I've been following the wonderful grist series on biofuels for the past couple weeks--Thank you Grist for taking on this complex topic. All the hype around ethanol and biodiesel over the past couple years, I have to say, is overbearing. It's hard for an environmentalist to choose what side he or she is on, when in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia, rainforest is being cut down to grow sugarcane and oil palm on industrial scales.

Having spent the past 6 months reading all I could about biofuels and writing my senior thesis on biodiesel development in Senegal, I think that there's clearly been spin on both sides of the debate. What the Grist articles show is that there is absolutely no way that biofuels will solve the civilization-scale problem of climate change while having benign side-affects.
If we, as environmental activists, engineers, policymakers, academics and concerned citizens, don't keep a close watch, ADM, Cargill and others will outpace small producer co-operatives and more sustainable producers by continuing to treat environmental degradation as an "externality." To ensure that consumers understand the true costs and enjoy the benefits of biofuels, we need to look at the whole energy picture. In my thesis, I argue that only a small-scale, decentralized biofuel production system would help rural people gain income.

Where I live in Vermont, the Vermont Biofuels Association and ACORN, a community group focused on energy issues, are trying to take the same model and apply it to Addison County, where dairy farms take up much of the land. All around the world, small-scale producers and cooperatives are outpacing large corporations in innovation while keeping sustainability and democracy in view.

In Vermont, the Midwest, Brazil and even Senegal, we must push for a more democratic, decentralized and sustainable bioenergy market before the behemoth conglomerates take us too far down the wrong path.

All this talk about Brazil and not a mention of it's rain forests?  

The land to grow sugar cane must come from somewhere.  It's my understanding (and unfounded at that) that a significant portion of land used to grow sugar cane is coming from chopping down rain forests.

Can anyone shed some light on this?  How much jungle has been lost to produce fuel?  Is it worth it?

If we are to learn something from Brazil's energy policy, it is important to take more than a superficial glance at Brazil's process to energy independence.

Brazil's push for energy independence, while admirable, has had heavy environmental costs. The huge environmental impacts of sugarcane, for example, are not even mentioned in passing in the article - the clearing of endangered restinga and Atlantic coastal rainforests, heavy use of pesticides, water degradation, etc. Also, increased off-shore drilling (at least in the region where I lived - the state of Rio de Janeiro) has resulted in oil spills. Tourist and fishing industries have been negatively impacted in some some of the most beautiful coastal areas imaginable. In other instances, people have continued to unknowingly swim and fish in oil-industry contaminated waters.

Learn from Brazil? I hope so. But I hope we take the time to examine the whole lesson first before jumping in.