But not all biofuels suck. When you're finally sick and tired of reading the same old doom and gloom bullshit such as this article, read this for a change:

http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v13/2/enviro.html

You might tell yourself

"Why does the Left keep supporting the Phoney War on Drugs? And why doesn't anyone realize that growing hemp on the rainforest actually saves and enhances the rainforest rather than depleting and destroying it? It's time to stop rambling the "pot is bad for you bullshit" and TEAR DOWN THE BAN ON CANNABIS !"

These rainforests are our lungs on this planet and yet we blindly choose to destroy them. Its suicidal and this bio-fuel surge is just all bad. We need to curb consumption first and foremost. Ofcourse thats never gonna happen in this rabid hyper-capitalist society. I was in the Malaysian rainforest a year ago and what I saw would make you sick in the gut.

What happened to the German company a few years ago that was producing diesel fuel for less than half the cost of conventional diesel by recycling Garbage?

I seem to recall that their technique had its ancestry in WW2 Nazi technology.

Why plant enormous acreage in Corn when almost every city in America spends Millions of dollars disposing of megatons of sewage, garbage and Yard Waste which could be reprocessed into fuel?

Range Fuels and others are making fuel using forest and agriculture waste using gasification. There is no extra land nor fertilizer used and no food crops used in production. Pretty much anything that grows that we do not eat is feedstock. The DOE has estimated that there are 1 billion tons per year of such biomass, enough to make 100 billion of the 140 billion gallons of fuel used each year.

http://www.rangefuels.com/home

This article does not even mention the fossil fuels consumed in the production of corn, soy, cane, or any "crops" for fuel.

Nor does it consider that using crops as fuel will divert enormous quantities of food from our dinner plates to our gas tanks.

Okay, so the "campaign manager" from Greenpeace has concluded, "If you're looking at the emissions from the transport sector, the first thing you need to look at is fuel efficiency and massively increasing it. That needs to come before you even get to the point of discussing which biofuels might be good or bad."

The first sentence is right on, efficiency first. But to flat out reject from the discussion any role that biofuels can play until we're all driving Prius' is irresponsible. What about biofuels that reduce pollutants and CO2 (using life cycle analysis), and those that contribute to local economies and local food and energy security?

Good people of CD, who seem comfortable enough leaving biofuels completely out of the energy conversation, as if all biofuels are created equal (they're not)... what will you do when petrol costs $120 ... $150.. more? per barrel, the cost of a head of lettuce is $5.00 and potatoes are $7.00/lb? Well if the farmer down the road is making biodiesel by growing canola or soybean on 15% of their land and it means they can run their tractors and deliver their produce to the local market for 30% less (than the "imports"), tell me there's "no point of discussing which biofuels might be good or bad"! right. Last time I checked there are no absolutes in nature.

Is there room for improving the sustainability of biofuels? Certainly!
Make changes (soon!), drive responsibly, lower your thermostat AND why not start a conversation with someone in your community involved in biofuels. You might learn something.

I'm from Iowa and have never been a proponet of burning food for fuel, besides it's taking enormous amounts of ground water to produce. I believe our nation and the rest of the world have no need to continue this way for electrical energy. The sun, wind, and tides provide a contstant source for our electrical needs. I read that GOOGLE is going to spend they're profits trying to get the sun harnessed, and supposedly that it would only need around 9% of our desert land to set up equipment that would produce enough for our entire nation. This is what the government should be helping to make a reality in our lifetime. All nations should be working towards this goal with hook-ups country to country.

tonkatsu asked:
"What happened to the German company a few years ago that was producing diesel fuel for less than half the cost of conventional diesel by recycling Garbage?"

I've never heard anything about that, tonkatsu, but I have heard of producing methane from human, animal and vegetable waste. Off the shelf technology that simultaneously reduces air and water pollution.

Another interesting possible source of biofuel may be jatropha plants. They produce about twice as many gallons of biodiesel per acre as ethanol from corn. On marginal lands. No irrigation. No pesticides. And the btu's per gallon look to be about 135% of ethanol. Univ. of Florida is checking it out as we speak.

