporting impact and risk elsewhere. The production of biofuels risks reprioritizing land use across the globe, and as yet we know relatively little about the implications of this. Biofuels are driving, and transforming, the increasingly entangled relationship between energy, food security and climate change, and consequently trying to understand the politics, narratives and discourses that drive policy and practice surrounding biofuels provides an opportunity to reflect on the thorny relationship between science, development and the environment (Molony and Smith 2010).

In some respects biofuels are simple technologies. We are simply deriving energy from plants, through seed oil or biomass, primarily to combust in car engines. Future, better technologies may unlock efficiencies or new ways of deriving energy from plants, but the basic principle remains. In other respects biofuels are extremely complex. They are being developed within complex systems and their production in itself creates new complex systems. They generate couplings between agricultural systems, international markets, petrochemical companies, consumers and producers. These couplings have implications of their own. Charles Perrow, in his book Normal Accidents (1999), analyses the implications of the unexpected consequences of technological interactions taking place within what he terms 'tightly coupled' systems. These systems are so interrelated and complex that there is no easy way to control or contain negative consequences once a technology has started to unravel. This unravelling may quickly become irretrievable, and indeed any attempts to intervene may exacerbate the problem if we simply do not sufficiently understand the mechanics or truly recognize the root of the problem. The lure of biofuels may blind us to the risks bound up in the intricacies of new technologies and the limits of our ability to deal with them. We may understand the chemistry of photosynthesis and the physics of combustion, but we may not understand the gamut of interactions and implications necessary to efficiently join them up.

Biofuels represent both a promise of a technologically driven future and the spectre of a Rumsfeldian web of known unknowns and unknown unknowns (and presumed knowns). They represent an increasingly globalized, interconnected world, and a world where production, risk and responsibility are inherently localized, constantly diverted and increasingly entangled. Biofuels represent at the same time an effort to acknowledge and deal with some of the most pressing global problems we face, and an excuse to not really deal directly with these problems, or even to really understand them, and in particular what drives them. Biofuels, their development, their deployment, the ideas they represent and the sorts of solutions they suggest, are rooted in the contradictory processes of global progress, consumption and development. They reflect how we imagine the world to be, and refract how we – or those who make decisions at least – imagine it ought to be, or can be. This book will focus on the recent development of biofuels as both a solution to, and a driver of, perfect storms.

Biofuelled futures

In the space of a few years biofuels have shifted from existing beneath the radar of development, to being seen as a possible multi-purpose solution to a range of problems – climate change, energy insecurity and rural underdevelopment – to representing a 'crime against humanity', according to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, owing primarily to the perceived impact of investment in biofuel production on food stocks and subsequently on global food prices. These contested and shifting perceptions have done little to substantially decelerate biofuels as a policy idea or as an investment opportunity. Figures from the US Department of Agriculture for 2009 show that the grain grown to produce fuel was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average consumption levels, according to the Earth Policy Institute. This figure represents a third of all those who constantly go without sufficient food. In 2007, twenty-seven out of fifty countries surveyed either had policy under consideration or had enacted mandatory requirements for biofuels to be blended with traditional transport fuels, and forty had legislation to promote biofuels (Rothkopf 2007). Between 2002 and 2006, the amount of land used to grow biofuel crops quadrupled and production tripled (Coyle 2007).

David MacKay, in his excellent book Sustainable Energy, assesses the potential of biofuel production as a substitute for petrol in the UK (MacKay 2009). This is enlightening, if not particularly empowering. The average harvestable power of sunlight is 100 W/m2 (watts per square metre). The most efficient plants in Europe are about 2 per cent efficient at turning solar energy into carbohydrates. This suggests that the most efficient plants might deliver 2 W/m , although in reality this translates into something nearer 0.5 W/m . MacKay assumes that if 75 per cent of the UK's land were devoted to bioenergy production, which would equate to 3,000m of land...