Tamra Gilbertson is one of the founders of Carbon Trade Watch, a former project of the Transnational Institute (TNI), and co-author of Carbon Trading: How it works and why it fails. She has been active in the project since 2001 and was a founding member of the Durban Group for Climate Justice. She is trained in photography and film-making and was a co-director of The Carbon Connection. She has been published in the New Internationalist, Opciones and Diagonal. She received a Teamsters Union Scholarship from 1995 to 1998 and the Samuel Rubin Young Fellowship Award in 2004.
Agrofuels
The rush for ‘biofuels’ is already causing serious damage. Far from being sustainable, the spread of what are more accurately called ‘agrofuels’ – liquid fuels produced from biomass grown in large-scale monocultures – is compromising biodiversity and fuelling human rights violations.
As the industry expands, it is encouraging intensified, industrial agriculture, providing a new promotional vehicle for GM crops, and posing a serious threat to food sovereignty. The argument that these ‘biofuels’ will mitigate climate change is unproven – indeed, the destruction of rainforests, peatlands and other ecosystems to make way for agrofuel plantations may well accelerate global warming.
This document focuses on particular types of ‘biofuel’ which we prefer to call agrofuel because of the intensive, industrial way it is produced, generally as monocultures, often covering thousands of hectares, most often in the global South.
Also by Tamra Gilbertson
- Upsetting the Offset December 2009
- Climate Justice for a Changing Planet: Beyond Carbon Trading December 2009
- Beyond Carbon Markets December 2009
- Carbon Con December 2009
- FACT SHEET: What's at stake in Copenhagen December 2009
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