Morons! Solar Power! Bio-fuels from food waste / garbage ONLY!

All environmental scientists know that it makes little sense to produce fuel from food crops, yet few politicians have gotten the message. Instead, Congress passes -- and Bush signs -- an energy bill with big subsidies for biofuel from food crops.

Let me see, now. Who controls lots of politicians, but very few environmental scientists? Could it be Archer-Daniels-Midland? Cargill? Chevron?

Who pays the piper, calls the tune. And major corporations have brought us the best pipers money can buy. We either dance, or ... now here's an idea ... THROW THE BUMS OUT!!!!!!

Here is a new solution that not a lot of people know about:

"... Compared to an acre of corn, which can generate around 300 gallons of ethanol each year, an acre of algae has been estimated to produce upwards of 5,000 gallons of biofuel annually."

http://www.internationalenergyinc.com/05-11-07.php

Hemp4victory,
Great post and a great article on the link. I fully agree that hemp would solve many of this countries energy needs and pull us out of this crisis. The war on drugs is just an attack on common sense and our civil liberties. I hope you plan to support Ron Paul for president in 2008 because he is the only candidate with a chance who will end the war on drugs. Kucinich will as well but he gave all of his Iowa votes to war on drugs supporter Obama. Paul is not in bed with big oil and big corporations and he will really work for what is good for this country.

I really like the garbage idea and it makes perfect sense and because we are such a wasteful society there is no shortage of it. I think ideas and plans like this, coupled with the power of hemp, solar, wind, and water power we would really be on to something great.

I bet making people turn a crank to generate energy and feeding them the food would be more efficient than turning the food into fuel in a big industrial plant. It would sure encourage conservation and promote exercise.

Of course, the phony economics used in capitalism externalizes all the big costs like pollution, famine, disease, injury and death that is being produced as a by product of the way we are running the planet.

I can hardly wait until oil becomes so expensive that it will cost too much to burn in cars and we will have to walk on the sidewalk instead of on a treadmill, ride bikes and horses again and travel overseas on sailing craft instead of on jets and motorships.

ixtlan, good job!

It is not biofuels that are bad, per se. It's the commodification and industrialization of biofuels.

Big business got us into the mess we're in. Why should we trust them to solve the problem? As long as energy is a commodity, it will not be valued properly.

Efficiency is great -- to a point. Jevons' Paradox shows that pursuing efficiency eventually causes higher consumption. Look what happened in the Peak Oil "trial run" of the '70's and early '80's: gas got expensive, cars got efficient, demand was destroyed, gas got cheap, and today we use more of it than ever.

Permaculture teaches to not waste much effort extending efficiency past the "maximum power point," the point in the middle of the parabolic curve where pursuing more efficiency costs too much energy. I suspect complicated hybrid vehicles that rely on exotic battery chemistry and sophisticated computerized control mechanisms is past the MPP, but a simple diesel, easy to service and maintain, running on waste vegetable oil is not.

What is certain is that we must consume less energy. And that does not mean buying a Prius, then continuing on with the same one-hour commute. (And possibly making more weekend trips on the fuel that you've saved -- see Jevons, above.) It means living closer to work, and possibly getting rid of the car altogether. It means living in a mostly-self-sufficient community. It means "de-globalization."

Another paradox is that the less energy dependent you are, the more dear energy is. If you "down size" your life, move into a small place that is walking/biking distance to services, work from home only a few days a week, and spend the other time with your kids, working in a garden, and community support, your fuel consumption may go down from a hundred liters a week to a few liters a week. But your income may go down from $80,000 to $10,000! So relatively speaking, your fuel costs are similar.

But the key point in this example is that you are less dependent on energy. If in this scenario, fuel rockets to $10 a liter, you can get by, pooling rides in your community and walking or biking more. In the previous scenario of 100 liters a week and an $80,000 job, you're screwed.

So please, for the sake of your future and that of future generations, downsize your life! That's the road (walked, not driven) to energy security.

And if everyone cuts their fuel consumption by 97% (as I and many others have), the fuel we do use will necessarily be locally appropriate, whatever the source.

