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Opaque ICOMIA
The first reaction of nearly all fossil fuel-using sectors is to identify biofuels as their key and most promising solution to the pressure to respond to climate change. It therefore isn’t surprising that ICOMIA/Ricardo’s report reaches this finding too. But it’s a standard failing of any study that looks ‘one sector at a time’ because it omits that the same finite and constrained supply of biomass isn’t sufficient for the combined needs of trucking, aviation, leisure marine, merchant shipping, agriculture, steel, cement etc, even before wider pressures on that biomass (feeding a growing population, substituting oil in plastics, creating negative emissions) have been taken into account.
By focusing on today and the immediate next 10 years, the study avoids having to confront/acknowledge this fundamental obstacle to their conclusions. This is not a problem that benefits from being looked at in such a short-term window. Instead, it has to start with a vision of the zero-emission
