The criminal insanity of biofuels

This article is a couple of weeks old, but it wasn't reported here when it came out. We all need to think deeply on the implications of this behaviour and whether our own nations (and indeed our own personal actions) are abetting such horrors.


I've said here before that commercial crop-based biofuel development is a crime against humanity. The UN seems to agree.

experts decided that I was wrong. And of course the UN since that's where I got my info.

No worries about taking away from food crops.

... the acreage used to grow the hemp was previously used to grow food crops.

biofuels are not insane or criminal.

Simply changing the crop to something that is not consumable (edible) is not sufficient. (I'm sure the hemp folks will chime in).

It's the resource use. In this case, land, water, fertilizer, and fuel.

biofuels will need to not compete with food for all of the resources... if you want the same food supply at the same (current) cost (or lower if biofuels can drive DOWN the cost of growing food).

So... you need a high yield biocrop that can be grown using land that isn't now (and possibly can't) be used for farming (hopefully without major impacts on wildlife and ecosystems).

Are there such crops... yes, two that I'm aware of...

One is Jatropha plant, which can grow on land that isn't suitable for most food crops and has a yield nearly that of oil palms (500gal/acre/year). Not edible. Doesn't need a lot of resources.

The other is algae (certain species), which can yield 5000/gal/acre/year or more... some believe that it can do in excess of 10,000gal/acre/year, and it certainly can be grown in areas not currently used for food. There are even studies being done to farm it in mid ocean.

I take a hard line on biofuels as a class. Beyond the competition with food for land, water, fertilizer and human production/distribution effort, what about the deforestation that is routine for making currently unused lands suitable for biofuel production, as in the Malaysia and Indonesian palm oil plantations? What about the biodiversity loss that results from planting "previously unproductive land" to monoculture fuel crops? There is no way to introduce a dirt-grown high yield fuel crop "without major impacts on wildlife and ecosystems", period full stop.

Algae is not ready for prime time yet, and is unlikely to be ready within the next two decades. There are serious problems with productivity in closed reactors and contamination by wild species in open ones. The theoretical yields look nice, but nobody has demonstrated a practical process yet, let alone a commercial one.

In my considered opinion, biofuels, in anything but very small niche applications, are one of the worst "solutions" we've come up with so far, mainly because people are either unable or unwilling to see the whole biosphere - including humans - as a complex, interactive, interdependent system.

1) "people are either unable or unwilling to see the whole biosphere - including humans - as a complex, interactive, interdependent system." True, but this is changing.

2) Algae is an exciting new opportunity for biofuel production and should be investigated further.

3) Pyrolysis is a good possibilty with numerous benefits - biofuel and hydrogen production, long-term (read: stable) carbon sequestration, improvements to soil fertility, improved water retention, the list goes on and on. I know we talked ad nauseum about this recently but it bears repeating.

4) Biofuel can and should be produced from "scrap" products, not edible crops. Examples include wood chips, sugar cane waste, biogas from wastewater treatment plants, manure lagoons at pig farms, etc. There are countless sources that dont rely on edible crops. Unfortunately, the volume is quite low so this would always be a small slice of the pie.

5) Any country that lets its citizens starve while it ramps up biofuel production to turn a profit is murderous and should be prosecuted by the world court.

Biofuels are just one possibility to end our dependence on fossil fuels. They are NOT a silver bullet but they are part of the solution.

1. I never suggested oil palms as a solution.

2. Algae is not likely 20 years away. On what basis do you make that argument? Simply because there are presently a few issues? Yes, open raceway ponds are not the ideal. And yes, closed bio reactors are presently too expensive. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't a solution to that problem, only that one hasn't been deployed yet.

3. There will be impacts on wildlife and ecosystems, however, growing food is a major impact on wildlife and ecosystems... so would you suggest that we don't grow food anymore?

The problem with purists is that they really don't have any solution that they like. The real problem is that there are presently 7 billion humans on the planet. Let's say that we all become 25 percent MORE efficient in our use of resources (stick with energy for now)... a near impossible feat for the planet since nearly 3 billion of those 7 are desperately trying to achieve what "western civilization" already has. TV sets, air conditioning, running clean water, automobiles, travel and leisure. All of which consume energy, vast quantities of energy. Not to mention that in 30 years it won't be 7 billion anymore... it will be 9 or 10 billion. So what if we become 25 percent more efficient in our per capita energy use if the entire planet uses 40 percent MORE energy to give everyone a "basic" standard of living. And there isn't a single energy source (at least not yet) that doesn't have major impacts on the environment. Nuclear? Nope... mining for uranium is a very ecologically unfriendly thing... and then there is that waste issue. Hydro? No... building dams is very, uh, damaging. Solar? Nope, lots of materials, some of which are in very short supply, go into building solar panels... lots of mining required, not to mention the land use. Putting up solar panels (or buildings on which you put solar panels) is very unfriendly to the ecology. Fossil fuels? I don't think anyone needs to even have a discussion on the ecological impact of fossil fuels. Geothermal? Hmmm. Better than most alternatives, but it is very limited supply (with present technology). Wind and/or wave? Again, there are many ecological impacts of these technologies, and they are expensive to deploy.

Forget Hydrogen, it's not a fuel source, it's a carrier.

Zero point energy? First have to prove that it really exists. And if it does, we are really a long way off from finding a way to use it.

