Biodiesel and ethanol are both biofuels: fuels produced from organic matter. As global warming worsens and our oil supply dwindles, biodiesel and ethanol have both been touted as the fuels of the future. They are purported to be renewable, and clean.

Because these similarities, people frequently confuse ethanol with biodiesel, and vice versa. Ethanol and biodiesel are completely different substances, with completely different properties. For one, ethanol is an alcohol. It is the alcohol found in beer, wine, vodka, etc.

If you drank biodiesel, on the other hand, you would most likely suffer harm. Biodiesel is an ester: a substance composed of an alcohol bonded with a fatty acid. The alcohol is usually ethanol, or methanol, also known as wood alcohol. The fatty acid is obtained from animal fats or plant oils.

So how is ethanol, the fuel, made? The same way that drinking alcohol is made: fermentation. Farmers grow high sugar or high starch crops, such as sugar cane. The sugar cane is juiced, and the juice is allowed to ferment. The alcohol is then purified.

Biodiesel is also made from plant matter. However, instead of sugary plants, crops with high oil content are favoured, such as rapeseed, palm trees, and corn. The crops are harvested and their oil extracted. The oil is then reacted with ethanol or methanol, to produce biodiesel.

The processes above describe making ethanol and biodiesel from new raw materials, as opposed to waste matter. It is possible to make both ethanol and biodiesel from waste. Compost can be fermented and ethanol extracted. Instead of using fresh oil, biodiesel manufacturers sometimes use waste oil from fast food restaurants.

If you live in a major city in North America, chances are 15% of the fuel you receive at the gas station is ethanol. The 15-85 mixture of alcohol and standard gasoline, lovingly nicknamed gasohol, has become the convention. It can run in any normal gasoline engine, with no modifications required.

Biodiesel cannot be used with a gasoline engine. It requires a diesel engine—any conventional diesel engine. Before switching over to biodiesel, however, ensure that your fuel lines are not made from natural rubber. Biodiesel will simply dissolve the hosing.

Engines in North America are predominantly gasoline-oriented. For this reason, gasoline pumps are much more popular than diesel pumps in North America. To use ethanol for your car, you simply need to visit your local gas station. To find biodiesel, however, you need to look around. Currently biodiesel is not mass produced in either Canada or the United States. Infrastructure for the transportation of biodiesel is not widespread. Awareness and demand for biodiesel is also low.

Consequently, you may need to travel a few miles before you can find a biodiesel station. Even then, the cost per litre is 250% that of gasohol. The low demand and its high price lead each other around in a vicious cycle. Which one is better for the environment? That is debatable. Both are renewable energy sources that come from organic matter. For this reason, their advantages and drawbacks are quite similar. In the end, however, ethanol is just easier to find.

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Until the rise of the budget airlines in Europe during the Nineties, short-haul air travel was an expensive business. For journeys under about 500 miles, trains were cheaper.

Now, it’s a different story. I’ve just been looking at travel between Milan and Rome this coming July. It’s a distance of 355 miles between the two cities. Since the collapse of Alitalia, easyJet and Ryanair have been taken over domestic flights in Italy. A one-way ticket on easyJet is 23.99 euros and takes an hour. Yet on one of the fast trains, taking 4hours, roughly equivalent to the total city centre to city centre time by plane, the fare is 55 euros if you buy two weeks in advance.

And in Britain, the situation can be even crazier. Air travel can now often be the cheapest form of travel. My retired father found that it was cheaper to travel from his home in Luton by easyJet to Glasgow in Scotland than by National Express (Britain’s version of Greyhound). And that was with National Express’s Over 60’s discount included as well! The flight takes about an hour compared with ten hours on the coach. What option would you choose?

If the European Union is serious about reducing carbon emissions from air travel, then it needs to look at ways of making longer-distance train travel within the EU cheaper and easier.

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As you’re biting into that nice, juicy king-size burger, have you ever thought how much you’re contributing to global warming?

I hadn’t. Cattle, though, are a major problem for the environment. As cows are busy munching away in their pastures, their multiple stomachs are producing methane.

Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide for global warming. According to The Journal of Animal Science, livestock produce between 250 and 500 litres of methane every single day! At the top end of the estimate, that enough to fill 250 large bottles of Coke.

And what’s worse, there are estimated to be 1.5 billion livestock around the globe. If the average animal produces 350 litres of methane daily, then that’s 525 billion litres of methane being released into the atmosphere each day. And then there are about a billion sheep and 800 million goats.

What about pigs? There are a billion pigs, but they produce much less methane than cows.

As countries have got richer, demand for meat has increased in the last 50 years by about 500 per cent.

The livestock sector is by far the single largest use by humans of land. Grazing occupies 26 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, while feed crop production requires about a third of all arable land.

Expansion of grazing land for livestock is a key factor in deforestation, especially in Latin America. Some 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon is used as pasture, and feed crops cover a large part of the reminder. About 70 percent of all grazing land in dry areas is considered degraded, mostly because of overgrazing, compaction and erosion attributable to livestock activity.

There are other serious problems with livestock that contribute to global warming. The United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) estimated that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.

Livestock farming accounts for nine percent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, most of it due to expansion of pastures and arable land for feed crops. It generates even bigger shares of emissions of other gases with greater potential to warm the atmosphere: as much as 37 percent of methane from humans’ activities, mostly from fermentation by cows and other ruminants, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide created by man’s activities, mostly from manure.

According to the UN FAO, the average American eats about 275 pounds of meat per year (more than any other country). The average Chinese eats 108 pounds per year (Earth Policy Insitute, 2005). According to a 2005 FAO study on meat consumption between 1998 – 2002, the average meat consumption per Chinese is 52 kg, compared to Americans at 125 kg, and Britain at 80 kg.   note:  there are smaller countries which (on average, per person) consume a little more meat than the US – 300 mil. people (for example: New Zealand – 4 mil. people, Denmark 5.5 mil. people, and some countries which consume around the same amount of meat. If the whole world ate meat at the American rate, only 2/5 of the world’s population (2.5 billion people) would be fed (Lester Brown).

Some countries are taking the problem seriously. For example, Germany’s environment agency has recommended that Germans should eat less meat, if they want to lower their carbon footprint and stop global warming.

Speaking at Berlin’s Grüne Woche (Green Week), Andreas Troge, president of the UBA (Germany’s environment agency) said:

“We must rethink our high meat consumption. I recommend people return to the Sunday roast and to an orientation of their eating habits around those of Mediterranean countries.”

Troge said that agriculture caused 15% of Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions. Meat production, he explained, was the most energy-intensive form of farming. Germans derive a high percentage of their calories from meat, 39% compared to the Italians’ 25%.

The US Environmental Protection Agency wanted to tax cattle, but this plan seems to have been dropped after protests from the powerful farming lobby.

So next time I’m in the supermarket, Quorn burgers are going in my basket!

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And why am I not interested? Because I’ve just been watching the eco-movie HOME. It’s beautifully filmed in High Definition and it has an important message.

For millions of years, the Earth has been storing up the carbon that threatens the planet’s survival. Over the last fifty years in particular, human beings have been extremely efficient at releasing it to power their lifestyles. And now the planet can’t cope any more.

It made me think how irrelevant many things in modern western life are, including supercars. The Veyron is an engineering masterpiece. It took a great deal of time and money to produce a car as fast as a Formula 1 car that can also be used on the road. That’s actually quite a technological achievement. But why couldn’t Ferdinand Piech, the then head of VAG, have turned his talented engineers loose on a more environmentally-useful project?

We’re destroying this planet faster than it can renew itself. People are busily fighting wars with each other, but climate change could kill us all unless we unite to deal with it.

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Whilst most hypermiling is practised during everyday driving, it has now turned into a sport. World records were set for economy at the 2008 Maximum Fuel Economy contest held in Elkhart, Indiana. A Honda Insight, Toyota Prius and Ford escape Hybrid achieved record round trip fuel consumptions of 213 mpg, 136 mpg and 76 mpg respectively.

