Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic carried out yesterday the world's first commercial flight of an aircraft powered with biofuel. “This breakthrough will help Virgin Atlantic to fly its planes using clean fuel sooner than expected,” he told reporters after the flight.
Clearly, there’s some good intent on the part of Branson and his firm. They seem serious about helping to address global warming, and have invested a significant amount of money into improving the energy efficiency of their firm.
But looks can be deceiving. This flight used a biofuel mixture of coconut and babassu oil. And while I couldn’t tell you the mixture’s exact carbon footprint, I’d be prepared to bet a significant chunk of change that overall, it’s about the same as plain old gasoline.
Why?
Because once again, when accessing the environmental impact of biofuel, we made the classic mistake of only factoring only the carbon emissions of the fuel consumption while forgetting entirely about the production. Biofuels are supposed to be carbon neutral because they produce very little CO2 during combustion and take carbon away from the atmosphere as they grow. But in fact, we’re realising today that the environmental impact of growing organic matter for biofuel makes it just as bad for the environment as fossil-fuel gasoline. Remember, biofuels are in most cases derived from corn or the sugar cane. To grow they need green space, water and heat. But finding space usually means cutting down trees and watering the crops excessively. So once you factor in all that heating and water, that biofuel business doesn’t seem quite as exciting.
This isn’t the only time this kind of thing happens. There was an article in a recent publication of the New Yorker magazine which essentially explained that lamb or apples imported from
So what does this teach us? Simple: we need to be careful and smart about helping the environment.
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