Faced with the obvious problems of the called first-generation bio-fuels (derived from crops like sugar cane, maize, soya and palm oil) – for example their zero or negative energy efficiency – industry and governments, helped by some academic researchers talk of a second generation that would overcome those problems and also the issue of competition with food crops. Among the "solutions" proposed, cellulose ethanol stands out, referring to fuel production from cellulose, via harvest and forage residues from animal foods and pasture, or else directly from trees planted for the purpose.

Things are not so easy as they sound in the propaganda. The main reason it is hard to use cellulose for ethanol is the same reason why people cannot eat wood, pasture or grain-stalks : we do not have the enzymes necessary to process cellulose, exploit its nutrients and turn them into energy. Making ethanol from cellulose demands more energy than the resulting ethanol renders. A lot more. Of course, for the government of George W.Bush and others, who assert that they will use pasture to make fuels, this is not necessarily a problem. Being subsidised and representing an excellent "environmentalist" facade by diminishing oil-dependence, even if only in theory, they offer public relations gains for both industry and government. In terms of global warming, the environment and the interests of the majority of the population – who pay for the subsidies – the relation is opposite : everyone loses.

Another problem for processing fuels from pasture, harvest residues and above all from trees is the lignine content, another fundamental substance in vegetable metabolism but one that not even enzymes can digest : only some bacterias and fungi. For this reason one of the objectives of the industries trying to establish tree monocultivation for cellulose production, both for paper and for fuels, is to experiment with genetically manipulated trees so as to reduce the lignine content. This, which seems so practical to industry, is fatal should GM trees be set free in the environment : the contamination would mean the weakening of wild trees and the dispersion of contaminating pollen would last not just during the planting period but, as in the case of GM crops, the whole life of the tree.

Arborgen, one of the leaders in the tragic field of GM trees, has extensive research into this kind of tree. In 2007 it set out to acquire the nurseries of important related companies like International Paper, MeadWestvaco and Rubicon in the United States, New Zealand and Australia with the intention of broadening its research and development for fuel production. Among the bundle of false mutually-supporting reasons (for example that ethanol from cellulose would be more effective than first generation cellulose) for the spread of GM trees is an argument the industry deploys to justify the accompanying use of "Terminator" technology, making "suicide plants" as a method of preventing contamination.

GM plants figure as a fundamental component of the development of second generation bio-fuels along with so-called synthetic biology. Synthetic biology proposes building pieces and biological systems that do not exist in the natural world or redesigning biological systems to perform new functions. It is "extreme genetic engineering" and by its own nature (or its absence of nature), the effects of its interaction with natural living things could also be extreme.

Investing in this new technology we find businesses like the biotechnology companies Amyris and Genencor (a sub-division of the food company Danisco) or the Danish company Novozymes, that, via synthetic biology processes, have manipulated enzymes, bacteria and fungi especially to process cellulose aimed at the bio-fuels industry. Novozymes has a research contract in Brazil with the Sugar Cane Technology Centre to process sugar cane waste. Syngenta also works in Brazil on GM processes for the cane industry.

A more extreme focus is taken by Synthetic Genomics, geneticist Craig Ventner’s company, that is trying to build artificial living organisms from scratch for use to accelerate processing agro-industrial fuels or else directly to produce fuels or other chemicals and drugs for pharmaceutical use. According to the ever-arrogant Craig Ventner, quoted in the New Scientist review, synthetic biology "will be routine for the production of just about everything". The environmental, economic, social and ethical impacts of building artificial living organisms are tremendous, but according to Ventner, they can be regulated via "voluntary" codes of conduct by the companies themselves.

Bio-fuels will not be able under any scenario to substitute oil based fuels (a weak 5-8% diversification of all fossil fuels is estimated) which only brings extraordinary profits to the same multinationals that control oil civilization. But what they categorically will do is bring a new recolonization of the Third World using up land and cheap or slave labour, spiced up with a broad spectrum of new and powerful environmental risks.

Based on the "Peak Soil+Peak Oil = Peak Spoils" report available at www.etcgroup.org

Silvia Ribeiro is a researcher for Grupo ETC
(http://www.alainet.org/active/22057〈=es) 

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