GM-free Scotland

News | August '07 | Second-generation disasters...

... self-digesting plants? ... floppy trees?

The sudden headlong rush into first generation biofuels has been worrying: food-crops and good agricultural land are to be used to fuel cars; a final justification has been found for all the major GM crops no one wants; South America is to become a modern-day GM colony of the US empire (see THE TRANSGENISATION OF LATIN AMERICA – News, May, 2007) and something very similar is about to happen on the other side of the globe thanks to Tony Blair's 'Africa Commission'. Major questions also remain over the efficiency and efficacy of these fuels (see BIOFUELS: THE SUMS DON'T ADD UP – News, May 2007).

Unfortunately, moves to develop second generation biofuels, promise to be even worse, because effects on the environment, and therefore on the carbon-balance, will be very long-term indeed.

The main second generation biofuel under investigation is lignocellulosic-to-liquid. The tough materials which keep plant stems upright and form the woody-part of trees are cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Cellulose is a carbohydrate composed of long-chains of sugar molecules. Hemicellulose consists of a whole range of complex carbohydrates which surround and protect the cellulose. Lignin is composed of long-chains of very stable sugar-derivatives which cross-link to 'glue' the cellulose together.

The value of these substances is that if cellulose and hemicellulose can be broken down to simple sugars, these can be fermented by micro-organisms to produce ethanol. The building blocks of lignin, when separated, can be used as a fuel additive to boost the octane level, or alternatively, lignin can be extracted and burnt to provide heat for processing.

Potentially, there is a lot of valuable biofuel lurking in dead wood and crop residues. However, the complex of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin forms a formidable, very stable, but flexible, supporting structure with an important biological function: it makes plants resistant to physical damage and to attack by micro-organisms and other pests.

Natural plant biomass poses a real biological barrier which prevents its disintegration, including chemical breakdown and fermentation. To produce fuels from biomass by physical means would require a huge amount of energy, much more than could be obtained from the burning of the 14-30% lignin content.

So, enter GM.

Micro-organisms can be genetically 'improved' to digest biomass more effectively, to ferment the resulting sugars more efficiently, and to tolerate high concentrations of ethanol so as to reduce the cost of distillation. Plants can be genetically 'enhanced' to grow faster, resist pests or tolerate extreme environmental conditions; as Syngenta's 'AMY797E' GM maize proves, they can even have their own enzymes to digest themselves with.

If you think this is bad, it gets worse.

Think trees.

Trees contain a lot of carbon. They require very little tending and you can harvest the old and dead bits leaving the rest to grow more carbon for you. Fast-growing species like willow, poplar and eucalyptus have received a lot of attention. The drawback is that wood has an awful lot of lignin, making it exceptionally strong, and exceptionally hard to break-down.

Now, think GM trees.

Besides increased growth rate and resistance to pests, trees can be genetically redesigned to grow with less pesky lignin and more handy cellulose.

Trees with 'floppy' genes will of course be physically weaker and prone to attack by pests. This might not matter if they were to be harvested as soon as practicable for conversion to biofuel, but trees live a very long time and every year they produce whole trees full of pollen at a great height which travels a very long distance (hundreds of miles); the spread of pollen will be higher if it comes from a stand of concentrated GM trees than it would from natural loners (see GM BLOWING IN THE WIND – News, August 2007).

Three very major areas of concern have been raised about the consequences of trees-to-liquid-biofuel.

  1. The long-term environmental damage caused by the spread of weakened, gene-contaminated trees could be devastating. (No doubt sterile, floppy GM trees will be churned out to keep environmentalists happy, but terminator technology will always be leaky and we could well end up with floppy, sterile trees wiping out natural populations before wiping out themselves)

  2. Increased areas of managed forests stripped of dead and dying trees and branches (these amount to around 40% of natural forest biomass) could decimate the thousands of types of fungi plus many lichens, insects, birds and mammals dependent on them.

  3. Spurred on by GM, developing countries of the South will be exploited to grow trees to fuel the cars in the affluent North. There are signs this problem is already happening, driven by the political trickery which allows companies responsible for excessive carbon-emissions in industrialised countries to 'offset' their pollution with carbon-friendly schemes elsewhere. The oil refinery of oil giant, BP, in Grangemouth is allowed to belch out carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter (linked to respiratory problems and cancer) because the Company has paid money into a scheme created by the World Bank to plant eucalyptus trees in Brazil. Villagers near the eucalyptus plantations are claiming their natural forest, and with it their medicinal plants and a lot of native culture, is dying of thirst in a land sucked dry of water by the fast-growing industrial trees.

The whole technology of second generation biofuels is showing every sign of following in the footsteps of second generation GM crops (the ones that can grow despite drought or salt, or can fill your body with the vitamins of its dreams): a lot of promises of miracles but no promises of when they will be a reality, and that may be never. The biggest danger is that GM dependent biofuel technology is a global distraction from finding real solutions to our urgent need to stop releasing carbon into our atmosphere.

OUR COMMENT

As Scottish Power prepares to jump on the biofuel bandwagon (see FARMER SCOTT POWER – News, August 2007), and Grangemouth is devastating the biodiversity of Brazil, it is time to remind the Scottish Executive that there are fast, proven ways to reduce our carbon emissions: energy-efficient technologies, carbon friendly life styles, carbon-independent power generation; organic agriculture. Scotland should lead the way, because if a small country (and you don't get much smaller than Scotland) bigger countries should be able to do it better.

Here are some interesting research findings you might use to encourage the Scottish Executive to disengage Scotland from questionable schemes to plant trees, especially GM trees, elsewhere in the world:

As Friends of the Earth New Zealand said: “If a technology, directly or indirectly destroys ecosystems which play an essential role in the Earth's carbon cycle then it risks accelerating, not mitigating, global warming.”

A world of self-digesting plants and floppy trees might be a very barren one for future generations.

SOURCE

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