If agro-biofuels are neither feasible nor desirable, why are billions of dollars and euros being poured into agro-biofuel production through investments and subsidies? Have politicians suddenly lost their minds? Have investors suddenly lost their common sense?
As a matter of fact, as is argued in detail further on, neither investors nor politicians have lost their minds. The profits of big companies lobbying for agro-biofuel production are soaring and political decisions on agro-biofuels as in the case of the European Parliament are often determined by intense lobbying activities by powerful industrial groups trying to secure their future.
Politicians are claiming to protect national interests by preserving the economic assets of their countries. But these two things do not fully explain the agro-biofuel folly. It is also about bad science and misguided public opinion.
In fact, the hundreds of scientific papers published each year on how to improve existing agro-biofuel technologies in order to substitute a relevant fraction of fossil fuels indicate that the academic establishment has ignored available knowledge accumulated over more than a hundred years in the fields of energetics and bio-economics, and that there is a serious failure in the quality control of scientific inputs used for decision-making.
Ideological lock-in refers in general to ideological biases that affect decision-making, including in relation to sustainability issues, and in particular policies such as agro-biofuels. The other two forms, academic and economic lock-ins, are direct consequences of ideological lock-ins and deal with the two most important decision-making processes in our society with regard to sustainability issues. Academic lock-in refers to the interface between the bureaucracy of scientific academia and public administrations where decisions are made about the allocation of funds for research and development. Economic lock-in refers to the actions of powerful lobbies that tend to stabilize the existing economic power structure.
What is common to all these forms of lock-in is the innate reluctance of humankind to change. This profound ideological bias aimed at the preservation of the status quo is manifested at all levels: the individual (for example, the profound fear of death typical of Western civilization), the community (the desire to maintain current cultural identities and lifestyles) and the society.
At the level of society, this ideological bias is manifested in the form of processes and filters (bureaucracy) guaranteeing the survival of existing institutions. For this reason, social institutions easily bend under the pressure of lobbies working to preserve existing power structures.