While I agree that greedy businesses need to be stopped from destroying rainforests and growing agrofuel crops instead of food while people are starving, banners with such simplistic and misleading messages as biofuels = deforestation = runaway climate change do no help us move towards long term sustainable solutions.

Copice woodland management for example is a sustainable use of a renewable resource and provides biofuels that don't equal deforstation and runaway climate change. Biofuels ARE going to play are increasingly important role in any long term provision of energy and always have (even during the last 150 years of the human races exploitation of fossil fuels, biofuels have remaine a very important energy source).

If you think biofuels have no place in our lives then you are condeming us to death by coal and nuclear power.

Don't demonise biofuels in peoples minds when the real enemy here is capitalism and the way they chose to maximise profit from unsustainable use of the worlds resources.

Biofuels are a term which is generally used to describe only liquid biofuels, primarily for transport. The vast majority of biofuels are agrofuels produced on large-scale monocultures (with only a tiny small percentage coming from waste vegetable oil).

Coppice woodland for bioenergy is not for biofuels - you can use it for heat and power, but it's not possible to make it into liquid transport fuels (not without using far more energy than is gained). There is major research into turning wood into liquids, and that involves research into GM microbes and GM trees, with significant risks involved and without any major breakthrough so far.

Many of the grassroots organisations in the global South which are strongly opposed to our increasing use of agrofuels represent communities which have always relied on some forms of bioenergy and want to be able to do so sustainably in future. Sadly, their ability to do so, as well as their food sovereignty, is being undermined by agrofuel plantations to supply European and U.S. cars. It's also worth remembering that, as an energy source, biodiesel and ethanol are pretty useless. Compared to many forms of wind and solar, bioenergy offers relatively low energy yields, and using energy-intensive processes for turning it into biodiesel or ethanol leaves little or no net energy at all.

Our large agrofuel companies have long benefited from a 'green image' of 'biofuels' which they sell and which are anything but 'green'. Unless we challenge this false image, I don't see how we can hope to stop what is probably becoming the fastest and most extensive land-grab by companies, including agri-business and oil companies, in history, particularly in the global South.

While it is true that most use of the word in recent years has been in reference to liquid fuels, biofuel certainly encompasses other forms of biomass including solids and gas.

"Biofuel can be broadly defined as solid, liquid, or gas fuel consisting of, or derived from biomass. "

"Biofuels are any kind of fuel made from living things, or from the waste they produce. This is a very long and diverse list, including: wood, wood chippings and straw, pellets or liquids made from wood, biogas (methane) from animals' excrement, ethanol, diesel or other liquid fuels made from processing plant material or waste oil"

"Biofuels are fuels derived from crop plants, and include biomass that’s directly burned, biodiesel from plant seed-oil, and ethanol (or methanol) from fermenting grain, grass, straw or wood."

Coppice woodland DOES provide biofuel and correctly managed it does so in a sustainable way.

Biofuels are NOT automatically worse than fossil fuels in terms of their carbon footprint, that depends on how they are produced, processed, transported and the use they are put to. Big business agrifuels are certainly a major threat but lets not generalise so much that we demonise truely sustainable solutions in the process.

Fair enough, cut-throat agribusiness biofuels need exposing and yes they are causing massive deforestation in the global south. But demonising ALL biofuels so simplistically is daft and counter productive.

We need to focus on reducing demand, reducing private transport, and gearing down to a fossil fuel free future. This will inevitably involve Biofuels, to power tractors, agricultural machinery, public transport and vital freight. Once you've made this reduction, you can meet the demand with natively grown fuels. Algae-oil biofuel also needs promoting and developing, since it can grow in saline water and not have to compete with food crops. You need to highlight the alternatives and solutions - I haven't seen much at all from biofuelwatch or the anit biofuel brigade on this.

So, what DO you propose? Electric vehicles would so seriously stretch our capability to generate our needs with renewables, that you might as well say yes to nuclear and be done with it. Hydrogen's a way off and has the same problem in that you've got to produce the H either from Electroysis or from gas / biogas. And where does Biofuelwatch stand on Biogas?

So DO continue to question and challenge the imported agri fuels, but don't tar all biofuels with the same brush. And I'd consider changing some of your slogans to reflect a more intelligent and considered perspective of what is a complex issue. By the way, you should probably also stop eating meat, dairy, and next time you get a bag of chips, check where the oil it was in fried came from - probably GM rapeseed or palm oil from indonesia.....

i'm not sure where the quotation used above comes from? although it is true that 'biofuels' can be used as a label for all sorts of energy sources involving carbon-based life-forms, strictly speaking you need to be careful. a bioenergy expert told me in an interview that all of the sources referred to above should be called 'bioenergy', which encompasses biogas, biomass, biofuels etc. biofuels as commonly understood are those agrifuels: the government's definition of 'biofuel' is fuel made from crops grown specifically for conversion into energy products, rather than the use of wastes (whether from forestry or agriculture or food 'surpluses') for energy production. it is confusing, but i'm not aware of any 'biofuel' products that are made sustainably from wastes, other than chip fat bio-diesel, and there's not enough of that going around to meet the BINDING target to source 10% of transport fuel from biofuels, a target which is guaranteed to promote the wrong kind of biofuel production...