Can we all just do without energy? Sure we can. Right after about 6 to 6.5 billion of us die. Who is first? And oh yeah, about having 3 kids (or more)... that will have to be illegal.

So... fossil fuels are dwindling (at least the easy to use ones), and are absolutely insane... but the alternatives are nearly as bad, so what do we do?

1. limit worldwide population growth. Adopt the Chinese family planning principle. We will be using their currency anyway, might as well have the entire planet use their family planning.

2. Become much more energy efficient. Yeah, I know I just argued that it isn't a solution. And it's not, but it will be to our advantage (each of us) and it's part of the solution.

3. For now (like the next 50 years or so), convert to biofuels. The conversion is easy (biodiesel is pretty much just like diesel). Be wise in what we use to make biofuel. Yes, we will likely see 200 square miles of desert consumed by this... or maybe more. So what. It doesn't all have to be in one place. If we keep using fossil fuels we will create 20000 more square miles of desert anyway (and lose 20000 square miles of other ecosystems in the process). It is the best of a set of bad choices. Unless 6 billion of us volunteer to just off ourselves. You first.

4. Where we already have buildings, add solar and wind generators.

5. Geothermal where possible, and improve our technology.

6. Nukes... more nukes will carry us through the next 50 to 100 years, and we can count (really count) that the future generations will come up with better waste disposal plans (because they will have to... and, in fact, they have to anyway).

Palm oil is simply an example of how deliberate cultivation of a non-food crop for fuel is deleterious.

My opinion about the time line for algal biodiesel is based on the fact that research is still turning up fundamental problems. Once those problems have been solved, pilot plants will be built to determine the practical and logistical issues. Once those have been figured out commercialization can start, at which point there will be a ramp-up time to significant production volumes. I figure that solutions to the fundamental problems are five to ten years away, pilot projects will take another five years to prove the processes, and industrial ramp-up will take another 5 years after that. 15 years in the best case, 20 years is more probable.

As an indicator, Iogen has been in business for 30 years, and still has yet to set up a commercial cellulosic ethanol operation.

Growing food indeed has an enormous impact in ecosystems. Monocrop agriculture is one of the biggest ecological offenders on the face of the planet. That's why I suggest we not make things any worse by introducing yet more large-scale crops and appropriating yet more of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity for purely human use. We already use between 40% and 50% of it. At what point do we leave any for other species?

I'm not saying don't use biofuels at all. I'm saying we shouldn't commercialize the industrial-scale use of biofuels because the biosphere simply doesn't have the slack some of us think it does. We shouldn't just be burning the biosphere into CO2, H20 and N02 in order to drive cars. We should be using biofuels only for small applications where the use of liquid fuels is essential. That level of use might be sustainable. 50 billion gallons of ethanol a year isn't, no matter whether it comes from corn kernels, corn stover or switchgrass.

Ultimately we need to reduce the level of human consumption and human numbers. We need to get from here to there without destroying the rest of the planet's life in the process. That's what I fear our current bio-fuelled path will lead to.

Why look that ethanol? It has its own set of problems. Just to maintain our gasoline guzzling ways? Biodiesel is available now, and many car companies are bringing back clean diesel technology (VW and Mercedes for two). Combine clean biodiesel with electric hybrid technology and we can go forward, not backward.

Ok, now about the algae thing. I know a bit about this subject, and those fundamental problems you refer to are simply not that overwhelming. As I stated before, open raceway ponds are unlikely to be the solution to the cultivation question. And, for the moment, bioreactors are not economic. However, enclosed raceway ponds are much less expensive than bioreactors and have most of the advantages of open raceway. The other major problem is extraction, however a number of companies are developing centrifuge technology which is designed to break up the algae cells and release the oil. From there, the refining of the oil to fuel is a well known (and now becoming widely implemented technology). In addition, to spur the growth of the algae, a number of people are looking at flue gas from current power plants (not that I think this is the right solution, but at least you get two bangs for your CO2 buck... once when you burn the coal/natural gas for electricity, and another when you burn the biodiesel. Algae has been reported to remove 30 to 50 percent of the CO2 from smokestacks. If we buried the algae, it might make the years between now renewables easier on the environment... without the pesky issues about how much oil the algae produces or how to extract it. Not to mention that we learn a lot about growing algae. I think your time line is off, probably by a factor of two (given that the price of petro oil is near $100/barrel right now, and I think likely to climb more). Given the amount of money to be made, I'm thinking that the resources that will be put into algae oil is going to be huge, we have only scratched the surface.

Algae can be grown anywhere from tropics to temperate climates. Deserts work really well and the algae won't compete for land use with crops. And because algae is SO productive, replacing the petro fuels with algae fuels doesn't require THAT much land. I refer you to the work done here:

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

In it, the author claims that all fuel consumed in the US (140 billion gallons a year, gasoline and petro diesel) could be grown in 15,000 square miles. To put that number in perspective, the US Sonoran desert is 120,000 square miles. Not that anyone (even the author) advocates placing the entire production in one place. And this is to produce what we consume now. We could consume less by both driving less and by engaging technologies (already in hand) to improve MPG.

And, as I've said, there are even people looking at growing algae in the oceans... however, THAT might be 20 years off.

