AbstractThere has been much hyperbole voiced against biofuels of late. At the end of October the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, stated at a press conference in New York that it was ‘a crime against humanity to divert arable land to the production of crops which are then burned for fuel’. These sentiments were then echoed by George Monbiot, in The Guardian, when he claimed, amongst other things, that ‘biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war’.The oil lobby must be rubbing its hands with glee. Never in over a century of destructive use of fossil fuels have such charges been leveled against the internal combustion engine and the fossil fuels burnt that are actually creating the problem of global warming. Instead it is the potentially clean substitutes that are attracting all the opprobrium. © 2008 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd