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       The New Geoeconomics of Biofuels: Lessons Still Unlearned

      Since the 1992 Rio summit on the environment and climate, the subject of biofuels has shadowed the global debate on the triple crises of global energy insecurity, global climate change, and global poverty. This has created a gaping hole that has allowed transnational corporations to step in to shape the contours and direction of the debate. Indeed, the corporate world saw the triple crises as heaven-sent. They reassured the world that the gains from the new life-science revolution would solidify the geopolitical and energy security of nations, substantially reducing greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions and stabilizing the global climate, creating millions of green jobs, and lifting up billions of people from grinding poverty through the promotion of rural development and income generation.

      According to the transnationals, the post-petroleum bio-economy will usher in a new era where all countries will rely on green liquid and solid sources of energy without fear of causing anthropogenic climate change, without fear of vulnerability to supply disruptions or global energy price volatility, and without fear of the political use of energy. The imagery and the propaganda that followed led to the global transport ethanol production soaring from 17 billion liters in 2000 to 52 billion liters in 2007, and biodiesel production growing from less than 1 billion to over 11 billion liters.¹ Indeed, the euphoric excitement in the potential of biofuels was such that the International Energy Agency (IEA, the international propaganda mouthpiece for industrial countries) projected that biofuels could constitute 23 percent of global transport fuels by 2050 through the conversion into biofuels of 1,500 metric tons of crop and forest residues per year, plus bioenergy crops grown on 375–750 million hectares of land (a hectare equals about 2.47 acres). This would be a necessary precondition to stabilize atmospheric carbon concentration at 450 parts per million (ppm) and keep global warming increases below 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.² Of course, this conjectural projection tells us nothing about the effects of such enormous production of biofuels on biodiversity, environment, and the atmosphere or on human food and animal feed production.

      In any event, for those who must focus on capital accumulation, their obsessive preoccupation has been on how to adroitly create the subjective conditions that will combine with the urgency of the very real environmental crisis in such a way that biofuels will be seen as the way to solve the crisis but will also allow capital to solve its own crisis of overaccumulation. One objective factor facing industry is the presumed oil peak. Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the bourgeois world has been haunted by the prospect of fossil resource depletion, something that found empirical expression in what is known as the “Hubbert peak.” In 1956, Royal Dutch Shell geologist King Hubbert developed a useful mathematical model that allowed him to assess the length of time it would take for the United States to use its petroleum resources before the resources begin to decline. In its simplest form, the hypothesis Hubbert formulated states that the duration of the supply of petroleum depends on the rates of discoveries, production, consumption, and the delivery infrastructure put in place. During the pre-peak period, production increases in a linear fashion because of new discoveries and the increasing deployment of capital to extract and deliver the resources. However, because petroleum resources are nonrenewable and finite, maximum production eventually peaks at a given point in the extraction process. Then, during the post-peak period, production of petroleum begins to gradually decrease, threatening the fossil-based economy. Interestingly, Hubbert’s depiction of the rates of discoveries, production, and consumption of petroleum in the United States was almost so precise that American petroleum production peaked at 9.6 million barrels a day in 1970, and then steadily declined to 5.1 million barrels a day in 2006, transforming the United States from having been a net exporter of oil in the 1950s to being a net importer of oil since the 1970s, importing 63 percent of its petroleum requirements by the turn of the century, even though shale oil discoveries and the fracking boom have now temporarily created illusionary abundance.³

      The politicization of petroleum by Arab and other radical regimes in the 1970s, coupled with supply disruptions owing to natural conditions or social instability, as in Nigeria in the early 2000s, has strengthened the Hubbert peak hypothesis. Indeed, it has acquired such status that it haunts petroleum-importing OECD countries. These countries have now come to grudgingly view the Hubbert peak as the essential expression of the limits of

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