However, such contests have attracted criticisms on safety grounds. The figures above were achieved while rolling through all stop signs and having the vehicle tires inflated well beyond recommended specifications.

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Composting reduces the amount of waste sent to landfill. Even for households that are already composting, new research has found that almost half of the food waste in their rubbish bins could have been put in the compost bin.

An interesting fact: composting at home for just one year can save global warming gases equivalent to all the carbon dioxide your kettle produces annually, or your washing machine produces in three months.

Some people think: “Why do I need to compost when my waste will break down in landfill anyway?”

When waste is sent to landfill, air cannot get to the organic waste. As the waste decomposes, it forms methane, a harmful greenhouse gas, which damages the Earth’s atmosphere. However, when this same waste is composted above ground at home, oxygen helps the waste to decompose aerobically. This means no methane is produced, reducing global warming.

As a bonus, after nine to twelve months, you get a free fertiliser for your garden to keep it looking beautiful.

Compost is a food product, rich in nutrients, for your garden. It helps improve soil structure, maintains moisture levels, and keeps your soil’s PH balance in check. This also helps to stop plant disease.

Compost will have everything your plants need including nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. It will help buffer soils that are very acidic or alkaline.

Your plants and flowers will love your home-made compost!

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Palm oil is found in products like margarine, cookies, bread and chewing gum. It might even be in some washing powders. It’s difficult to spot on the packaging as it’s usually listed as ‘vegetable oil’.

Demand for palm oil may increase if more vegetable oils are required to make biofuels. Currently, the European Union Biofuels Directive aims to achieve fuels with a 5% biofuel content.

So why is this natural product a problem? Thirty-square miles of rainforests in Borneo are being destroyed every day to plant giant palm-oil plantations. As the rainforests, disappear wildlife so does wildlife like orang-utans, tigers, bearded pigs, sun bears. All are endangered species.

Rainforests are important for absorbing carbon dioxide as well as sustaining indigenous peoples and endangered wildlife. Peat as well as plant life is important for trapping carbon dioxide. It is a semi-saturated soil which acts as a ‘carbon store’ which release massive amounts of carbon dioxide when it is burnt to make way for palm oil plantations.

Greenpeace, in its report “Cooking the Climate”, calculated that the burning of South-East Asia’s peat forests – mainly for palm oil plantations – caused the release of 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

That means that a massive 4% of global-warming-causing emissions came from 0.1% of the Earth’s surface.

The UK Government calculates that such deforestation causes 18% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. CO2 is a key element in the Earth’s warming that is likely to alter the Earth’s weather system radically in the coming years. Climate change may well bring more flooding in places such as Bangladesh and the Maldives. Already, Tuvalu is danger of sinking. Even the UK has been experiencing serious flooding in the last few years.

To prevent the problem getting worse, the UK will be pressing for REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) at the Copenhagen Environmental Summit to be held in Copenhagen at the end of the year. Essentially, REDD is a scheme for funding jungle preservation in developing countries.

Meanwhile, companies are coming under increasing pressure to reduce their use of palm oil. Unilever is the world’s biggest user of palm oil. 1.6 tonnes of palm oil is used in its products each year. That’s 4% of the global total. Its solution was to set up the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2004. The RSPO devised eight principles and thirty-nine practical criteria to protect native peoples, plantation workers, small farmers and wildlife. Forty per cent of palm oil suppliers have signed up to the RSPO. Members agree not to destroy virgin forest, but are allowed to use ‘degraded forest’ – where some trees have already been felled.
Currently, only 4% of the global palm oil supply (1.5 million tonnes), is certified by the RSPO as sustainable.

Unilever, Premier Foods and United Biscuits have only committed publicly to using only sustainable palm oil by 2015, 2011 and 2012 respectively. However, most companies haven’t given any commitment to sustainable palm oil.

PepsiCo is leading the way though. It has phased out palm oil from its two remaining products.

