Now that Bliar and Bush have jumped on the biofuels bandwagon, it is really time to wonder whether it's actually a good idea.

Ideally, of course, it would be best to turn agricultural waste into ethanol and use that as fuel. Pilot projects in this direction are running in places like Sweden, Canada, and Cuba. Spain, I read recently, want to turn megatons of orange peel from their juice factories into bioethanol.

But in practice, at the moment, most of the support for biofuels in the US and UK goes into actually growing crops specifically to be turned into fuel, as they do in Brazil as well.

This week, George Monbiot has argued that the latter kind of biofuel program does a lot more harm than good and that it should be banned until truly "green" programs can be scaled up to industrial level. Essentially he argues that if you burn down forests in order to grow crops for a biofuel program, you produce more CO2 than you would using plain old fossil fuels instead. And you're helping to eradicate the Orang Utan. Well, that's my short summary. Read the full comment at:

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2043727,00.html