Airbrushing and biofuels

In an a wonderfully brass-necked piece on the always lamentable Comment is Free, an enviro-loon called Mark Lynas claims, astoundingly, that environmentalists were right all along. Biofuels are a disaster!

Yes, you read that correctly. The environmentalists are going to start claiming that they've always been against biofuels.

When you've stopped killing yourselves laughing here's the "proof". Lynas says:

When the prospect of large-scale use of biofuels as a response to climate change was first mooted, many green campaigners and writers - including Greenpeace and the Guardian's George Monbiot - raised concerns about the impacts on land-use, food supply and biodiversity.

To his credit, Moonbat has written against biofuels in the past. But as one commenter on the CiF thread points out, Friends of the Earth have been welcoming pretty much every move towards biofuel for years: 

Here's what Friends of the Earth had to say in 2004:

Climate Change and the Budget, Nov 2004, page 19
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/pre_budget_nov_2004.pdf

"The Government should introduce a Biofuels Obligation, to stimulate a UK biofuels industry - as a lower carbon alternative to conventional transport fuels. The obligation would require that a proportion of all road transport fuels in the UK should be sourced from accredited renewable sources."

and here's what Friends of the Earth had to say in 2005:

Cautious welcome for biofuels obligation, Nov 10, 2005
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/cautious_welcome_for_biofu_10112005.html

"Friends of the Earth welcomed the Government's promise today (Thursday 10th November) that biofuels will form five per cent of transport fuel sales by 2010, helping to tackle transport's contribution to climate change."

Friends of the Earth eventually reversed their position in 2007:

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/oecd_warning_over_biofuels_11092007.html

"Friends of the Earth called on the EU to scrap its ten per cent target for using plant-based bio-fuels for transport, after a leaked paper revealed that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD's has grave concerns about their social and environmental effects."

Friends of the Earth spent several years campaigning in support of biofuels with total vigour and certainty. They're now campaigning against them with equal vigour and certainty.

And what about Greenpeace, who Lynas claims have been in the forefront of the green perspicacity on biofuels. In fact they've been screaming in favour of them for simply years - this from 1993. They were still welcoming biofuels targets in 2005.

Airbrushing history is just so much more difficult when your opponents have got Google.

Comments

[Brian]

I think you'll find that Green Slime have been in favour of any new technology, provided only that no-one attempts to use it. Remember in the 60s the Greenies supported nuclear power stations, on environmental grounds, until people started building them, whereupon they opposed them, on environmental grounds.

We see the same pattern emerging for windmills, 'sustainable' houses, electric cars, etc etc.