British ministers to review climate change plan

The Guardian is reporting that a new report blaming biofuels for much of the recent sharp rise in global food prices is bound to force a change in both the UK and EU's plans to fight global greenhouse gas emissions.

Like in the US, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also took the foolish step of making corn-based ethanol a major part of their plan to reduce emissions. The result has been to drive the demand for corn up dramatically. A basic rule of economics is that when the demand rises, so does the price, and that factor has caused more than 100 million people worldwide (by most estimates) to go hungry.

The Gallagher Report states that there is a place for biofuel in the strategy to reduce world greenhouse gas emissions, but the emphasis should be put on developing what it calls second-generation biofuels - ones that use fibrous plans as the source (what's often called cellulose-based ethanol in the US). Food crops for ethanol, the report suggests, should only be grown on "marginal" croplands - fields that do not yield enough crops to be commercially viable for food production.

Really it seems like common sense not to use food crops for fuel. Instead of building ethanol plants to turn corn into fuel (a process that basically uses as much fossil fuel to produce ethanol as it replaces), that money should be spent on research to make cellulose ethanol commercially viable, it is good to see a major government report reach that conclusion.