Europe finds politics and biofuels don't mix

[Valin]

Reuters:

Pete Harrison
7/5/10

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The messages are tense, angry, cajoling.
Written between 2008 and January 2010 and sent between lobbyists, scientists and high-ranking European civil servants, they hint at the intense emotions in the debate over one of Europe's most contentious environmental issues: the use of biofuels, long touted as an alternative to carbon-emitting petroleum.

But it's not how the emails are written that's important. It's what's in them -- and the fact that if it were not for transparency laws, Europe's citizens would be unaware of how vested interests have influenced the science behind a cornerstone of the continent's clean energy policy.
One of the mails calls the evolving science of biofuels "misleading"; another "arbitrary". In one, sent last November, a European civil servant calls an attempt to quantify the damage from biofuels "completely flawed and incomplete". Lobbyists pick holes in the evidence, using graphs, charts and tables. A worried official warns against "financial consequences" for farmers.

Most damaging for the European Commission is a leaked letter from the head of its own agriculture unit, Jean-Luc Demarty, in which he refers to mounting evidence that biofuels do serious harm to the climate. Unless handled carefully, Demarty writes, that scientific perspective could "kill biofuels in the EU".....(Snip)