Read here - a peer-reviewed paper recently published in AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment. The production of biofuels requires staggering amounts of fresh water, several times more than fossil-fuel energy production. Al Gore has pushed politicians and the UN towards policies favoring biofuel renewable energy as a solution to reducing human CO2 emissions, using the rationale that climate change (human CO2 "caused") will create climate refugees and climate conflict. It is highly speculative though that global warming will cause "refugees" and "conflict." In contrast, if regional shortages of fresh water develop due to biofuel production, water refugees and water conflict will most definitely occur.
"The three U.S. researchers say their results suggest that "the most water-efficient, fossil-based technologies have an EROWI one to two orders of magnitude greater [ed: better] than the most water-efficient biomass technologies, implying that the development of biomass energy technologies in scale sufficient to be a significant source of energy may produce or exacerbate water shortages around the globe and be limited by the availability of fresh water."...These findings will not be welcomed by those who promote biofuel production as a means of combating what they call "the threats posed by 'climate refugees' and 'climate conflict' to international security,"..... she identifies some of the principals in the spreading of what she calls this "alarmist rhetoric" to be various United Nations agencies, NGOs, national governments, security pundits, the popular media and -- quite specifically -- the Norwegian Nobel Committee of 2007, which, as she describes it, "warned that climate-induced migration and resource scarcity could cause violent conflict and war within and between states when it awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, Jr. and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.".....Hartmann goes on to suggest that "this beating of the climate conflict drums has to be viewed in the context of larger orchestrations in U.S. national security policy." And in this regard it doesn't take a genius to realize that the promotion of biofuels to help resolve these concerns will only exacerbate them in one of the worst ways imaginable, providing a "cure" [ed: water shortages] that is worse than the disease [ed: human CO2 emissions]."
