Fitzsimons Jeanette: Sustainable Biofuel Bill — First Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Sustainable Biofuel Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:656;Page:5260] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 I move  
That the Sustainable Biofuel Bill be now read a first time. 
 At the appropriate time I intend to move that this bill be referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee. 
Biofuel made from a range of plant and animal materials has been hailed as our solution to peak oil and climate change and condemned as the cause of mass starvation and the final destruction of natural ecosystems. Both are true and neither is true. Both arguments are extremist and ignore the huge differences between fuels made from specially grown crops and fuels made from wastes or grown on land unsuitable for food production. The idea that it is OK to feed good human food like grains into motorcars while people are starving shows what happens when someone pursues a single-minded goal excludes all other considerations and totally loses sight of the big picture. 
It also shows the abject failure of the market to allocate scarce goods when there are very big differences in ability to pay. There is only so much agricultural land available so there is an absolute limit on how much grain can be produced in the world. We can increase yields with clever management but we can never overcome the fact that there are limits. There will never be enough to feed all human mouths and all the world’s vehicles. When it comes to market competition between the fuel tanks of the wealthy nations and mouths of the hungry who cannot afford to pay much for food it is obvious who will win. In this context unrestricted biofuels can mean genocide. 
The competition between vehicles and living space for orang-utans and other endangered wildlife is even more unequal. If we try to expand the area of available land to provide both food and fuels what will give? It will be the few remaining wild areas the areas of biodiversity and naturalness with no votes and few to speak for them. Already we have lost so much old growth forest in South-east Asia and the Pacific because profits can be made from timber sales from using the land to grow palm oil trees for biofuels and from the palm kernel which is used in our dairy industry as a supplementary feed on high-intensity farms. My colleague Catherine Delahunty has a bill waiting for its first reading that deals with the timber issue by prohibiting unsustainably logged timber from entering New Zealand and undercutting New Zealand foresters who log sustainably. This bill ensures that biofuel made from palm oil will not qualify for subsidy in New Zealand. 
Yet we should not let those very serious risks blind us to the opportunities to make fuel from a range of agricultural and forestry wastes and low-value by-products. Sustainable options in New Zealand include tallow from meatworks and ethanol from a range of agricultural and processing wastes including whey from the dairy industry. As technology matures in the future fuels from our large quantity of wood waste would come from the forestry industry and from algae grown on sewage ponds with the double value of faster better sewage treatment and fuel production. 
The premier science journal  
Science 
 has just published a year-long study by 11 specialists in technology energy systems climate ecology and policy development who resolved their initially differing positions and all agreed that “Biofuels can be produced in large quantities [in the US] and have multiple benefits but only if they come from feedstocks produced with low life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions as well as minimal competition with food production.” They list such feedstocks as including but not being limited to perennial plants grown on degraded land abandoned for agriculture crop residues sustainably harvested wood and forestry residues double crops and mixed cropping systems of energy and food together and municipal and industrial wastes. 
That is why I indicated to the Labour Government last year that the Greens would not support its biofuel obligation legislation unless it contained clauses setting out criteria for sustainability. We worked together on the wording of those clauses and refined the bill at the select committee and that wording was passed into law last year. The new Government does not support a mandatory obligation and it repealed the law substituting a subsidy for biofuels. For ethanol the subsidy is achieved by exempting those who produce ethanol from petrol excise tax and for bio-diesel which is most likely to be sold as a blend with petroleum fuels there is a subsidy for the production of the fuel. 
However in repealing last year’s legislation a new problem was created as sustainability criteria were repealed with it. Those involved in setting up a New Zealand industry are afraid that when they have committed the capital and have invested in doing the right thing someone will undercut them by using soy beans which could be feeding people or palm oil grown by clearing tropical forests. I received a message from Lindsay Fergusson of Ecodiesel a firm set up to make tallow and bio-diesel. He said “We feel there should be sustainability rules. It shouldn’t be left open to the industry how they feel about them. What is being proposed is perfectly reasonable and the industry should have some standards around it.” I welcome his support. New Zealand’s clean green reputation is too important to be besmirched by accusations that we are destroying forests and starving people when we do not need to. Our big advantage is we have so much primary production self-generating the residues that can be used sustainably for fuel although we must always remember that the quantity is not unlimited and we still need to take serious measures to use fuel more efficiently. 
This bill amends the Energy (Fuels Levies and References) Act 1989 by adding the sustainability clauses with appropriate amendments that were law last year. Firstly it requires that biofuels must show a substantial—not less than 35 percent—reduction in greenhouse gases compared with petroleum fuels. There is no reason we would go to all this trouble and expense to subsidise a fuel that leaves us hardly better off in terms of our greenhouse gas emissions. Fonterra raised the point with me that the whey used to make ethanol and sold to Gull Petroleum as a petrol extender may struggle at some times of the year to achieve that 35 percent reduction depending on how much of the life cycle cost of milk production one attributes to the whey. I am very open to discussing at select committee whether fuels made from genuine waste products which would create a disposal problem if not used for fuel should have that condition relaxed. It was intended to stop scams like the US corn-to-ethanol industry some of which creates more greenhouse gas to produce the ethanol than it saves in avoided petroleum. 
The second requirement in the bill is that production of biofuel does not compete with food production. It specifies that by using a by-product from food production such as tallow or whey it does not contravene this provision and neither does oilseed grown in rotation with food crops. In this situation the seedcake is used for animal feed so the competition with human food is minimal. Thirdly the production of biofuel must not reduce biodiversity or adversely affect land of high conservation value. 
It is not possible to specify in legislation a bright line to separate sustainable and unsustainable biofuels. The detail must be left to regulations. The regulation-making provision is in clause 4 which inserts new section 34C. Regulations will specify how to assess life cycle carbon emissions how to determine whether land is suitable for food production and how to define land of high conservation value. We know that those regulations can be drafted quickly because they were well under way when the Government repealed the previous legislation. The previous Minister of Energy David Parker and I met with officials from the Ministry of Economic Development and the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority to discuss international precedents for such regulations and how quickly they could be achieved. Those regulations would probably be in place now if the legislation had not been repealed and work stopped but it was very good to hear from the Minister earlier today that it has started again in preparation for the passing of this bill. I commend this bill to the House and I thank the Government for its support.