Biofuelwatchers – advise please!!

Wow – it’s been a while since I last blogged on APEShit and I’ve been missing it, but sometimes life’s too hectic to blog. Anyway I came across Bioroot through Facebook, and I just wondered what you guys think of this, especially the Biofuelwatch crew, who I know follow this blog:

 

http://www.biorootenergy.com/

 

Of course, saying that they can clean-up coal-smokestack carbon and turn it into clean fuel must not dissuade our work towards encouraging renewable energy, but, is it possible to make clean fuel from municipal waste (shit) as they state on their website… and if so, why isn’t this taking-off like wildfire?

Can we get a dialogue going on this? Is Biorootenergy a green start-up with a future? Comments please!!

Biofuels Can Be Green

Biofuelwatch are undertaking the Herculean task of exposing a great travesty of justice, whereby the UK government plans to build new ‘biofuel’ power stations that will lead to massive deforestation in order to power them. See this Ecologist article for more details.

It saddens me however, that in all this, ‘biofuels’ get a lot of bad press. As I have discussed before in my ‘It’s A Matter of Scale’ blog – biofuels in themselves are not bad – it’s the massive, linear, commodified consumption of them that dooms the system. Why do we have to run huge powerstations off imported virgin wood when we all shit once a day – a most underused resource if ever there was one?! Also, it is a supremely ‘local’ resource (every village, town and city has a potential power plant at its sewage works). We overlook poo at our peril. Why don’t we do what they’re doing in India – a country that is forging ahead with clean technology – and make biogas from this eminently renewable biofuel? (The image shows a ‘sewage-to-energy’ biogas plant in Flint, Michigan)

This all begs a huge question: who exactly is profiting from these new power stations? Not the planet, that’s for sure, and not people either, but once again, big corporations who always put profit before people and planet.