Johnson Pledges to Ditch Net Zero Biofuels Policy to Lower Food Prices

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks on during a visit to the CityFibre Training Academy in Stockton-on-Tees, Britain, on May 27, 2022. (James Glossop/Pool via Reuters)

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that he will commit to reducing biofuel production in the UK in a bid to combat skyrocketing food prices at home and abroad.

Critics have said it will hardly “make a difference to the cost of living crisis” and urged Johnson to commit to a “radical U-turn on green policy.”

Johnson said that the government has committed to a £372 million package of support to help countries hit by rising global food costs and shortages of fertilizer. He called on G7 leaders to review their own biofuel use.

“While [Russian President] Vladimir Putin continues his futile and unprovoked war in Ukraine and cravenly blockades millions of tonnes of grain, the world’s poorest people are inching closer to starvation,” said Johnson in a statement on Friday, stressing that the measures were to ensure people in poor countries have access to grain.

“The Government has put in place an unprecedented package of support to help the most vulnerable households in the UK deal with the rising cost of living,“ he said, adding that ”from emergency food aid to reviewing our own biofuel use, the UK is playing its part to address this pernicious global crisis.”

Net Zero Targets

Used to produce E10 fuel, biofuel was rolled out in 2021 in an effort to cut “greenhouse gas emissions and meet our ambitious net-zero targets.”

About 96,000 hectares of agricultural land in the UK are used to grow crops such as wheat and maize for bioenergy, representing 1.6 percent of the arable land in the country, according to a government report. 

The New Scientist has argued that scrapping biofuel mandates can help to avoid a food price shock, due to the lack of grain exports down due to the Ukraine war.

Environmentalism skeptic Ben Pile, co-founder of the Climate Resistance blog, told The Epoch Times by email that there is a “desperate need for a radical U-turn on green policy, to undo many years of Westminster’s intransigence.”

“The [prime minister] can blame Putin as much as he likes, but the reality is that the cross-party consensus on climate change put green Utopian ideals before debate, democracy, and the public’s interest time after time. And now that the green agenda has hit an entirely foreseeable bump in the road, it has caused a crisis that nobody currently sitting in Westminster is capable of solving,” he added.

Craig Mackinlay, chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of MPs, told The Telegraph that “We need to look at a lot of these greenwash proposals and consider: Are they truly green?

“Wouldn’t production of foodstuffs be a more primary goal for the land? I think the Government would be well served to look very carefully at many of these environmental policies again,” he added.

Pile said he believes that claims of the prime minister “doing a U-turn on a central plank are probably overstated.”

“Johnson reportedly is going to call for 10 percent reduction in biofuel use at the G7 conference. But if that is correct, given that E10 petrol is 10 percent biofuel, this means reducing the mandated 10 percent to just 9 percent. This is hardly going to make a difference to the cost of living crisis,” said Pile.

Last October Johnson told investors that “Green is good. Green is right. Green works,” encouraging them to put their money into green companies.

“But now we see an admission from him that green is expensive, wrong, and doesn’t work. Some people have been pointing out that the green policy agenda was bound to end in failure for a long time, but have been excluded from political debates. The previous Conservative government for example, knew that prices were rising, and stole the opposition’s policy of a price cap in 2017, and then declared the Net Zero agenda just two years later,” said Pile.