Using biofuels might be a sin, says Muslim cleric
by Sebastian Blanco on Feb 25th 2009 at 12:43PM 
I had no idea what would pop up when I typed in "ethanol sin" into the search box over at Flickr. Turns out, you get the image above, which was created for the Pope's visit to the U.S. back in early 2008. It's a good reminder that the debate over biofuels has donned religious clothing before. There a new twist to the discussion, though, following a recent statement from Sheikh Mohamed Al-Najimi, member of the Saudi Islamic Jurisprudence Academy, who said that using biofuels might be a sin because they go against the Islamic rule forbidding alcohol. This opinion, issued as a personal opinion and not an official fatwa, according to Al Arabiya, would apply to ethanol and methanol, and biodiesel made using methanol. SVO users, you're off the hook, here.
Related stories:
- Could the Pope make 15 mpg a sin?
- Can driving greener get you into heaven? Vatican says sure
- Another thing to worry about gas guzzlers: the sin factor
Note: we've had a little too much name-calling in the comments recently and have needed to ban some people from writing more. Feel free to write what you think about this particular issue, but stay away from name calling and broad generalizations about religion or ethnic groups, ok? No more warnings, just bannings if you can't be civil.
[Source: Cleantech via Green Daily, Al Arabiya]
Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com. Licensed under Creative Commons license 2.0.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
ronEbear 1:10PM (2/25/2009)
I won`t do any name calling, but, this is yet another example of how religion is detrimental to progress.
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ale 6:27PM (2/25/2009)
while, I can debate that issue, I wont go there, moreover, though, I can't believe that ABG would release this story and not think that ppl would resort to generalizations... c'mon now, the title itself would already issue a storm. However, I agree that using edible crops or creating cash crops to fuel our nation is a tragedy that has dire consequences as seen with the first ethanol boom.. however i disagree that biofuels are immoral if done the right way...
Owain Ozymandias Buck 6:54AM (2/26/2009)
"...creating cash crops to fuel our nation is a tragedy...."
I don't want to generalize, so tell me--do you like those of us engaged in agriculture to depend on subsidies, or do you think that growing things should be done collectively for the people, like on a Five Year Plan perhaps? I'm just trying to find your angle.
The simple fact is that biomass feedstocks are only going to bring somewhere around $30/ton. That's not the kind of price you'd give up your prime irrigated land for. The best choices for these crops are hardy, well-adapted species that require much less inputs and thrive on lands of marginal production value.
And oh so unfortunately, farmers will get paid when they sell these crops.
evo 1:29PM (2/25/2009)
This smells of money concern, not really a religious concern.
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GoodCheer 1:30PM (2/25/2009)
I don't much care what the pope or any Muslim cleric might say, I just wanted to thank you for helping to keep the discussion boards from turning into middleschool playground.
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jharlan 1:43PM (2/25/2009)
You don't think it would be in the Arabs best interest to squelch any competition for their petrochemical and fuel businesses , do you? It makes perfect sense to me. It's money, (it usually is).
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jharlan 1:46PM (2/25/2009)
Thank you GoodCheer:
I have frequently wondered if some of the contributors had reached puberty yet.
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ronEbear 1:58PM (2/25/2009)
That`s a pretty creepy statement, wondering if people have reached puberty yet.
Puberty does not equal maturity.
Puberty also does not equal intelligence, as is evident in your case.
harlanx6 3:00PM (2/25/2009)
ronEbear:
????????
Rain 1:58PM (2/25/2009)
I don't see this as a strictly religious issue but more a issue of social responsibility.
Turning grain into ethanol is surely wrong but making Ethanol from silage,not so much.
I used to think that making E from sugarcane in Brazil was very good till I discovered that the harvesting techniques are damaging to the environment and the fact that many people die every year during the harvest itself.
I for one,though not a member of any denominational religious group,would welcome the involvement of the church into the development of alternative energy.
If You care about the future of your fellow man and your home then it is simply the right thing to do.
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Carney 11:14AM (2/26/2009)
Turning grain into alcohol is NOT wrong. Ethanol corn for example merely has the starch taken out to make ethanol, while the protein, vitamins, minerals, etc., go to make animal feed for meat livestock. Those animals would need to have had feed grown for them anyway, so that corn is directly serving two purposes, alleviating hunger AND oil dependency.
