Hello Fritz, Bruno and all
Hello Bruno,
thanks for that posting!
when i look at a major sponsor of this event,Nova Gmbh,i cant help
to think at NOVA,a Dinosponsored PR organizer,working so hard to
deny global warming!
I could be wrong and anyway its not important anymore!
At this point i would like to see Keith in the ranks to get a first
hand look at the merits of this congress,after all its him who
worked so hard to get the biofuels known an in the rigth directions.
My call is to everyone on this list to sponsor a trip for Keith to
attend this congress,so we get a qualified feedback on this german
brew.Its worth to me to pledge a couple hundred bucks to help pay,so
Keith could attend the congress!
Golly! :-0
Well, thanks for saying such nice things and having so much faith in
me Fritz, but I have to decline. There's really no chance that I'd be
in a position to take about a week off from our commitments here in
September for an SVO conference in Germany, or for anything else I
can think of.
Anyway I don't think there'd be any need. I don't think there's any
mystery about this conference, it's the same as all the others, the
same old industry stuff. They provide some material at their website
but I don't see a need for a critique. I think I've already done
that, mostly, in some of the material in the SVO section at JtF, and
here:
How much fuel can we grow? How much land will it take?
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html#howmuch
The rest of it would be covered by the general critique by GRAIN that
I posted the other day:
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg70355.html
[Biofuel] No to the agrofuels craze!
That's a thorough and devastating attack on industrialised biofuels,
which GRAIN aptly renames agrofuels:
We believe that the prefix bio, which comes from the Greek word for
'life', is entirely inappropriate for such anti-life devastation. So,
following the lead of non-governmental organisations and social
movements in Latin America, we do not talk about biofuels and green
energy. Agrofuels is a much better term, we believe, to express what
is really happening: agribusiness producing fuel from plants as
another commodity in a wasteful, destructive and unjust global
economy.
I agree with that. Steve Spence once said here: I have a niggling
feeling that 10 years from now, the environmentalists will be
fighting the ethanol industry tooth and nail. Anything can be done
badly, and I expect the ADM's of the world will be successful in
turning a clean renewable resource into a dirty unsustainable one...
I agreed with that too. If biofuels are supposed to be sustainable
and renewable then industrialised agriculture cannot produce biofuels
because industrialised agriculture is itself not sustainable, not in
any way. Calling what they produce biofuels is greenwash.
GRAIN, however, in re-defining as agrofuels what industry calls
biofuels, then fails to define what real biofuels are, that is, fuels
for life.
I think that's quite well defined in the JtF link above, How much
fuel can we grow? How much land will it take?, which is largely
derived from discussions here at the Biofuel list. Biofuels are
produced by small-scale, local or community-level projects using an
Appropriate Technology approach, which means that projects fit the
local context. The industrial approach does the opposite thing,
forcing the local context to fit the demands of the bottom-line, and
externalising the costs.
It's industrialised agriculture and/or colonial-era plantation
economy projects that industrial biofuels depends on, whether it's
ethanol, biodiesel, or, indeed, SVO/Plant Oil Fuels.
I've been watching the huge worldwide growth in the last 18 months to
two years of biofuels conferences and expos of all types, I get sent
all the flyers, scores and scores of them, hundreds probably, and I'm
quite sure they're a very good business venture. I just don't think
they're of any interest.
But Fritz, hey, thanks again! Really!
All best
Keith
Fritz
- Original Message -
From: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]Bruno M.
To: mailto:biofuel@sustainablelists.orgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2007 9:22 PM
Subject: [Biofuel] SVO congres sept 2007 + Trade fair nov 2007
First International Congress on Plant Oil Fuels 6
+ 7 September 2007 Erfurt Germany.
http://www.pflanzenoel-kongress.de/www.pflanzenoel-kongress.de/
( in German )
The same in English :
http://www.pflanzenoel-kongress.de/index.php?lng=enwww.pflanzenoel-k
ongress.de/index.php?lng=en
And in November also in Germany (Munich):
Oils+fats 2007
International Trade Fair for the
Production and Processing of Oils and
Fats made from Renewable Resources
20 - 22 November 2007
oils+fats is the only international B2B
exhibition that focuses on the
manufacture and processing of oils and fats