Two days ago the British government played a cruel hoax on its people.  And it’s over two weeks too late to be an April Fool prank.

From this time forward, all petrol sold in the UK must contain at least 2.5% of what the government, the media and the industries involved misleadingly call ‘biofuel’.  And think yourself lucky that you’ve got me here to tell you this.  A recent survey revealed that 90% of Britons are blissfully unaware of what is going into their tanks.

Let’s deal with the language problem first.

Bio, as a prefix, means life.  And, naturally, it has a positive image.  Advertisers in the cosmetics business, or cleaning products, are happy to find some way of sticking a ‘bio-’ prefix onto some word on the packaging of the their products.  So your average consumer is supposed to think that biofuels are something to do with life.  Far nicer idea than that associated with ‘fossil’ fuels.

But a more accurate term might be ‘agro-fuels’.  Now this is bit less attractive.  It makes one think, quite correctly, that these fuels are agricultural in origin, that they have been produced in preference to what agriculture normally produces – food.  Which is perfectly true, and we’ll come back to that in a minute.

Now one of the reasons why something like this needs a misleadingly innocuous name is the same all those other tricks of the advertising world – it’s basically a con. 

The British government (who, to be fair, are only following an EU directive) (which, to be even fairer, was something the British government supported), want to show that they are doing their bit for climate change.  If you replace the burning of fossil fuels with the burning of agro-fuels, even it’s only by one-fortieth, well, it’s a start, right? 

But see how the debate has been subtly shifted.  The question is about what we should be burning, not about whether we should be burning anything. 

Richard Branson knows a thing about diverting the public’s attention away from the real issue to what he wants them to think about.  So he had the wheeze of flying one of his Virgin Atlantic jumbos from London to Amsterdam using agro-fuel to supply one of the 4 engines.  The media obligingly focussed our attention on a technical question, a question barely any of us knew existed until then.  Had Old Beardie cracked the problem that most agro-fuels freeze up at altitude (which of course he had). 

Left unanswered, because it was never asked, was the question why you need to fly a 747 to Holland in the first place when you can get there by train at the cost of a couple more hours.  (In fact, if you’re flying out of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, the train looks a lot surer option.)

Planes have been a prominent feature if the climate change debate.  We might, with enough will, money and effort, replace carbon fuels with energy from solar, wind, tide, whatever, for most of our energy needs.  But you’re never going to get planes flying off batteries, or solar panels, or very, very large sails.  Planes need fuel, and burning fuel is what we can no longer do in any quantity.

Flying (except maybe by balloon) looks like it will have to disappear from the average person’s travel options.  Unless we swallow this con that what’s important is not burning hydrocarbons, whatever their source, but what kind of hydrocarbons we burn.

Agro-fuels are a chimera.  There is a bewildering variety of source materials and end products, but in many cases the energy you create is less than the energy you use in the conversion process.  They only look good because people might be easily convinced that the emissions created from what started out as corn or sugarcane or oil palm nuts or just agricultural waste will, by a miracle of nature, in some distant future, turn back into corn and sugarcane and so on.

So, we are then encouraged to think, we can carry on as normal.  Keep the air-con on all day and night, eat more and more meat, and fly wherever and whenever we want.  The tourism industry does not blush when it forecasts an increase in flights of 6% a year, which will double aircraft emissions in less than a generation.

But that is exactly the problem.  We can’t carry on as normal.  We have to cut back burning fuel, of whatever kind, to next to nothing.

And the great British public may not know what they’re buying at the pump, and they are even alarmingly ignorant about where the raw materials for agro-fuels come from and the environmental effect this is having.  But they do know that splashing a bit of agro-fuel into the mix won’t do it.  They overwhelmingly support the idea of government-mandated fuel efficiency for cars, and of improved public transport.  Of the 55% who known what agro-fuels are, only 1 in 7 think they are the best way of solving the problem.

Basically they seem to be buying into the idea that things have to change and it’s not just a question of clever capitalists finding a new way of making money from business more or less as usual.

Because the detour of agro-fuels isn’t just a blind alley in the search for ways of keeping the planet liveable.  By diverting land and resources away from food, agro-fuels are ensuring that when we start to fry, we will be a select bunch.  The poor will already be dead of starvation.