I'd much rather use 5 percent of the Sonoran desert and 5 percent of the great basin desert, than I would see corn prices at a point where Mexican peasants can no longer afford tortillas (which may already be here) and see all of Indonesia and Malaysia cleared for the planting of oil palms AND we will still be adding nearly as much CO2 to the atmosphere by burning oil from Canadian tar sands (no to mention the ecological disaster that will be the Canadian sub arctic forests where the tar sands are located (Alberta).

I don't think you will convince people to simply not drive. Drive less, maybe, drive more efficient vehicles, yes. Not drive at all... no.

When there is a commercial algal biodiesel pilot plant running successfully I'll dance another. Until then, I will remain skeptical. My skepticism won't prevent research and development from proceeding. Of all the fuel sources currently proposed, algal biodiesel certainly has the best combination of possible yield and technical feasibility. Hybrid diesels running on algal might even allow us to keep driving our kids to soccer practice in perpetuity.

I drive a VW Jetta TDI. I bought it specifically so I could run it on biodiesel. Since I bought it I've found out where most biodiesel comes from, and I'm a bit embarrassed to admit to my original motivation. I now simply drive as little as possible, but I refuse to use biodiesel as a political and moral statement.

I think people will actually convince themselves to drive less as time goes by. Saying that they won't has a peculiarly American ring to it. In most other places in the world they drive a whole lot less. If we don't get algal biodiesel up and running before global oil production drops by 30%, I'd bet that $20/gallon would make even Americans drive less.

HIV/AIDS, drought caused by climate change, rising fertilizer and fuel prices, booming populations and rising food prices are all factors. Biofuel competition raising food prices is just one influence. Why should we make any of them worse, though, if we don't have to?

No other energy source can make that claim. No other energy source can take excess carbon out of the atmosphere.
http://www.bestenergies.com/downloads/naturemag_carbon_200705.pdf

Biofuels would have a very hard time being carbon negative because an inevitable outcome of their use is the release of CO2 into the air. With the current goal of converting all organic "waste" material (that might have sequestered some carbon if it was tilled back into the soil) into fuel and then into CO2 as well, it's hard to see how biofuels could ever be carbon negative. At the moment they aren't even carbon neutral.

Agriculture could be carbon negative if it resulted in a buildup of carbon in the soil over time. Again, at the moment it's not, as shown by the depletion of organic material in agricultural soils. The problem of NO2 released by the use of nitrogen fertilizers tells us that even being carbon neutral isn't good enough, as NO2 is a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as CO2....

No need to shout, I can read lower case too...

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

A combination of Terra Preta and no-till practices would be beneficial, no question about it.

Sorry, It is the way the article was written.

"Biofuels derived from low-input high-diversity (LIHD) mixtures of native grassland perennials can provide more usable energy, greater greenhouse gas reductions, and less agrichemical pollution per hectare than can corn grain ethanol or soybean biodiesel. High-diversity grasslands had increasingly higher bioenergy yields that were 238% greater than monoculture yields after a decade. LIHD biofuels are carbon negative because net ecosystem carbon dioxide sequestration (4.4 megagram hectare–1 year–1 of carbon dioxide in soil and roots) exceeds fossil carbon dioxide release during biofuel production (0.32 megagram hectare–1 year–1). Moreover, LIHD biofuels can be produced on agriculturally degraded lands and thus need to neither displace food production nor cause loss of biodiversity via habitat destruction.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314/5805/1598

Tilman responds:


At the moment it looks as though this is a promising idea, but not one that's seems likely to provide a significant carbon wedge in the next decade or two. We ought to be pursuing it, but I personally think efforts to reduce fuel-driven transportation requirements by such means as rail electrification are more likely to provide immediate benefits.

Ultimately, proposals like are attempts to answer the question, "How can we keep driving?" I think that's the wrong question to be asking. It strikes me that any civilization that depends on the degree of mobility we have built into ours will inevitably overshoot, as ours already has.

and everyone is entileted to their opion. However, “The criminal insanity of biofuels” is simply untrue and a clear distortion of the facts.

Current biofuel processes and policies are flat-out nuts and are contributing to starvation. That constitutes criminal insanity as far as I'm concerned.

Rational, humane and helpful biofuel processes (which might or might not ultimately include algal biodiesel or LIHD biomass) are still a decade or more away from implementation. Rational, humane and helpful biofuel policies are nowhere in sight. Given that shortcoming virtually any process, no matter how enlightened, is a candidate for unsustainable implementation.

made from inedibles as loong as food crops are not taken out of production to grow the fuel crops.

Biofuels themselves are not evil. They are carbon-neutral.

It doesn't matter what we grow. For that reason alone, biofuels are wrong, even if they are not replacing food crops.

The current course (use all of the fossil fuels we can, and when we are out of the easy ones, start using the hard ones... like oil shale and tar sands) is just batshit crazy. We are killing ALL OF THE ECOSYSTEMS, not just a few hundred square miles of desert or farm land.

We have almost reached the point of no return (runaway greenhouse), there is evidence that the planet is ALREADY UNDERGOING a mass extinction event. Right now.

So, what's the plan? Give up energy? Keep using fossil fuels? Biofuels (no matter how "bad" they are)? Other? (and don't say solar/wind/geothermal/wave... those are all ways that produce electricity, which presently we don't have an easy or convenient way to use for transportation, and the ways that we DO have, like fuel cells, are not very ecologically friendly either). So what do we do? Give up transportation?

