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GREEN
GONE
WRONG
Dispatches from the Front Lines of Eco-Capitalism
Heather Rogers
To my family
Contents
Dedication
Introduction—Green Dreams
Part I: Food
Chapter One—Close to Home: Local Organic
Chapter Two—All the World’s a Garden: Global Organic
Part II: Shelter
Chapter Three—The Greenhouse Effect: Eco-Architecture
Part III: Transportation
Chapter Four—The Fuel of Forests: Biodiese
Chapter Five—Green Machines: Ecological Automobiles
Chapter Six—The Price of Air: Carbon Offsets
Assessment
Notes on the Possible
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Resources
Notes
Index
Copyright
Also by Heather Rogers
The riots started in early 2007. The first country to erupt was Mexico. In just one year the price of corn, the key ingredient in tortillas, had shot up more than 80 percent. Suddenly, not just the poorest but also wage earners were unable to put food on the table. Tens of thousands of workers and peasants angrily took to the streets, marching down Mexico City’s main thoroughfare to the famous Zócalo, setting off what came to be called the “tortilla riots.” To quell the uproar, Mexican president Felipe Calderón was forced to announce a price freeze on corn. In the ensuing months the world convulsed with violent unrest in over thirty countries, including Egypt, Somalia, Colombia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cameroon, and Haiti. The sometimes deadly protests were set in motion by a global food crisis triggered in part by the diversion of food crops to refineries making plant-based transportation fuels known as biofuels. Considered ecologically sustainable, biofuels can substitute for fossil fuels, thereby cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming. However, today’s eco-friendly fuel is made from edible crops such as corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and palm oil (a vegetable oil); thanks to subsidies and the high price of oil, at that time selling crops for biofuels offered a bigger return than selling them for food, so growers and agribusiness followed the money.
By the spring of 2008 food prices peaked further still, having surged by more than 50 percent from the year before. Discontent ignited across the globe as grocery bills went through the roof. The cost of vegetable oils, wheat, rice, and other basics soared well beyond reach in developing countries, where many people spend half or more of their income to keep their families fed. As strife over rising prices intensified, more than forty people were killed in Cameroon. In Haiti, the prime minister was ousted and at least four rioters were shot and killed amid street protests over the scarcity and escalating costs of food. In China, a stampede at a supermarket that had discounted its prices left three shoppers dead and another thirty-one injured. Small vendors in outdoor markets in Indonesia sold vegetable oil that appeared new but was used; the dark color from cooking was eliminated by adding household bleach, which buyers would unwittingly ingest.
As the terrible social impacts of crop-based biofuels grew more acute, questions also began arising about their supposed environmental benefits. People such as David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, claimed it required more energy to grow and refine corn ethanol than the alt-fuel could provide. According to assessments such as Pimentel’s, corn ethanol was a net loser when it came to preventing carbon dioxide emissions. In other arenas environmental groups such as the Rainforest Action Network and Friends of the Earth were already campaigning against the supposedly eco-friendly fuels. These organizations said escalating demand for biofuels was driving deforestation as agribusiness expanded into tropical-forest zones. Detailing these knock-on effects, two reports published in early 2008 in the journal Science stated that more carbon dioxide was being released into the atmosphere from the production of some biofuels than if people continued filling their tanks with gasoline and diesel.
That same year deforestation rates in Brazil shot up sharply. Similarly, Indonesia had recently earned the dubious distinction of becoming the world’s third-largest carbon dioxide emitter, trailing only China and the United States. Much of Indonesia’s spike in CO2 came from clear-cutting and burning trees to make room for crops that could be refined into biofuels. Imagine millions of acres of dense rain forest teeming with the world’s most diverse flora and fauna. A crew armed with chain saws and bulldozers forges a narrow path through the trees. The workers begin to rip away and flatten the forest as wildlife, including endangered species such as orangutans, flee for their lives. A bulldozer shoves innumerable splintered trees into tangled piles that stretch for miles, and crews set them alight. Ferocious fires blast through what was once a dynamic web of life, leaving behind a carbon dioxide–filled haze and a silent, charred wasteland. After the forest has been erased it’s almost impossible to imagine what was once there.
Such outcomes—violent social upheaval, and the further shattering of vital ecosystems—reveal some of the dangers of taking up solutions without serious critical assessment. So how do we work toward solving the profound ecological problems we face in ways that don’t make matters worse?
MORE IS LESS
From today’s vantage point, 2006 was a big year. That’s when global warming was finally acknowledged by the last, and very powerful, holdouts: U.S. government and industry. The city of New Orleans still lay smashed from the previous year’s Hurricane Katrina—a storm that was likely intensified by the effects of global warming. Commissioned by the British government, the Stern Review was published, the foremost study on the grim economic impacts and financial risks of climate change. Also in 2006, Al Gore’s documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, helped convince the mainstream that global warming was real and the result of human activity. These events were backed up by reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a
