Initially, Europe was thinking that biofuels would be a good way to support some counties, but the result was far from good.
Wind and solar are the best sources of energy, but lack of good grid scale energy storage make them impractical. Once we have good and cheap batteries to store energy, than solar and wind from Africa could resolve Europe energy needs. https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
Using palm oil for biofuel sounds like the worst idea ever. I thought biogas was normally produced from wastewater treatment and trash. Sweden does around 2TWh a year of it that way which isn’t a lot (2-3% of total energy use perhaps?) but it’s, for example the only gas used to heat stockholm.
Not a good choice, in many cases using the same space for (human) food or just a forest is a more environments friendly, more subtainable and due to the use of fertilizer sometimes more climate friendly choice (at least in the EU/Germany)
It also avoid all kinds of social/human problems.
And even if it's not not climate friendly it's not much worse either.
The same space as what? Biogas is produced by rotting in wastewater plants (or that’s what I thought until someone mentioned the idea of growing stuff to make biogas but that sounded like a bad idea as you point out).
There is only that much rotting close by bio wast, so I don't think natural bio gas makes a dent on the larger picture (but is nice for some use-cases without question).
So when Germany started subvention Bio Gas it didn't took long until people started growing stuff with the intention of having "a lot of was for bio gas"
(as far as I remember).
Similar, probably worse, thinks happened in some "3rd world" countries as far as I remember.