Personally, I don't think biofuels are much more than a niche legacy solution, or something to drive our aircraft fleets on, but too many people here are perfect examples of the old saying that nothing will ever be accomplished if first all possible objections must be overcome.

We need to back down as quickly as possible from our current high-energy civilization to a level of human numbers and activity that is in proportion to the planet's natural energy flows and physical regeneration capacity. To do this we need to reduce our population by the most effective but humane means available, and to reduce our collective resource consumption and waste generation as much and as quickly as possible.

Ideally we need to do this while not damaging the ecosphere any more than we already have. Given the current situation that's not possible, so we need to at least minimize the damage. To do that, we need to clearly understand what problems we are trying to solve, what the potential solutions are, what impact those solutions will have on the ecosphere (which includes other humans) and try to choose solutions that do as little damage as possible.

My claim is that, used in the quantities required for large-scale human activity, biofuels are more damaging to the ecosphere than wind power, solar power, hydro power, even nuclear power, and certainly much more damaging than population reduction, conservation and lifestyle adjustment.

Yes, we give up some transportation. It was nice while it lasted, but I doubt the level of human mobility we have achieved is sustainable.

We need to reduce our population by the most effective but humane means available? What in the world does that mean? Starvation? Some nice quiet gassing of villages?

Are you advocating the actual killing of people as a means of reducing population?

By that I mean the education and empowerment of women, the provision of family planning services and local economic development to whatever extent is feasible without further damaging the ecology. No eugenics allowed, sorry.

Whew! That's a relief. Sorry about the misunderstanding. I guess you mean we should reduce population GROWTH, not reduce the current population. And your use of the term "humane" made me think you were trying to find a so-called nice way of extermination.

While it should be possible to shrink the world population by gradually reducing the fertility rates of underdeveloped nations, it would probably take 30 or 40 years (a generation or two) to start seeing such an effect. That's longer than we have left. I expect the global population to start actually shrinking in about 15 years, but not through any deliberate human actions. I expect Mother Nature will step up to the plate. It won't be pleasant, but at least our hands will be clean.

Steel track and overhead wires is a very mature technology. Society is inevitably going to rearrange itself so that personal automobiles are entirely unnecessary in the daily routines of our lives. The population density of suburban areas, especially those surrounding large cities, will increase as automobiles become less viable. These areas will be increasingly served by public transportation, most of it eventually electric.

The future for most people will not be a retreat to 40 acres of farmland and a horse, instead it will be an increasingly urbanized lifestyle. Unused parking lots, driveways, and garages will become additional housing and small markets easily accessible by foot.

Communities will become much brighter, livelier and cohesive places, and the majority of people will be unable to comprehend why we ever equated personal automobiles with freedom when rapid travel to anywhere in the civilized world begins by picking up one's wallet, packing a suitcase or backpack, and walking to the nearest bus, subway, or streetcar stop.

Good luck with that.

I think people would rather drill every available spot on earth, AND build nukes in Alberta to recover the oil from the tar sands, and actually lay waste to the planet through global warming then give up the family automobile. It's become a birthright for every American and the aspiration of billions of upwardly mobile Chinese and Indians. I have a low opinion of my fellow man. I think we need to offer an alternative method of transportation that still allows one to drive when and where they want.

I'm open to the idea of something like compressed gas drive (rather than combustion engines).

But I don't think "Society is inevitably going to rearrange itself so that personal automobiles are entirely unnecessary". That's a nice dream... but try it out with the lunch crowd at work... be sure to include people who aren't part of your "group".

Without cheap oil and natural gas you can't economically build and fuel the tools required to extract oil from tar sands. It's the easily extracted oil and natural gas that make very capital intensive projects such as tar sands extraction and deep sea oil platforms possible.

In other words, we won't have a choice. Nobody is going to buy cars if they can't afford fuel, and nobody is going to be able to afford the fuel because the entire economy will be running out of inexpensive fuel while real incomes decline. If we manage to keep our heads together much of the U.S. "lunch crowd" may end up working for some modern version of the Depression era WPA, regularly riding worker buses towing porta-potties, and thanking God they aren't starving like so many other people in the world.

That's not exactly a utopia.

Within a decade I suspect the U.S. will be unable to support its oil-fueled military empire simply because oil is too expensive, and especially too expensive to take by force. If a barrel of peacefully acquired oil costs $200, a barrel produced in someplace like Iraq will cost $400, not counting the blood cost. There will be a slow rotting away of U.S. infrastructure and this will make our military as it is now structured nonviable.

It doesn't make any sense to believe things can go on as they always have once the easily extracted oil and natural gas are gone.

By this argument we should cease all agriculture.

Sorry. I'm not suicidal.

The second and third planks of the Deep Ecology platform are:


That says to me that we are allowed to reduce diversity to some extent through agriculture, but only in the pursuit of vital needs, like food. I say "biofuels for everyone" is not a vital need. Others' mileage may vary.

Deep Ecologists tend to be the most philosophically uncompromising SOBs in the green movement. If they've decided that some agriculture is morally defensible, I'm good to go. But dammit, making enough ethanol so everybody can just keep on truckin' like back when there was still oil does not meet my definition of a vital need.

The only reason we see corn stover etc. as "waste" is because of a limited and (and even anthropocentric) perspective on the biosphere. Even farmers know there is no such thing as "agricultural waste". I know they think that because I spent this last weekend at the annual convention of the National Farmers Union, and this very topic came up. A room full of 150 farmers were all horrified at the thought of using "waste" for fuel and just burning it up instead of using it to maintain soil fertility.

