I refer to the Malaysiakini letter Now that our rainforests are gone, they want biofuel .

While I agree totally with Noor Aza Othman on the destruction of the rainforests and animal habitat due to forests being cleared for biofuel production, there is, however, another important impact it will have and that is to result in a scarcity of food and higher prices as land used to grow food is switched to growing the raw materials used to make biofuel.

F William Engdahl wrote a brilliant article, The Great Biofuel Fraud , where he speaks about the impact of switching agricultural land to biofuel production on higher food prices and its impact on soil use, erosion, etc, which would ultimately greatly affect the livelihoods of less well-endowed humans.

Perhaps we need to go back to the traditional wood fireplace for cooking, go forward to solar panels for hot water and we need a more extensive, efficient and better connected public transport system to discourage car use or reduce the need to buy cars, even if this means less national cars sold.

We should look towards more clean, non-oil dependent forms of electricity production, such as hydro-electricity or wind, tidal and even nuclear energy.

Nuclear and hydro electricity may be 'uncool' among the greens but hydro power has proven to be the most viable, environmentally clean and renewable source of electricity generation. And despite risk of radiation contamination and disposal problems for spent fuel, nuclear energy does not produce the environmentally damaging pollutants which fossil fuels do.

Lastly, my advice to the 'greens' is to not blindly follow this 'uncool' image being painted about nuclear energy. It would be worth looking behind the promoters to see which interest groups are behind these campaigns for it could well be those capitalist interest groups which feel economically threatened by them reducing dependency on oil.