Biofuels’ unbalanced equations: Misleading statistics, networked knowledge and measured parameters

Abstract

The independence of claims that biofuels can mitigate climate change is assessed using environmental history. The development of professional and institutional networks that produced both energy demand models and soil, land and terrain databases and models is traced, and the acquisition of significant unacknowledged social power is examined. Data literacy’s critical perspective identified sources of embedded distortions, unacknowledged bias and inherent weaknesses. Claims of the robustness, accuracy, objectivity and originality of globalised analyses in general, and global biofuels projections in particular, are challenged. The effectiveness of policy based upon these results is discussed.