The agricultural "waste", as non-farmers like to refer to it, is vital at maintaining soil fertility and soil structure. The decomposing leaves, roots, and stalks inject nitrogen and other nutrients back into the soil, act as sponges to hold rainwater, and provide a breeding ground for beneficial microorganisms.

Look at a stalk of corn. The corncob itself is a small part of the plant, yet just removing these from the field requires that farmers invest in heavy nitrogen fertilization every spring. Removing the entire plant would rapidly turn the soils to sand, even with massive nitrogen injections.

Removing corn chaff from fields would make my entire Midwestern farm family's heads explode, unless you used it as livestock bedding to be returned to the field in the spring, enriched with manure.

Only people removed from the land can think that's good

To save money all cities waste is combined together and not put on fields
because its has heavy metals in it, and other not so nice stuff

After the bacteria work on the chaff it could be returned also to the fields
So it would not be burned up.

We remove the chaff and corn all the time its called silage and then the end product is returned to the field. Or its chaff and cobs are bailed and fed as roughage. But the manure is returned when it can.

Really big cattle lots usually don't own land so the manure goes to waste
So its done all the time. Some is put in bags and sold. That didn't make it back to field that it came from.

Some farms cattle get food from couple of states away. The manure isn't seen as valuable to ship back. I'm thinking of Cal. or Idaho.

And in doing so, the US has lost HALF of it's topsoil in the past century. Ethanol-from-chaff conversions will INCREASE this soil degradation.

Yes, we could return the processed chaff to the fields, just like we could return all sorts of biomass, yet that doesn't stop landfills and incinerators from being filled with the stuff. Here in Minnesota, for example, a power plant that burns turkey manure recently opened up, despite the excellent fertilizer value turkey waste has to farmers.

I suspect that the cost of simply dumping the processed chaff into landfills or incinerators might be a bit cheaper from an ethanol manufacturing standpoint that trucking it back to those farm fields for redistribution, at least until chemical fertilizers become too expensive. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see a cellulosic ethanol plant tout itself as carbon-neutral by BURNING the left-over chaff to power the plant.

One farmer that I worked for the farm has been in family since Minnesota was settleted only had 6 inch of topsoil at first now they still have that 6 inch. That was from when it was first put to the plow.

Hay never is left on the field that is also always removed some of those dairy farms are still working with the same soil. My uncles still work the same fields. No drop off of topsoil.

We have been feeding people without returning the manure back to field

I don't think ethanol will be bad. I also want it for a fuel source if oil does go away. Bio diesel will be needed also.

You say hay is never left on the field at the farm. Where does the manure and soiled bedding material from those dairy cows go? Is there some huge mountain of manure next to the barn? In the winter at my dad's farm, we can't spread manure into the fields due to snow, so we pile it up next to the barn and spread it in spring. In 5 months, our pigs and cattle generate enough manure to produce a pile 10 ft tall, and this is from a small farm.

Unless they were practicing some incredibly long rotation cycles to maintain soil fertility, like 3 years hay/3 years soybeans/1 year corn, the soil will become depleted. To argue otherwise is naive. I can go to my grandmother's house and read through my grandfather's old textbooks that he had when he went to the U of MN to get his degree in agricultural sciences in the late 40's, and even back then they recognized you can't continually remove nutrients from the soil without degradation.

Yes they also piled up manure when winter would not allow it.

When it could be put on it was still some of it was lost.

Some fields did not get any. Soil samples have been taken little or no loss

Are you saying they don't know their own land!

They have not loss any. Gee maybe you should come over and do it

Rototilling the Sumatran rain forests to make you feel better about your gas tank is not carbon neutral.

Neither was rototilling the pantanal in Brazil to make ethanol carbon neutral.

There are zero tankers that import "renewable portfolio" biofuels from Sumatra to Germany that run on biofuel. Zero. Nada. Zip.

If there were just one such tanker, your little cult would be screaming about it loudly while pretending that the other fifty thousand tankers didn't exist.

I note that there is NOT ONE member of the anti-nuke religion who has demonstrated that the South African coal freighters they just financed - the ones that will be transporting coal to Germany - runs on biofuels, wind or solar.

Is that so

How about land used to grow Cotton?

How about land used to grow flowers?

How about land used to grow sod?

How about land used to grow Mac Mansions ( my favorite )

How about land used to grow feed for your favorite Horses?

How about land used to so your kids can play soccer?

How about land I'm growing trees on ( no food) ?

How about your front lawn is it growing food or waste grass?

How about land used for Golf courses (Minnesota has 625) no food there?

How about land that your house sits on?

How about all the roads and road ditches?

Are these also crimes

How are these Jim think its spelled out good enough?

That's the short answer.

We can reduce our impact on the natural environment by reducing our numbers and by thinking carefully about the way we do things.

Maybe, for example, we don't need cars or suburbs or front lawns to be happy...

It's my own personal belief that we would all be a lot better off if automobiles were not tone of the central themes of our culture. I think it is very likely the automobile culture will fade away as the price of oil rises.

"The World Inside" by Robert Silverberg.

That's another part of the solution. Urbmons (Urban Monads... essentially huge 1000 story buildings that mankind developed so that the planet would have enough acreage to feed the population). People weren't allowed to go outside.

