Swedish biofuel company SEKAB says it will become the first company to vend ethanol verified to be environmentally and socially sustainable. The company is partnering with Brazilian producers to develop criteria for the full lifecycle of fuel-bound sugarcane, verifying that the fuel was not produced through child or slave labor, was processed in fair working conditions for fair wages, and did not contribute to rainforest destruction. "This initiative is the first of its kind in the world and a major step for speeding up the replacement of gasoline and diesel," says Anders Fredriksson of SEKAB. "The criteria will gradually be developed over the coming years and synchronized with international regulations when these are in place." In the meantime, flex-fuel vehicle drivers in Sweden should be able to fill up on SEKAB's sustainable ethanol by August.
source: PR Newswire, CanadianDriver
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bobclive Posted 11:18 pm
27 May 2008
So Brazil exports bio-fuel to satisfy the euro green fanatics and imports oil in its place.
The US grows grain for bio-fuel instead of food, because of this folly millions are starving to death in the third world.
You would have thought these fanatical environmentalists would have learned from past mistakes like the DDT fiasco, which has caused hundreds of millions of deaths in the third world over the last 30 years, but fanatics never do learn by there mistakes or they would not be fanatical.
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Jonas Posted 3:44 am
28 May 2008
But on substance: the global potential for sugarcane ethanol is quite large. Several hundred million hectares in Africa, Latin America and the Indian subcontinent are available.
Knowing that by 2050, explicitly sustainably produced bioenergy can yield around 1500Ej of energy (which is 6 times the total amount of all oil consumed today), and knowing that sugarcane can be grown on approximately 25% of the landbase deemed suitable under this scenario, we can assume that there is enough potential to replace all oil with sugarcane ethanol.
Of course, this only works when one doesn't deny the existence of a continent like Africa, which some people seem to be willing to do.
According to Brazilian experts, Brazil alone can replace all worldwide gasoline consumption, without cutting a tree.
Luis Cortez, Vice-Coordinator on a project for the expansion of ethanol production in Brazil and a professor at the State University of Campinas:
Brazilian biofuels can meet world's total gasoline needs - expert.
There's still a lot of education to be done about bioenergy. And also about geography (like teaching people of the existence of a strange continent called Africa.)
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Wolverine Posted 4:23 am
28 May 2008
Hundreds of millions killed by the "DDT fiasco"? The fiasco is that this crap was ever allowed to be manufactured in the first place and that it's still used.
The "myth" that sugarcane destroys the Amazon? While true that rainforest is not directly cleared for sugar cane plantations, expanding production is pushing small farmers into more marginal areas, including the cerrado grassland and rainforests of the Amazon basin.
The ONLY environmentally friendly biofuels are those made from waste. The rest are at least as environmentally destructive as oil, some more so.
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Jonas Posted 4:45 am
28 May 2008
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danallen Posted 6:17 am
28 May 2008
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Wolverine Posted 3:35 am
29 May 2008
By waste, I mean things like used cooking oil. Growing anything anywhere in order to produce biofuel can only have one of two consequences: either natural land is destroyed in order to grow the crop, such as the tropical rainforests that are currently being destroyed in Brazil, Indonesia, and Malaysia, or land for food crops is converted to growing crops used for biofuel, in which case food becomes more scarce, expensive, or both.
This is a perfect example of why what's needed, from an ecological standpoint, is for people in developed countries to simplify their lifestyles with far less consumption, starting with far less consumption of oil and coal. There will be no magical technological solutions to ecological problems caused by human consumption, because all technology is ecologically harmful, albeit some more so than others. The basic law of physics still applies: for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, so you can't get unnatural energy, such as that from oil or coal, without causing significant ecological harm.
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Wolverine Posted 3:54 am
29 May 2008
The first sentence of your post shows our fundamental disagreement. Of course there were other reactions beside wonder at the "miracle of chemistry." Your perspective is strictly that of an anthropocentric civilized person; that is, you think that human technological advances are great, regardless of their killing of other species and destruction of the Earth and its ecosystems. Talk to or read about some traditional indigenous people, and you'll find they have the same reaction as me: human-made chemicals poison the planet and we oppose them unequivocally.
Your comment that DDT saved countless lives is another half truth. It may have saved some human lives, but it also poisons the Earth kills countless members of non-human species, including the birds such as the eagles that it almost made extinct. And the idea that it's OK to poison mosquitoes is per se reprehensible and ecologically immoral. Mosquitoes have every bit as much right to live as humans and are just another of the millions of species that comprise life on Earth. Areas of large malarial mosquitoes are clearly not fit for human habitation and should just be left alone. The problem is endless expanding human population and overpopulation, not mosquitoes.
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GRLCowan Posted 4:18 am
29 May 2008
Perhaps they had no predatory intent. We'll never know now, will we.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
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Wolverine Posted 8:09 am
29 May 2008
An equal right to live means that you don't do things like kill plants or animals that you don't eat, or pollute. But it certainly does not proscribe killing an insect that's about to bite you.
This is one of the extremely rare exceptions I make to the goal of not killing anything except to eat it. Swatting a mosquito on one's body is fundamentally different than poisoning them and the rest of the planet in order to try to kill massive numbers of mosquitoes. I also kill mosquitoes by hand when they land on me and even when they're not on me on the rare occasions when they get into our home. But killing individual mosquitoes by hand does not cause any ecological harm, nor does it poison the Earth or other species.
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