Salad days

Like Cleopatra, we are often green in judgement. But it's hard not to be green in intention and judgement these days. On the one hand you have TV documentaries purporting to be scientific but carrying a hidden agenda, while on the other you have genuine efforts to reduce the human footprint having a genuinely negative effect.
Take biofuels, for example. If ever there was a topic to assuage the guilty conscious of the liberal west, here it is. Developed by Papuan Soloman independentists, the major fuel companies have seen its commercial value. But at what price? It'll be more profitable for the nations that can grow high yield crops like sugar cane to do so at the expense of crops that feed their people. Why would they do that? Because as usual, this land is in the hands of the few rather than the many. The crops can be harvested easily without mass labour. The industrial world will drive up the price of biofuel but processing will be carried out by labour well away from the plantations. Trade agreements will impose higher tariffs on the raw produce than on the processed fuel, so Brazil will sell sugar cane to the US at a fraction of the cost it takes to get it back. It's another form of colonisation of capital.
Ok, so that all sounds like a bit of a rebarbative Marxist agenda, and I know that there's potential for generating biofuel without taking land that can be used to produce food (by exploiting algae, for example), but wait and see. Biofuels may answer one problem -- peak oil -- but they'll cause many others.