Interesting idea, but unlikely to happen. More likely is a major resource war that kills off a significant portion of the population. Or a new plague.

What's not OK is taking land out of the biosphere and sequestering it for non-essential human use. I can understand us appropriating the amount of land we currently use for growing food, because until there are fewer of us we do need to keep everyone fed if possible. At the moment that takes all the farmland we're using.

Of your list of items, the only one that I would not immediately consider a criminal use of land is growing cotton and the actual land under an appropriately-sized dwelling. Given the current planetary situation, I would consider expanding the land used for the rest of your listed items to be criminal, and our lack of effort to reduce the land used for those purposes to be likewise criminal.

I travel a awful lot so when I say the amount of land becoming
for non farm use that once was is more problem then fuel will ever
be. I can't stop that but it I worry about it. Once topsoil hauled off can't be
put back to farm use.

There are only a small amount of land that's gets the right amount of
rain and is fertile and flat enough to use for crop land.

I also worry when we pave or use every space. There needs to be some
wild land. Other wise we won't be here.

I say we need to provide housing for some helpers

Two 1. Barn swallows (yes they make a mess on your house tuff!)
2. Bats

One that doesn't need housing just some space not used
1. Beavers

one that needs to be de linked from blackbirds
cow birds or grackles
In the old days they followed buffalo so they have to two sets of eggs
each year. One they raise which might get stomped on. One they
put in other birds nest for them to raise. So they are getting to big in
numbers (Black Birds (songbirds))

And now Jim can say I'm all over the map like he did about my last rant.

I couldn't agree more, right down the line. There's got to be room on this Earth for something besides people and their works. If we lose the wildness we lose ourselves.
:toast:

Its okay to have people play in the futures market of food
Which has an effect on the price people pay for food.
this okay right?

Its okay for General Mills to take 3.00 a Bushel corn and turn it into a

4 or 5 dollar box of cereal. Very small part of the bushel went into the

box of cereal. Thats okay

One of the biggest problems we face in the world today is the abstraction and corporate control of essentials like food. The disconnection of eaters from farmers, the interposition of corporate production and distribution systems, the anonymity of cellophane-wrapped, commoditized food is one of the processes that has allowed our food sovereignty to be violated - violated to the extent that pork belly futures have more value than actual pork bellies.

The use of food crops for biofuel is being driven by that same corporatist agenda that always deems profits to be more important than people.

Does he seriously believe that there's enough current demand for biofuels to make even a fraction of a percentage difference in the availability of food? Famine is by definition a logistical problem--while one area may not have enough food, food production overall still considerably outstrips consumption. Hence, the problem isn't a lack of food, but getting the food to where it's useful.

It strikes me that if you're in the middle of a drought, and can't produce enough food, there's an argument to be made for doing something that will produce a little bit of free currency, which would allow you to import food. Growing for biofuels might--and I say might--be more profitable than simply trying to directly feed people from the same square area.

Also, 3000 hectares is only about 12 square miles, or a block 3.4 miles on a side.

You want to complain about something going on in Swaziland, try going after the King, his fleet of luxury cars, and the fully renovated luxury mansions of his many wives. That's an infinitely bigger drain on the country than 12 square miles of cassava for ethanol.

In his SOTU GWB said he wants 35 billion gallons per year of alternative fuels online by 2017. Let's say a mere half of this comes from corn ethanol (with the rest coming from biodiesel, coal-to-liquids etc). A bushel of corn produces 2.7 gallons of ethanol. 17.5 billion gallons of ethanol would require 6.5 billion bushels of corn. That's half the total 2007 US corn harvest, and three times the amount of 2007 US corn exports.

In what universe would that not make a difference to world food availability?

Actually, the basic math works well.

What you're not mentioning, or simply don't know, is that 1 bushel of corn produces both 2.7 gallons of ethanol AND 18 pounds of animal feed. 6.5 billion bushels would convert into about 120 billion pounds of feed, or 30 billion pounds of meat per year. Already 6.1 billion bushels are used every year for animal feed. That only leaves a margin of 400 million additional bushels to find.

Again, I think that biofuels are going to end up being a limited niche, but the people who talk about them like everybody's going to starve to death do not know what they're talking about.

My concern is that food prices are already being significantly impacted world-wide by the minuscule amount of biofuels we're currently making. If food prices rise too much (say they doubled?), while you might still be able to afford your steak and two veg, there are 2 billion people living on a dollar or two a day that might feel the pinch. Of those some will die of starvation. The higher food prices rise, the more of them will die as we in the rich west outbid them.

We'll be just fine. It's only faceless brown people with funny names who will be at risk. I don't want the deaths of any of them on my conscience. Since we know that biofuel production is driving up global food prices then if I were to use biofuels I would have to bear some moral responsibility for any resulting famine deaths. I'd rather not carry that weight.

"My concern is that food prices are already being significantly impacted world-wide by the minuscule amount of biofuels we're currently making."

Evidence of that, please?


"If food prices rise too much (say they doubled?), while you might still be able to afford your steak and two veg, there are 2 billion people living on a dollar or two a day that might feel the pinch."

Do you really think we pay the same for food in the US that the poorest countries pay? Of course not. Food isn't a traded commodity--nine times out of ten it's consumed in the same area it's produced.

