In the Sunday Business Post in October last year, I wrote to criticise the
If you still suffer from the delusion that we live in a democracy, then Ireland’s prospective new energy policy should open your eyes. Last Sunday saw the publication of the Green Paper on energy, the most significant planning document on energy for 20 years. The Green Paper promises investment in new technologies and a new focus on protecting the environment.
However, as usually happens in Irish politics, politicians are instead granting privileges to special interests at the expense of the public. All that is new is that this is now justified by doubtful claims as to the environmental benefits and cost advantages of renewable energy. In the 1970s, haunted by the fear of ever-more expensive oil, the government invested in the huge Moneypoint generating plant in Co Clare, powered by coal. The feared oil shock never materialised.
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The Green Paper, echoing the Oireachtas committee’s report, makes a heavy rhetorical commitment to renewable energy, in spite of the cost disadvantages. It stresses biofuels extracted from fuel crops such as rape, wheat or sugar beet as a route towards lower energy costs and environmental protection. Here we see the farming lobby triumphant. Domestic sugar beet is offered as a solution - as if Ireland is akin to a boggy Kuwait. The fairyland economics of European agriculture seriously distort the economics of biofuels. Brazilian sugar cane can produce ethanol for transport at about a third of the cost of crops grown in western Europe, according to the IEA, but faces tariff barriers that make it uneconomic.
The use of biofuels to deliver reductions in greenhouse gases that cause global warming is also doubtful. Each ton of carbon dioxide avoided, the IEA estimates, comes at a cost of some $200 to $400. This is more than ten times the cost of alternatives, like sponsoring clean energy projects in developing countries through Kyoto’s clean development mechanism or buying reductions through the EU emissions trading system.
In essence, with the CAP in slow and painful decline, the Irish farming lobby have formed an alliance with idiotic politicians and cyncial bureaucrats to lock in subsidies for the domestic production of biofuels - rape, wood and even sugarbeet, uneconomic even at the peak of oil prices and yielding no environmental benefit. For the Irish public, too much sugar in the diet is bound to be unhealthy.
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