It seems appropriate, in a week that petrol and diesel prices have been hiked up, once again (this time by 2 pence per litre), and amid comment from industry analysts that they cannot rule out the Government raising fuel prices to £1.20 per litre in the current lifetime of the administration, to reference an article recently written by Nick Reeves, Executive Director of The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM).

You can read the full text for yourself but, in essence, he lambasts the Government for possibly the most irresponsible and ill-thought out piece of legislation of its time in power; the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation, a protocol which, from April 14th this year, obliged all fuel suppliers to add at least 5% to fuel from sustainable renewable resources. In practice this means bio-fuel.

Now, unlike in the USA and Canada, we don’t have any Flexible Fuel vehicles over here, so 5% is about all that our vehicles can support… thankfully, since across the pond, where they can accommodate up to 85% in some instances, you are in the ridiculous situation of depriving one family of edible grain for a year every time you fill up the tank.

The government will argue that we actually need to increase the percentage from 5 to at least 30% in order to create fuel security but with the plethora of alternative fuel and energy generating technologies emerging from the green tech community, it seems a very short-sighted and, ultimately, politically suicidal strategy to not only decrease the amount of food available to the global economy but also to be responsible (in part) for the most astronomic rise in food prices we have seen in a very long time, due in no small part to scarcity that is being created by diverting grain to liquid fuel generation.

You may very reasonably be saying to yourself, “so what?” How does this affect UK plc? Well, consider this; bio-fuel generation is still in its relative infancy yet it is already creating a food crisis in over 40 countries and hundreds of millions of people are being pushed deeper into poverty and hunger. Since we stopped actually making ‘stuff’ to any significant degree a decade or two ago, that means the very people we rely on to make the stuff that we import, sell and consume are being pushed to the brink and will severely challenge the abilities of some of our best corporations to ride the storm.

The real question is, “what can we do about it?” well, that’s a trickier one. The office of the UK Transport Secretary is keeping things under review and, of course, is trying to focus attention away from the issue by waxing lyrical about the train links programme… which no-one really feels they need either. In this instance, however, perhaps the commercial sector does need to lobby the Government for a crisis meeting.

At a time when the US President is actually making waves about (and making ‘proper’ money available for) electric vehicle (EV) technology, our own Prime minister needs also to be looking down other avenues, otherwise this country will face a second economic crisis and this time it may just be too late to spend our way out of it, especially considering that the Government’s capital spending was supposed to rise by £33 billion this year and yet, approaching mid-point of Q3, only £12 billion has actually seen the light of the day!

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