ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses any of the issues that follow: approaches to environmental sustainability; community organisation; and political alternatives. G. Monbiot argues that the adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster. His reasoning, briefly, is that to sustain prevailing rates of fuel consumption by motorists would require so much acreage of land for the biomass crops that widespread famine would ensue. New computer-controlled furnaces and reactors already exist to attract fuel, heat and electricity from biomass. Professor Paul Kruger went on to say that making slightly larger nuclear power stations would generate enough surplus electricity to run hydrogen production cleanly. It could also be sold to a national network of hydrogen filling stations for fuel cells in cars. S. Pacala and R. Socolow claim that even though some alternatives such as hydrogen-fuelled cars themselves involve environmental problems adopting just a few of these could stabilise levels of global greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
