Bio-Taxed

Gordon Brown's promise to increase still further the road tax on Chelsea Tractors is probably a good move - but it still misses the vital point. CO2 emissions are as a result of burning fossil fuel and surely the right thing to be doing is to encourage the use of biofuels.

At the moment a driver who uses biofuels currently pays the same road tax as does one who uses fossil fuels - and also has to contend with a punitive level of tax which generally makes biofuels more expensive than fossil fuels.

Cleaner vehicles attract lower levels of tax - which is fine, but we now have a situation where drivers producing CO2 using fossil fuels are paying less tax than ones who don't because they are using biofuels.

Where is the sense in that?

The greening of George Bush

The greening of George Bush may seem like an oxymoron. (That means a contradiction in terms, not that Bush is a moron - which he is.)

However, there are some interesting implications of his quest to rid America of its "addition to oil". The first is his plan to invest massively in bio-ethanol production - a vegetable based substitute for gasoline. This may have more to do with creating a market for their grain mountain - and baiting the votes of said farmers than any green credentials. Environmentalists will tell you that bio-ethanol is the wrong alternative fuel to be going for because of the environmental cost of producing it (biodiesel is a much better option). But the United States have very few diesel cars - unlike Europe where around a half of new car registrations are diesels.

So - given a grain mountain, a nation of gasoline driven cars, a bunch of pissed off farmers an over dependency on Iraqi oil (now there's another story), a bunch of vehicle manufacturers who say they are more interested in bio-ethanol than bio-diesel and pressure from the Christian right who are getting huffy about trashing God's planet it does seem like a plan.

But - here's the rub. Biofuels have had very little press in the environmental debate in Europe. Very few people have heard of biodiesel even though it is available right now and will run perfectly well in todays diesel vehicles. The unintended impact of his announcement is that biofuels will get a higher profile. And that in Europe that probably means biodiesel - the feedstock (oilseed rape) grows here very nicely and there is a much higher percentage of diesel vehicles on the road.

The obstacles remain a bunch of sceptical vehicle manufacturers who never do anything until the law forces them to and a mean minded chancellor whose idea of a green budget is to raise taxes on alternative fuels.

None of this changes the undisputable fact that Bush is a global menace and Blair is a smarmy arse-licking, self deluded, twat. But there is hope.