Find the IPCC chart of ice core data that was the basis of Gore's movie and book. (A great chart is in the book Inconvenient Truth). Note that the past cycles each had a spike of temp and CO2 which was in a very short geological moment defeated and reversed. Until this cycle, it would have been hard to tell what triggered the reversal, GHG or temp. But we can now see that CO2 was not it, because CO2 has already gone so far past natural historical norms that if it was the trigger, we would have the direct, present time experience of whatever it was that did the reversing. That means global temperature is the trigger. That means nuclear energy is part of the problem, just as much as burning oil, coal or ethanol. Note the required cooling towers.
If you are reading this tonite, make a quick visit to NOAA NWS.gov and get a gander at that west coast storm–satellite-west conus-water vapor-loop will give you an idea of the beginning stages of the weather phenomena that will do the natural reversal. Read Gore's book and watch The Day After Tomorrow for a flawed, overly dramtic Tinsel Town version. Then buy some solar stock and hang on.

Snydly:

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It is increasing due to humankind burning fossil fuel and made worse by deforestation and possibly loss of ocean phytoplankton. Global temperatures are increasing with increased CO2. We have CO2 levels unprecendeted in millennia with the sun's input(to the best of our knowledge) cycling within normal ranges. The climatolgists have done the math over and over. It all fits together. Waste heat, including nuclear, is not significant.

Back to the specific subject, all energy inputs and environmental impacts, and market impact need to be considered when a crop is used as biofuel.

Ethanol from corn, for example, is almost definitely a loser or break for energy input vs output even at best. There is evidence corn growing increases fertilizer runoff into streams and the ocean, increasing alagal dead zones. Subsidies and diverted consumption are driving up food prices. In short, ethanol from corn is a triple loser.

There needs to be a way to evaluate proposed biofuel schemes before they are put in place, and review them during operation to ensure they aren't wasteful. Businesssmen will always be eager to chase a subsidy, whether the technology is good or not.

Maybe we can get people to ride bicycles, but I do not think that 100 million drivers will do this over night. When Bush said that the terrorists want to destroy our way of life, he might have been referring in part to the large SUV life style.

Politicians rarely ask people to sacrifice. Even after 9/11 the word was to go shopping, to not to slow the economy down. Ironic that a lot of the items people shop for are made in China, where they hold 100s of billions of U.S. dollars and lend them back to the U.S. government with interest.

I agree completely with hemp4victory January 4th, 2008 1:17 pm
Thanks for throwing that in there.

I would like to see Dr. Steven M. Greer of the Disclosure Project and the 400 and some scientists, military experts and eye-witnesses that are willing to testify before Congress about what they know of advanced energy technology from reverse-engineered extraterrestrial craft, which definitively could bring down the oil cartels and their $100 barrels of ecological poison – if a transition were to happen as rapidly as it possibly could.

Couple this with hemp and it's ability to harvest twice yearly an astonishingly rapid and abundant supply to all sorts of life needs, as well as, like hemp4victory said, rapidly replace the earth's lungs and the industries that pollute our air.

Dr. Lester Grinspoon http://www.marijuana-uses.com/index.html and his fellow scientists ought to join forces with the Disclosure Project scientists and experts of pertinent fields – and SOON. The veil mush be removed.

The vision of these two men alone will take care of the power piggies, and noting the millions who have visited their official websites is indeed encouraging.

earth's lungs ...
The veil MUST be removed...

My edit feature doesn't seem to work here. Anyone else?

At least one more point should be made here. There is no such thing as a non-food crop. Every erg of solar energy captured by green plants and turned into carbohydrates is food for something. There are no crop "residues", or wood "waste". Switching to those things as sources for motor fuel just means starving out the soil life at the bottom of the food chain rather than we humans at the top. Remember that in your thinking on biofuels.

You might like to read this article from the University of New Hampshire describing growing algae which are 50 % oil to be used as biodiesel fuel:

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

Possibly all transportation fuel needs for the U.S. could be made using algae pools that take up 1% or less of our land area AND we could use the least used desert land and salt water or brackish water for the pools.