Furthermore the problem of hunger is almost never lack of food; masses of it are thrown away even in the Third World. The problem is tyranny and poverty. Tyranny we have only a limited ability to solve, but poverty we can do a great deal about. Foreign aid is both too paltry and too ineffective, even without considering how much is diverted to specialized companies and corrupt local leaders.
What the world's poor really need is trade, not aid, but the First World maintains tariffs and trade barriers such as subsidies to wall out Third World agricultural products to keep farm jobs going at home. If we switched to alcohol fuel as the standard, there would be more business than our farmers could handle, allowing us to drop these barriers and allow in Third World produce and biofuel. This redirection of hundreds of billions of fuel purchasing dollars away from OPEC leaders and to poor farmers would do wonders to alleviate poverty and help lift people up to decent standards of living.
Thus, ethanol would help alleviate hunger.
CNCMike 11:47AM (2/26/2009)
Rain,
You need to stop believing all the radical right wing oil company propaganda. Sugar cane in Brazil is grown very responsibly and havested very sustainably. The fields are all tilled to keyline and use periodic swales which are on contour dead level ditches that collect rain water and allow it to evenly soak into the ground increasing the aquifer levels. Each sugar cane row is also a contour berm allowing water to soak in evenly. This is very important because the canes form later in the dry season and grow rapidly, relying on water stored underground. A number of cane fields are on hills with a 15 degree sople and even a heavy downpour does not cause the topsoil to wash down hill which also prevents nutrient and chemical runoff from polluting streams.
Also the canes are coppiced which allow harvesting just the top half of the cane allowing the lower half to continue growing. They can get 3 or 4 harvests a year that way. Most of it is actually still harvested by hand. Nearly all of the nutrients needed for the next crop remian in the stillage left after distillation and is returned to the fields alomost eliminating the need for any additional fertilizer.
Some of the fields will go 10 years before replanting is necessary but most will go at least 5 years. Our farmers could learn a lot form Brazil.
Rain 3:48PM (2/26/2009)
Thanks for the comments.
Unfortunately reality bites,the statistics for the Cane production in Brazil are impressive.
But,I should have made the point more firmly that the Sugar Cane harvest is based on
500 year old slavery.
I do tend to gloss over things in the interest of brevity and believe me I do appreciate that I am addressing very intelligent people with sometimes opposing opinions.
Most of the time We are on the same page,i'm happy to say.
Here is a link to an article by Der Spiegle,forums permitting:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-602951,00.html
Again,thanks for the info.
Carney 11:38AM (2/27/2009)
Rain, about the article you sent, it's good that this publicity is getting out. One major benefit of cash crop rather than subsistence agriculture is that customers with cash in hand have major leverage over producers on environmental and labor issues.
Whereas it's a lot harder for outsiders to tell a starving farmer not to burn the Amazon to grow food for his family.
We also need to bear something crucial in mind. The ten fold run up in the price of oil from 1999 to 2008 was economically devastating for the First World, but it was all but genocidal for the poor.
It's one thing to pay $100 a barrel when you make $35,000 a year; it's quite another when you make only $1,000. When fertilizer and truck/tractor fuel costs skyrocket out of reach, farmers can't afford to take crops to market. Fishermen have to pay for fuel too.
During 2005, when OPEC-manipulated high prices netted the Saudi rulers $150 billion, Kenya, a country with a population half as great again as Saudi Arabia, scraped together $2.5 billion, and had to use this scarce money to buy overpriced fuel with only a pittance left for farm machinery, replacement parts, and other badly needed equipment.
Kenya BTW is not even one of the world's 50 poorest nations; many others are much worse off. The amount the Saudis took in from their price fixing would be enough to DOUBLE the foreign exchange earnings of SIXTY COUNTRIES like Kenya.
(And in 2006, the price of oil doubled yet again).
Meanwhile the Saudis and other OPEC leaders loll (only 1 in 6 Saudis work) and wallow in the most disgusting and decadent luxury imaginable, with palaces, personal passenger jets, racehorses, drugs, concubines, yachts, etc. And buy up large portions of Western media company stock, endow elite university departments and professorships, shower think tanks with funds, and lavishly reward recently retired politicians and bureaucrats so as to influence currently serving ones, all to keep the gravy train rolling. Also they fund tends of thousands of madrassas around the world brainwashing poor village youth and turning them into fanatical jihadis, spreading murder, chaos, poverty, ignorance, hate, and the death of all cultural and intellectual life.
While nothing is easy and all economic advancement comes from hard work and hard conditions we can barely imagine (but which are still better than what came before or current alternatives, which is why workers accept them), on the scale of human misery, ethanol is going a long way to alleviating the even greater human misery of gasoline.
Matt 2:04PM (2/25/2009)
If you've read The Omnivore's Dilemma you know that using corn ethanol does NOT in ANY WAY reduce the supply of food. There is so much "corn" coming out of the US that they use it for fuel for lack of anything else to do with it. If we could pave roads with it we would do that too! Besides, No. 2 corn is barely edible anyway; it has to be processed into food. The good stuff that you eat off the cob is never turned into fuel because it's prohibitively expensive.
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Rex 2:18PM (2/25/2009)
I am a muslim, and seriously, if alcohol was as broadly banned as this guy says, we would all be dead.
Yes, alcohol is baned, but in the drinking sense, and that too because it causes a person to lose all senses, and frankly, even the west agrees that alcohol is a menace, didn't the US try to ban it once?
Has this guy ever heard of things like rubbing alcohol? Alcohol is permissible for other uses, like for medical reason, diluting certain organic drugs, and such.
Similarly, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong using various alcohols as fuel (we already do, duh!). I mean, god just doesn't want us drunk and going nuts, as long as we are not doing that, god has no problem. Contrary to popular belief,Islam is not against technology, infact muslims are "supposed" to innovate and find make life better for every one.
Maybe the guy is thinking that people will use bio-fuel plants as a cover to make alcoholic drinks, for which I can only say, less bribes, more regulation, guys!
Actually never mind, he is a Saudi cleric, they are superstitious old coots (ironic, since islam prohibit people believing such dumb stuff), they tried to ban the telephone coz "the devil speaks in it", the king had a headache how to get it "approved". They tried to ban cars, bicycles and what not, so ignore them, they are just scared of new things, like any old geezers :)
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Snoopy 11:54PM (2/25/2009)
Well, I was going to ask if there were any Muslims out there who wanted to pipe in about this and address the question of non-consumption use of alcohol. Thanks answering before I asked!
Chris M 2:31AM (2/26/2009)
Since everyone has bacteria and yeasts that live quietly in their guts that produce alcohol, if we tested anyone's blood there would be a trace amount of alcohol in it. So, logically, it isn't alcohol that is a sin, but getting intoxicated from an excesss of alcohol is.
Of course, not all religious pronouncements are made on a logical basis, or even a sound theological basis, but instead reflects a persons own opinion.
gorr 2:22PM (2/25/2009)
I said the same thing then the pope and catholic church and islam and i said it before them and i said it at the right place. The right place is here because long time ago i said to souls that i will shop here for a hydrogen car and by instinct many souls get their way here to read me and participate but unfortunattelly just siners pointed here and the few happy soul have left this site because of the extremelly small thinking of people here.
I said that the biofuel story is because martian mentality people are analysing under the goverment official protection how a human corpse work and they relate human corpses technology and beliefs to cars, LOL. I said that water is the main source of energy for car and biology including human corpses. These forgotten souls in the goverment desperattelly study everything while stopping any human activity to furthur study it because they didn't actually understand anything and are speaking with the words of others and don't have an identity of their own yet.
I said to stop burning pollutants and build water powered cars. Im i bigger then the weak church?? And by the way do green algae farming to power the old cars, trucks, bus, trains, vtt, lawn mowers, radio-frequency hobby small airplanes and small radio-controled 2 strokes 10 cc small race cars.
Don't listen the catholic church anymore, they live in the past and are not aware of anything new since millions of years, they are old wannabees speaking to themselfs.
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Zeph 3:00PM (2/25/2009)
Who cares what a muslim cleric says. Besides, it is not obligatory to use food crops for biofuels, and the byproduct of the biofuel crops can be used to feed livestock. Ok, maybe the pig is a sin for some people. Maybe the cow is a sin for others. Perhaps some of them have a total intolerance of carrots. We can't cater to everyone, however we can cater to common sense...
So ripping the bowels out of the earth and throwing up polution into the sky is not a sin?
I agree, this was probably a statement made from the wallet, not the heart.
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