Food for fuel

From the Food for Great Health Blog in Los Angeles:

Switching from petroleum oil to plant oil (biofuel) could go some way to getting the Kyoto Protocol on climate change rolling. Feeding our cars on fuel that comes from living plants seems a friendly enough idea. Fossil fuel comes from plants long dead, locked deep in the ground. Burning oil from this source releases back into the atmosphere carbon dioxide which was captured eons ago.

If nothing is done to prevent or slow global warming by reduction of carbon dioxide the planet could see catastrophic changes within 20 years. Some crops growing in the Mediterranean region may not be able to adapt as the climate becomes more like that of a sub-tropical zone..

The biotechnology industry is reasearching how to modify genes in fuel crops to produce a plant which will render more calorific value. A pre-accession report on the impact of GMOs and their regulation in Malta found that GMOs approved by the EU such as rapeseed could have a detrimental effect on the local environment. The report emphasised that any applications to carry out deliberate release of such products should be subject to the most stringent boundary and safety regulations.

No studies have yet been carried out to establish whether genetically modified rapeseed would hybridise with related species in the Maltese environment. There is a lack of mathematical models for predicting whether a particular species will become invasive in the Maltese ecology.