Since biodiesel emits 60 to 80% less CO2 than gasoline, a 72 mpg biodiesel hybrid car

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_Intrepid_ESX

would emit as much CO2 as a 240 mpg (using the figure of 70% less CO2 for the biodiesel hybrid - 72 mpg divided by (1-.7) ) gasoline powered car!

And we continue to fool around with ethanol derived from corn. Why? Hint. Where is the first presidental primary/caucus?

John

He makes the argument that "if rain forest is used to grow green mass for fuel" then it is bad but that may or may not be so.

Be very careful in this debate to note who is saying what for what purpose. Those opposed and those for will be making bad arguments.

And search "Terra Preta", biofuel may be produced without increasing C02. Terra Preta produces biofuel almost carbon neutral, now don't jump on my bandwagon, look it up.

Biofuels needn't necessarily be a bad thing. Trying to use them to power today's industrialised society is foolish and could only end in disaster.

However, one can produce an ample fuel wood crop via coppicing. Furthermore, this can and in someplaces is coupled with waste treatment. For example, sewage sludge spread on a short-rotation coppice crop of salix spp., producing 6 to 12 tonnes per hectare per year, meets the heating needs of most of Sweden (and it takes up 200 kg of nitrogen per hectare of the sewage sludge as well). The trick here is to make sure homes and industry don't dump unwanted toxins into the sewage system.

I think forest and agriculture waste can be used for biofuels. The DOE has allowed for all the biomass that needs to be returned to the land in their estimates. Some would say that we should all just walk and ride bikes. That is more than a bit unrealistic and I would hope that you know this.

If you want to be credible, you need to start talking about things that can really happen instead of hoping that you can transform the thoughts and actions of 100 million people. Humans have always had an effect on their environment. The more humans, the more the effect. We just have to balance the costs with the benefits and make rational decisions based on that.

The idea of the US importing ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil is ridiculous. Fossil fuel emissions are spewed out into the air in order to get the stuff here, and cutting down the rainforests to plant sugar cane in order to reduce fossil fuel emissions is about as sensible as releasing tigers on your farm to control the coyotes that are eating a few of your chickens.

The only really sensible way to make biodiesel for US consumption is to make it out of hemp, in the US itself, hopefully as close as possible to where the biodiesel is actually produced.

sjc:

Unrealistic or not, I don't think there will be much of a choice when such impending disasters like Peak Oil hit 6.6 billion people and China and India achieve our American Dream. Unfortunately US cities are designed for cars while many European cities are designed for people. Solar electric cars and other modern inventions are great, but walking and riding bikes could help control our obesity epidemic.

My previous post on this topic must have been moderated out for lack of political correctness.... or something.

DO THE MATH........ If one takes time to actually look up the number of acres of farmland in the US........ and the average yield of biofuels across the entire spectrum of farmland, it takes only the most rudimentary math skills to discover that if every acre of US farmland were put to biofuels.... every single acre!.... we would have the capacity to produce the same number of gallons of biofuel as we import gallons of crude oil..... in 21 days...... that's right 3 weeks! That does not take into account ANY overhead. The creditable numbers that truly attempt to take all energy costs into account in production and processing, distribution, fertilizer, etc...... Not the numbers claimed by folks with a biofuel agenda..... or those bitterly opposed to biofuels...... all put the yield at less than 10%. That is to say at least 90 gallons on the average of fuel would go into production of 100 gallons of biofuel in the US. That means that if you actually realized a 10% yield........ AND put every acre of farmland into biofuel production, we could produce the gallon equivalent of 2.1 days of crude oil.

Now crude oil contains far more energy per gallon than either biodiesel or ethanol, so that figure would be optmistic.

I don't know about biodiesel as far as energy per gallon.... but I do know that there is a significant increase in fuel consumption where gasahol is used. I know this from personal experience. My own car...... Subaru...... gets approximately 86% of the mileage that I get from gas if I burn gasahol........ Your results may vary.

Now we come to the cost of replacing all the agricultural produce we can no longer produce on the acres used for biofuel........ Anybody care to guess what the energy cost of that is?

And of course there is the environmental damage of intensive farming as described here...... pesticide pollution..... fertilizer pollution... loss of topsoil....... And all for what???

