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An idea at the crossroads - Sophie Morris

Once seen as the golden ticket to a low carbon future, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, now calls biofuels "a crime against humanity", describing them as being "absolutely catastrophic for hungry people." Endorsed by environmentalist Al Gore, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, this year even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund added their voices. Are biofuels the answer, or just the emperor's new clothes?

The prefix "bio" transforms expensive, polluting fossil fuels into an apparently natural, environmentally-friendly and renewable energy. Biofuels are made from biomass: essentially anything derived from a plant or animal. The most popular and common are bioethanol, distilled from sugar cane or corn, and biodiesel, usually from soya beans or rape seed. When burnt in a car's engine, biofuels emit the same ozone-depleting greenhouse gases as traditional petroleum-based fuels but, because the plants have absorbed carbon during the growing period, they are in "energy balance" — not adding to the carbon in the atmosphere.

However, biofuels are as old as fire, and humans have always used biomass for heating and cooking. Drilling technology gave the automotive industry a swell of cheap oil, and from then on (except in wartime and the 1970s OPEC oil crises), biofuel production was largely put to one side.

Renewed interest in them comes from the threat of "peak oil" (the point at which oil production goes into terminal decline), wanting to cut the transport sector's climate change-causing carbon emissions and, for the US at least, a desire to free itself from dependence on oil-rich Arab countries.

The downside to biofuels is fourfold. Their environmental record is unclear; the social impact of finding land to plant them on has made millions homeless; redirection of land used for growing food to fuel crops has contributed to the current global food crisis (though the extent of this blame is disputed); and the search for new land to grow biofuels has meant razing virgin forest (far more effective carbon sinks than fertilised monocultures), threatening biodiversity and endangered species.

It's increasingly hard to dispute that there are serious drawbacks to at least some biofuels. Yet, it is a big step from that position to writing off the whole idea. The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels established itself last year to try and flush out some of biofuel's gremlins. Second generation biofuels, in which all of the plant, including the roots and any woody stems, is turned into biofuel, have become a byword for sustainable biofuels because they make use of waste products, though they do not take all of the humanitarian side effects into account. "It should be looked into," says Friends of the Earth's Kenneth Richter, "but you cannot rely on these technologies to turn out the solutions."

Meanwhile, the world's oil supplies dwindles and the climate warms. Biofuels may not be the answer to our problems. But they are an issue that shows no signs of going away.