Today Margaret Wente goes
on the hunt for a pro-business enviro-capitalist to put up against the
sandal-wearing, tree-hugging cartoons she draws so often in the pages of The
Globe. Wente, who regularly lambasts her straw environmentalists for promoting
sappy ideology over hard facts and science, begins her promo piece for Jon
Dwyer’s Flax Fuel enterprise with this sentence: “Flax fuel can operate in any diesel engine
and emits no greenhouse gases.”
Fact: Flax is a biofuel. Biofuels emit greenhouse gases when burned: “Engines running on biofuels emit
carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary source of greenhouse gas
emissions, just like those running on gasoline”.
Those emissions are
simply mitigated or neutralized – to varying degrees; since plants need carbon
dioxide to grow, the net impact of biofuel emissions is reduced throughout their life
cycle. They are also renewable. However, “because it takes fossils fuels – such as
natural gas and coal – to make biofuels, they are not quite ‘carbon neutral’”.
Or as Wikipedia puts it, “Although the burning of biodiesel produces carbon dioxide emissions
similar to those from ordinary fossil fuels, the plant feedstock used in the
production absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when it grows”.
Perhaps Ms. Wente
meant to say something like that. Or
perhaps her grasp of science is a bit weak.
In any case a clarification would be helpful.
Technically, the only "zero emissions
cars" are battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. But in the same article Wente describes
electrics as “mirages” because “from the paint on in”, they “are made of
oil”. Apparently this doesn’t hold true
for the flax fuel versions. Similarly,
she says the new breed of environmentalists neither want nor need subsidies –
which are bad. We await her column
calling for an end to the billions in oil industry subsidies.
Perhaps we can’t fault
Ms. Wente. Really, for her, it’s all
about honing her image in the culture wars - facts, and logical consistency just get in the
way. For example, just a
couple months ago, bio fuels were terrible:
“Take
the sorry history of biofuels, which were supposed to green up the world by
substituting for fossil fuels. The rush to biofuels has caused massive
deforestation, disrupted commodity markets and pushed food prices to record
highs”.
But apparently today
they look good on her. Margaret has given us a captain of industry to use as a
foil for all those sorry enviro-types – one who has not only reversed the
terrible history of biofuels, but created one that
‘can operate in any diesel engine’ and emit ‘no greenhouse gases’ at
all. Remarkable.