There are hundreds of wild claims about this grass or that alge.... but the plain fact is that there is no way we can replace 20 million barrels of oil a day, and untold billions of cubic feet of natural gas using biofuels......... It's pure fantasy!

We have a responsibility as caretakers of this earth to protect it.... to save it in a condition that can provide for the needs of future generations. The utter stupidity of trying to farm our way out of the energy crisis is stunning.... But it is human nature to grasp onto the most appealing fantasy and use every spurious argument imaginable to support that fantasy........ and it will continue to be so.

Howard Wilkinson

thankful that someone is beginning to question the wisdom of this madness!!

Then you convince 100 million people to ride bikes and let us know how you are doing on that a year from now.

Convincing 100 million people to ride bikes will do very little on its own to reduce greenhouse emissions. People need to eat, they need to eat more when they exert themselves, and nearly all food production today requires massive fossil-fuel sourced energy input aside from sunlight. At present, the net impact on CO2 would be minimal.

On another note- every living thing on the planet- including every human- uses energy and resources that could be used by another creature living in its place. There is a strange human impulse to feel guilty about this, as if we don't deserve a share of the earth's resources. I feel this is perverse. After all, we are the only species with the intellectual capacity to appreciate the fullness of nature. Our task is to choose the best compromise we can find between resources used for our own comforts and those left for other species. There is bound to be debate over what the best compromise is, but let's try not to get sanctimonious about it.

It seems to me that what we should start doing right now is to simply require that all new automobiles on the road get at least 35 mpg. This would cut way down on fossil fuel emissions and would also make the oil that's still under the ground last longer. It wouldn't be difficult, either. All we'd have to do would be to make new cars smaller and lighter in weight, without having to make any drastic changes in their engines. American car manufacturers could do this today, if this was what their customers really wanted.

Basically, we'd be buying time to come up with a better solution or solutions (does there have to be only one answer to this problem?).

Unfortunately, we're preaching to the choir here. When you're done posting here, shoot a letter to the editor off to the major newspaper in your area.

A couple points about hemp vs algae... algae grows in non- potentially agriculture producing places. Algae "eats" waste products as it food. Algae is not a political hot potato, and has a better real-world chance of success.

That said, the better solutions today, right now, come from the sun, wind, ocean currents and geothermal.

As population increases worldwide, coal combustion continues to be the dominant fuel source for electricity. Fossil fuels' share has decreased from 76.5% in 1970 to 66.3% in 1990, while nuclear energy's share in the worldwide electricity pie has climbed from 1.6% in 1970 to 17.4% in 1990. Although U.S. population growth is slower than worldwide growth, per capita consumption of energy in this country is among the world's highest. To meet the growing demand for electricity, the U.S. utility industry has continually expanded generating capacity. Thirty years ago, nuclear power appeared to be a viable replacement for fossil power, but today it represents less than 15% of U.S. generating capacity. However, as a result of low public support during recent decades and a reduction in the rate of expected power demand, no increase in nuclear power generation is expected in the foreseeable future.

Using these data, the releases of radioactive materials per typical plant can be calculated for any year. For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.

Coal = Death

Check it out for yourself: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

VeggieCar, you're right: we are preaching to the choir here.

I do write reader editorials to my local paper, but, since I still see a lot of SUV's on the road in my neck of the woods, I'm not sure how much good they're doing. I guess I'll keep writing them, though, just for the heck of it.

Things change...maybe not as fast as some would like, but they do. The SUV craze may be coming to an end. The monster house that costs a fortune to heat and cool may become a thing of the past. When people figure out that they can lead wonderful lives without all the waste, we can start to get back in balance once again.

Yes, sjc_1, things change. The choice is make the change now, which you will enjoy, or be forced into change which you will not enjoy. I have not doubt most people will choose the latter, though.

As for humans having an impact on the world, I agree again. Fortunately, we have the knowledge and the means to make that a n environment-enhancing affect in tune with ecological principles.The good news is that the time and effort necessary to damage an environment is greater by far than the time and effort to heal an environment (based on actual projects I have seen and others I know of). Nature responds almost instantly to actions patterned on ecosystemic processes.