So what can you do? It’s not easy to avoid palm oil in the supermarket. 43% of the UK’s top 100 grocery brands contain, or are thought to contain, palm oil. Check out these products at www.independent.co.uk/palmoil .

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Many environmentalists are concerned about the effect of the Tata Nano on global warming. Finally on sale last week after seven months of delays, the Nano promises to be the world’s cheapest new car.

The Nano is a small, four-seater car made by Tata,the Indian tea to tech conglomerate. As India’s economy has boomed, so has demand for cars from the growing middle class. At present, only one in 8000 people in India own a car compared to 450 cars to 8000 people in developed countries. But India has population of 1 billion and is a country hungry for cars. Nobel Prize winner, R.K. Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that he was ‘having nightmares’ about the Nano.

The Nano promises to bring motoring to the masses with prices starting at 1 lakh (100 000 rupees or around $2000,£1200). Better-equipped versions with electric windows and air conditioning are available that will cost about 50 000 rupees more. But this still much cheaper than than the previous cheapest model on the Indian market, the Maruti 800 (which is based on an old Suzuki design).

The car itself is reasonably economical. It has a 624cc gasoline engine capable of about 50mpg. Tata claims that it complies with Indian emissions regulations and it has lower emissions levels than current two wheelers.

But at such a low selling price, Michael Walsh, a former US Environmental Protection Agency regulator and now a pollution consultant, worries that the Nano is not fitted with the advanced technology necessary to keep a car’s emissions low throughout its lifetime.

The main worry is that the sheer numbers of Nanos on India’s roads will send India’s already-bad pollution soaring. Vivek Chattopadhyaya is an air pollution specialist at Dehli’s Centre for Science and Environment. He is concerned that ed India’s inadequate infrastructure and high pollution levels did not have the capacity to cope with a huge influx of Nanos.

The Nano’s eco-credentials got off to a bad start with the siting of the factory purpose-built to produce it. Tata spent $292 million building a plant on a 1000 acre site in Singur, West Bengal. However, local farmers, whipped up bu populist local politicians protested, often violently, against the state’s compulsory purchase of the site for Tata’s factory.

Tata cut its losses and moved to an alternative site at Sanand in Gujarat. But much of the original investment will have to be written off. The new factory will be more expensive to build at $389 million. To environmentalists, there are also the wasted carbon emissions from having to abandon the first factory, giving the whole project an unnecessarily high carbon footprint.

Until the Sanand facility comes on stream in 2010, Tata is producing the Nano at its existing factory at Pantnagar. This only has a production capacity of 50,000 compared with 250,000 in its first year rising to 500,000 thereafter for the new factory.

But this might not be an ecological disaster in the making. The Indians can’t be blamed for wanting the personal mobility that those in developed nations take for granted. Perhaps some of the environmental impact of the Nano can be avoided.

Tata plans to build a version of the Nano for Europe. It will have to meet strict European Union emissions and safety standards. A US version is then on the cards. Also, Tata believes that most of the Nanos sold in India will be the more expensive version. So it might be possible to incorporate the emissions technology needed for Europe and the US into Indian models at a reasonable cost that Indian consumers would be prepared to pay.
The economies of scale possible from the huge production of the Nano may also make this possible.

Another cause for optimism is the fact that Tata owns Jaguar/Land Rover. The latest Jaguar XF Diesel S shows how good JLR’s engineers are when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions. With a three-litre, twin-turbo diesel engine developing 271bhp, the XFS emits only 179g/km of carbon dioxide. Compare that to a 2.0 litre gasoline Ford Mondeo which has 145 bhp and emits CO2 of 189 g/km. Tata can call on this expertise.

The G-Whiz, a micro Indian electric car, gained a cult status with many celebrities in London. If the Nano can become the ‘must have’ city car in Europe and America, then it may help reduce greenhouse emissions on a wider scale.

If you’ve ever been on an Indian road, you’ll know that it’s dangerous chaos. But mostly people get where they’re going without harm. Hopefully, the introduction of the Nano will be the same.

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