Stratfor's Bart Mongoven on why the growing negative buzz around ethanol is having limited political effect:
... the backlash against biofuels is in full swing. The critics, however, are running head on into the powerful agricultural lobbies in the United States and Europe that so successfully championed the issue in the first place. These advocates say that ethanol, biodiesel and other nonpetroleum-based transportation fuels reduce pollution, help fight climate change and improve national security by reducing dependence on foreign oil. Though many policymakers find these arguments compelling, the biofuels issue would not have achieved the political momentum it has without the intense lobbying by the agricultural sector.
In fact, the fate of the current wave of biofuel mandates and the pace at which industrialized countries offer biofuels at the pumps will largely be determined by agriculture interests. The implications are as strong and lasting for developing countries as for the industrialized countries involved.
Worth reading the whole thing.
Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp
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Jon Rynn Posted 8:06 am
13 Sep 2007
Second problem, which is worse, is the farm lobby power, in both the U.S. and Europe:While the EU environmental lobby is much stronger than its U.S. counterpart, it pales in Brussels compared to the farm lobby. In Europe, the important energy issues are energy security and climate change. Environmentalists were helpless when the farm lobby flexed its muscles in the most recent energy policy discussion and won a dramatic increase in biofuel use, having used both energy security and climate change as justification. Though environmentalists were livid, for EU politicians it was an easy decisionThe farm lobby is so powerful in Europe that most of the EU budget is subsidies for agriculture, and there are high tariffs for farm products, even from desperately poor countries.
There's a third fact that's scary, which is that Brazil's ethanol is by far the best -- which means the Amazon is in even more trouble.
We better go toward electric vehicles and public transit before there's no more soil left.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 5:49 pm
13 Sep 2007
I share Jon's annoyance with the Stratfor article's glib lumping together of "environmentalists". While Bart Mongoven is right that those environmental groups in Washington who derive their very life essence from their access to the Hill are inclined to make the kind of Faustian bargains that he discusses in his article, a more accurate picture would be to describe environmental groups as comprised of circular firing squads when it comes to the issue of agrofuels.
Lately we are beginning to see mass defections from the "any biofuels will do" forces, with some moving into the "we need to move to second-generation biofuels ASAP" camp, and others joining the original sceptics and opponents.
As for the Amazon, that is not directly threatened by ethanol: rather, Brazil's savanna, the Cerrado, is where ethanol expansion will take place. Indeed, if anything, the Amazon is threatened by grain-based ethanol in North America and Europe. In the USA, corn is displacing soybeans (acres planted to the former up by 15% this year, and to the latter down by 11%), which is driving production of soy elsewhere. And soy grows very well in the Amazon.
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:12 am
14 Sep 2007
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/09/pennsylvania-m ...
This sounds a wee bit nutty, but an article in Sunday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette tells the story of an Erie, Pennsylvania man who created a 3,000-degree flame by exposing salt water to radio frequencies.
...
Roy [a Penn State University...chemist and expert in water structure] called Kanzius' discovery "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years."
John Bailo
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:09 am
14 Sep 2007
The "chemist" who says this works thinks homeopathy works, too. He's a nut.
They've built a machine that liberates hydrogen from water, and then burns the hydrogen. Umm, the energy they get back from burning the hydrogen will be less than the energy it took to liberate it. This is not an energy source. This is an embarrassment to journalists.
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:23 am
14 Sep 2007
Heh, me I'm in the camp of "virgin terrestrial feedstocks are bad"
True waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill, or as sewage is fair game.
And Algae might be able to make some impact.
Everything else is simply bottlenecked by a lack of topsoil, water, and the limitations of photosynthesis itself and how weakly it transfers sunlight into energy.
As is, it seems like eating up 500 year old topsoil, and eating up 500 year old ground water resources is assumed to regenerate itself in less than one year. When thats simply not the case.
Even rainfed agriculture, that fresh water would have been used for some purpose elsewhere. And by polluting it for the purpose of agriculture that purpose elsewhere is being subverted.
If you simply included the energy cost of water remediation in these biofuel processing facilities, that would kill almost all their energy gains.
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:24 am
14 Sep 2007
Salt water fuel gets major university review
http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=74285
But fascinating if workable. As far as the inventor, he's a respected cancer technologist:
Kanzius had originally designed his RF machine to kill cancer cells by heating up high tech nanoparticles.
Doctor Steven Curley, M.D. is using the Kanzius RF device for research at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.</blockquote?<br>
John Bailo
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:31 am
14 Sep 2007
Energy experts like University of Akron Professor Emeritus, Rudy Scavuzzo, Ph.D, say the burning of salt water is nothing more than a new twist on a high school science experiment.
Scavuzzo told Channel 3's Mike O'Mara that the Kanzius invention requires too much energy to be worth celebrating.
"There is no breakthrough", said Professor Scavuzzo, "because there are more efficient ways of breaking water down to hydrogen and oxygen."
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