But since you asked, these are the kinds of stories that are informing my opinion:

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/05/22/corn.html

http://www.straight.com/article-101132/biofuels-bonanza-will-cost-money-and-lives

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6481029.stm

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=a49d1dc0-50c6-407d-91ff-666814b11c24&k=48316

http://money.uk.msn.com/investing/articles/nicklouth/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4791536

You may not see stories like these as evidence of major global risk. I do. In fact I see it as a large enough risk to warrant using strong language on the Internet!

Goggle corn and mexico farmers and you get how they are being run out of business because of USA low corn price.

Goggle corn and tortilla and you get that the cost is due to two companies controlling the white corn tortilla market. The people can buy a bushel of corn and grind their own tortilla cheaper than for .50

Every since fuel surcharge has been passed now diesel stays higher than gas. Right before that gas used to go up before a big holiday. Now diesel just stays high. That high price been passed into every thing. This has not been in your figures.

Almost all large cities have to run oxygenated fuel I guess you want to bring back MTBE back also. Big oil answer was to make MTBE. Or one can use ethanol. A very small leak and it gets into the water supply. I'm pretty sure that's why USA had to go to two walled tanks. An awful lot of Mom & Pop gas stations went out of business instead of buying the new tanks.

You bring up that the cost of land in Illinois is going up because of ethanol but right here on Underground was posted how a couple bought up crop land to put up there house in the country. Housed built bigger than barns. Yeah well at least if people want they can take the food. But when homes are built and the topsoil sold off. It can not be put back buts thats okay.

Just like when they looked at aphids as a pest and come to find out that liquid from the aphids feed the bacteria that feed the plants that the aphids feed on. Somethings are not as simple as they seem or as easy to fix.

I read you link from the usda does not say what you claim. ddg does have a advantage over the corn its made from. Before the ethanol plants farmers had to pay extra to get it. I guess they should have talked to you before they did it.

It's easy to look at this or that bit of evidence somone presents, find a piece of data that casts doubt on it, throw that up and go on to the next point. That's known as "fisking", and it's a common tactic on the net. Hell, I do it too. The problem is, that technique is usually used to avoid dealing with the core of the argument, it's logical underpinnings.

I claim that current biofuels and the lack of any global or national biofuel policies except for "More, please!" constitute a risk to the world's food supply. I arrived at that conclusion from a logical analysis of the systems of biofuel production as they now exist, agriculture as it is now practiced, what I understand about the energy flows of ethanol and biodiesel production, and what I understand about human nature.

I presented these stories as the kinds of evidence that I'm seeing crop up (sorry) all over the place that seem to form a consistent pattern. That pattern supports my pure-logic conclusion that inevitable excessive use of biofuels as they are currently manufactured will compete with food, raise its price and disproportionately impact people who can't pay the higher price. Does the fact that some people buy farm property and then don't farm it mean that logical conclusion is incorrect? Does it mean that rising land prices are only due to city slickers getting themselves a country retreat? I don't think so.

Why on earth would you think I want to bring back MTBE? My concern is the competition that large-scale biofuel substitution poses to the global food supply. MTBE replacement is a small proportion of potential ethanol use, and I have absolutely no problem with it in that application.

Regarding DDGs, I pointed out that weight for weight DDGs contain around 130% the nutrient value of corn. The problem is that there was also nutrient value in the carbohydrate that got fermented into alcohol. The original 56 lb bushel of corn shrinks down to just 18 lb of DDG solids during processing. So while the DDGs have a higher nutrient content by weight, they only weigh a third of what the original corn did. The original 56 lb bushel of corn, according to the link I posted, would have had 2.4 times the nutrient value of the 18 lb of DDGs that came out the other end, even though each pound of DDG has 1.3 times the nutrient value of a pound of corn. The difference is the energy that was left behind in the moonshine.

Is that clearer? I'm not saying that pound for pound DDGs don't have a higher nutrient profile than plain corn - they do indeed. However, the plain fact is that when you make ethanol from corn, some calories stay behind in the still.

Please show link that shows that, is this using fisking

You have no mention of seed company trying to get small farmers hooked on seed from them. This brings their cost up

They want them hooked on hybrids seed. They also taking farmers to court when hybrid seed pollen blows over on a field that its not planted on. They are trying to say that it is their stuff now when it was never planted there. They want farmers to pay for it. Some of these farmers in Africa can't pay for seed. They never had too.

Yes you are missing the point about farm land becoming non farm land. Because the first thing they do is haul off the topsoil. You say land use for fuel makes food price go up. Less land to grow food makes the price go up then. The best farm land gets sold. So if less food is raised it makes the price go up. It can not be put back to make food. Yes it does cause problems. Its like a virus spreading every where. I travel the whole lower 48 so I see it, the amount would make your head spin. The farmer can't raise the price they get for what they raise if the cost of production goes up. The global market does that and futures market have an effect on this price. So if one farmers price for product doesn't cover his cost he stops making the item. Unless that land is sold off.

The price of food is going up but not for reason that you state, am I missing the point. My point that we will get mix right between bio fuels and food, but unless something is done we won't have to talk about it because the fields and wild spots will be gone. All wild things can live unless we just keep taking their habit away. We are spreading like a virus until we are to the edge of petri dish. In the lab we see it going on and shake our head because you see how its going to end. We can't see the dish that we are in.


