And They're Really Not That Good for The Environment Either!
Mary Kane has a piece today on the rise of food prices and its devastating effects on the developing world. Many experts blame biofuels for the food shortage. Leaders in Peru and Bolivia, for example, have told the U.N. that biofuels are starving their people.
Until recently we've been told that biofuels hold the promise of curbing global warming and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. But given the amount of energy it takes to produce biofuels, and the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by burning those fuels, some are rethinking jumping on the biofuel bandwagon.
Two scientific studies released in February said that biofuels are actually worse for the environment than gasoline.
In a previous post, I quoted NASA climate scientist Mark Chandler, who reiterated what scientists have been saying for some time. That it's disingenuous to market biofuels as a green issue. Since Chandler really hits the nail on the head, I'll reprint his comments:
Most people have found that biofuels have pretty close to a neutral effect on emissions, because it takes so much energy to produce an acre of corn or something like that. For the most part, biofuels [is] one of those issues where they're sort of marketing it as a green issue, but it's really not. It's a dependence-on-foreign-oil issue. In other markets, it's an excuse to continue those agricultural subsidies as well...One of the problems with biofuels, they've already found out, is that there's only so much biofuel that can be produced, and when you produce it, you tend to take away from another supply, like food supply, and that tends to drive prices up.
And, because biofuels constitute limited resources, when the use of biofuels increases, their prices can rise. Actual clean energy -- wind and solar power -- results in an opposite effect on prices. The more those energies are used, the further the price goes down.
Mike Adams at Natural News calls biofuels "largely a government-sponsored scam." He makes some good points in his piece today:
It was one of the dumbest "green" ideas ever proposed: Convert millions of acres of cropland into fields for growing ethanol from corn, then burn fossil fuels to harvest the ethanol, expending more energy to extract the fuel than you get from the fuel itself! Meanwhile, sit back and proclaim you've achieved a monumental green victory (President Bush, anyone?) all while unleashing a dangerous spike in global food prices that's causing a ripple effect of food shortages and rationing around the world.
Comments:
Posted 04/23/2008 04:47pm with
Be careful in lumping all biofuels together. While corn-based ethanol is a government scam, other measures may not be. Biodiesel can be made from waste vegetable oil, which while not a solution for the masses, is a viable niche market. For larger scale, algae-based biodiesel uses sunlight as the only input and does not impact the food supply.
Mike Adams has some kind (preliminary) words for this source as well. From your link:
The only truly promising biofuels technology available today is based on microalgae. Feed CO2 to a vat of algae, and you can produce biofuels cheaply and responsibly, without destroying the environment. But these programs are only in experimental phases. Nobody is producing biofuels on a large scale from algae farms (not yet, anyway).
Now can we get this in our next energy bill?
Posted 04/24/2008 12:51am with
This kind of half-informed reporting can be really damaging. The problem is not with “biofuels”. The problem (to the extent that there is one) is with one particular biofuel (ethanol) produced from one particular group of feedstocks (grains). Although the greenhouse benefits of ethanol from corn are marginal, other biofuels such as biodiesel from vegetable oils, ethanol from sugar, and ethanol from cellosic biomass (including crop waste, wood waste, and purpose-grown biomass crops) reduce net greenhouse emissions by 80% or more compared to gasoline oil-derived fuels. As ethanol-from-cellulose technology matures, grains will likely become uncompetitive as ethanol feedstocks—instead, ethanol and corn will be co-products, with ethanol being produced from the corn stalks, leaves, and cobs rather than the grain.
While grain prices are up sharply, ethanol has less to do with that than imprudent reductions in reserve stocks, rapid growth in consumption in China and India, and bad weather. Right now, about 10 times as much grain goes to feed animals for meat as to produce ethanol (and much of the grain used to produce ethanol also produces animal feed—distillers dried grains—as a coproduct). If people are worried about high grain prices starving the poor, the best way to counter that would be to reduce meat consumption. Remember, too, that until recently, world grain prices were at record lows when adjusted for inflation, and had been falling steadily for thirty years—pushing many small farmers (especially in developing countries) to the wall. Remember all the stories about poor Mexican peasants ruined by competition from U.S. corn farmers due to NAFTA? Higher grain prices are bad news for urban dwellers in poor countries, but very good news for the (frequently even poorer) people in rural areas that live by farming.
Sources: There is a large body of work looking at well-to-wheels emissions, see http://www.transportation.anl.gov/software/GREET/index.ht… as a starting point)
Posted 05/18/2008 11:36am with
every biofuel out there has its advantages and disadvantages. you take something to make something,
one area that has been looked at and i believe is the best option, is cold fusion technology, most people dont know what this is. its heavy water and adding specific electrolytes into the fusion, which theoretically should cause excessive heat at room temperture. easy to make no emissions, and extremely cheap to produce. One huge drawback is that theres very little funding because its still just an idea. nuclear scientists all over the world are trying to form this tech but have had little success. nasa is the leading entity of development and testing. they are still in the beginning stages. they estimate it would take several years just develop this new thinking of nuclear fusion tech.
they say in order to transform this fusion into fuel it would cost per household 50 dollars a yr. the fuel would be infinite and would never run out. alright people lets get this going.