Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have a few questions about the environmental impact of biomass and biofuels. Obviously, I am trying to learn from everybody here as well. I am not being dogmatic about this but is there not an argument that the use of biomass and biofuels can have an impact on other parts of the planet? Alternatively, have things moved for the better? I remember quite clearly being in Egypt prior to the Arab Spring where food poverty and food security were significant questions. One of the things farmers spoke about was big land masses being bought up to produce biofuels for the west. I believe this was a trigger for the Arab Spring in countries like Egypt and Tunisia. The farmers could not grow the food they needed to eat and the cost of food shot up because there was scarcity of ordinary, proper, healthy food in the region with most of the land being taken up with the production of biofuels. There is an ethical question here about the energy the First World uses at the expense of the Third World and indeed the greater impact of climate change on the Third World than on the First World. I want to tease out this issue. Is this still a concern?

Another issue I have come across recently because people have written to me about it is getting biomass from dumps. Apparently, Bord na Móna has a dump in Kildare from which it extracts biomass. What is the impact of that on the local communities and environment? Would anyone here from the Department and elsewhere comment on that?

We are trying to get all the freight carriers to move to biomass fuels but at the same time freight is responsible for more than 15% of CO2 emissions from transport. I am old enough to remember the goods trains in the good old days that went up and down the train tracks carrying Guinness, food and fuel. As a State, we should be trying to return to a massive reintroduction of trains as a means of transporting goods thereby getting freight carriers off the road. This would be a big contribution to cleaning up our air and our usage of fuel. I am more interested in the ethical arguments around biofuels.