Some land that is in production has been making food longer than USA has been, maybe you should ask them how they have done it. Without outside input

http://www.ncga.com/ethanol/co_products/definition_production.htm


It's the protein and corn oil that gives DDG its higher nutritional value per pound than the original corn, mostly because the remaining oil contains more calories per pound than the starch that was removed. The fact that 61% of the weight of the corn is starch as mentioned in the second paragraph accounts for the difference in weight between the original bushel of corn and and the weight of the coproducts.

I agree that biofuel is just one of the current and potential influences on food and land prices. My concern stems mainly from the fact that there are no regulatory or policy restrictions on biofuel production. It's being left up to the market, and the market cares a lot more about making money than feeding people. So I don't share your confidence that "we will get mix right between bio fuels and food".

I also agree that loss of wilderness and the reduction of habitat is a major issue, and I see the push toward biofuels as a major driver of that process. Read the Q&A at the link I posted here for a glimpse into what one senior Harvard economist want to do to forests in the rush to develop biofuels. One of his responses in particular is this:


That's why I'm so bloody worried about this.

Starving people will not just sit by and stand for the way things are.

So your new link shows 18 pounds but does not show the advantage in feeding it to livestock. It doe not show how much value about its weight. So amount of wddg which is better for food value. Adds to how much value to how much corn. I've looked at cattle so this helps because the way their stomachs work. Pigs pass it thru more than once so maybe you get better use of wddg because the starch is worked on before the animal eats it. Even if it only passes thru once.

But if the land is still there its crops can be determined where it goes.
If its Mac D parking lot can not grow anything

The feeding of ddg has a benefit for the animal otherwise farmers would not pay for something that they grow. http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/ansci/beef/as1242w.htm


The cds is also used for a feed supplement. That weight is not told in article.

This next point takes a bit. Here in USA we take food and ruin the food value. To make flour last longer we remove the wheat germ

German bread in small towns looks like white bread but its more like our whole wheat. But it has to be eaten the day its made. It gets like a rock otherwise. In looking up corn I came across this.
http://www.harvestfields.ca/harvest/cookbooks/food/03.htm
Have to look it bit more this is saying graham is flour with the whole wheat.

This is a different item animals are feed antibiotic because early test show that the animals put weight on faster. Newer studies show this not the case. When you get sick bugs you will have already been exposed to antibiotics in the animal feed.

since fuel contributes to the cost of food at every step- growing, processing, packaging and shipping. According to USDA, non-farm costs account for 80% of every food dollar spent in the U.S.

The type of corn used to produce ethanol is not destined for human consumption.

85% of the cost of fertilizer is the cost of the NG feedstock. If NG prices quadruple after Peak Gas, what happens to African farmers that already pay 3x the world price for fertilizer? It's going to suck even more to be an African farmer in about 10 years.

However, that doesn't mean that biofuel competition isn't already a factor, and won't be more of a factor in the future. Plus it's production and use is something that can be legislated, unlike Peak Gas.

The argument that "The type of corn used to produce ethanol is not destined for human consumption" is almost Republican in its obtuseness. No, the type of corn used for ethanol just goes to feed cows and pigs, and nobody eats them, do they? What about the replanting of land originally in direct-to-human crops like wheat or soybeans so that farmers can take advantage of corn prices and subsidies due to ethanol? That old shibboleth should be getting embarrassing by now.

Unless I have misinterpreted your argument, you seem to be assuming that 18 lb of DDG directly substitutes for the original bushel of corn. If that's what you're saying, it's incorrect. According to http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rbs/pub/sep06/measuring.htm:


The DDGs from a 56-lb bushel of corn retain (18/56)*1.3 or 42% of the nutrient value of the original corn. The other 60% or so of the energy in the original corn gets burned up in cars or perhaps used as process heat to keep the coal and natural gas consumption down. So the DDGs from 17.5 billion gallons of corn likker production would replace about 2.5 billion bushels of feed corn. That leaves a requirement for 3.6 billion bushels.

Of course that 17.5 billion gallons of white lightning doesn't replace the same amount of gasoline due to its lower energy content. Then there are the small matters of transporting and drying the extra 4 billion bushels or so of grain (the mass of the original 6.5 billion bushels that doesn't turn into DDGs), the natural gas needed for the fertilizer to grow it, and the pesky issue of process heat for distillation - all that EROEI stuff that people use to beat up David Pimentel.

You can't just wave the magic DDG wand and have your ethanol turn green...

Always pissing in our Wheaties.

I've read your link I don't find what you state

ddg are put back into feed for protein value

Its also added to back into feed corn meal

If it had less food value then it would not be added back in

So ddg has something that is not used or that the animal can use

corn used to be used for distilling doesn't have to be dried to the same level that corn that is stored for long times have to be

Pimentel admitted that he got the land lost amount wrong (His words)

Mitsui Engineering using dehydration to remove water from ethanol

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/07/mitsui-engineer.html#more

removes one more energy loss in production of ethanol

That doesn't mean it's necessarily a tractable problem. Here's an interesting tidbit about fertilizer logistics, that says a lot about transportation logistics in the developing world:


The same difficulties that impede fertilizer supplies also hamper delivery of food aid.

For a frightening glimpse into the mind of a neoconomist, read the Q&A. Ricardo Hausmann is as clinically insane as your president.
"Nothing so predisposes a man to blindness as having his paycheque depend on his inability to see the truth." :argh: :banghead: :nuke: