“It wasn’t me sir… It was him!”

pete quentin, 6 May 2008

Launching the buck on biofuel targets across the Atlantic, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson’s article in the Guardian last week stated “European biofuel production is having only a minimal effect on global prices”. (Roughly translated as: “It wasn’t me sir!”) But he warned “large-scale biofuel production, especially in the US, may be one of the factors pushing up global food prices as it diverts resources from food production.” (Roughly translated as: “It was him!”)

Biofuel targets are fast becoming the thorn in the side of EU energy and environment policymakers, with huge implications for both environment and trade. However, Mandelson has come up with a new tactic – blame it all on the consumerist Americans, those oil guzzling, Kyoto avoiding, mother earth haters! If there’s an environmental crisis they must be to blame.
So called “green issues”, like the EU’s biofuels targets, are assuming an increasingly transcendent character to the extent that driving a car and accepting an extra bag in Tesco have become immoral acts. Environmentalism is the newest faith. And you can’t reason with faith. Extracting a rational debate from some followers is like trying to extricate eco-warriors from the heady heights of their leafy tree houses (or more recently from the tops of governmental buildings). It is emotional and fraught with noisy publicity. You stand a good chance of being pocked in the eye with a stray branch and hit with a moral motto or shrill slogan. Green is more than emotive in today’s political climate.
Of course politics in general is increasingly about emotions, “messages” and “promises”. Productive debate has given way to snappy sound-bites, with sound argument and detailed analysis compromised by the need to react to 24-hour media. But the biofuels issue is especially complicated and EU policy has huge implications for world trade and international development, which will have the greatest (or worst) affects on the least well off. If the Commission must involve itself in such areas it should at least take care to examine in detail the wider implications of these hugely complicated issues and not shun difficult debate.
Mandelson does his best with a thorny issue. He attempts to soften the biofuels blowout with a promise to constrain the growing market with EU bureaucracy (which so often smothers initiative, a useful outcome when the initiative is unpopular/unproductive). Mandelson stated, “to avoid making the switch to biofuels an environmentally unsustainable stampede…a certification system [will ensure that biofuels] meet emissions-reduction, land-use and environmental-impact standards.” But, in case that doesn’t work, he has got an early dig in at the Americans, the global community’s favourite whipping boy on the subject of the environment. He is preparing to boot yet another uncomfortable issue into the long grass across the pond because the EU’s involvement in increased usage of biofuels, resulting in the inflation of global food prices is morally and politically damaging.
Biofuel targets really are troubled, when even a Commissioner suggests that “they are no panacea; they have their own environmental costs.” Yes, we know that…with increasing certainty…but…ummm….“It wasn’t the EU, Sir! It was those nasty consumerist Yanks!” Just further evidence of the EU as an institution for pooling responsibility, not for action, but in order to dilute blame before collectively apportioning it elsewhere.
By Claire Daley