if you have half a brain. Engineering corn and soybeans to make it "cheaper" and more "profitable" to convert those two crops into biofuels is nothing but bad news. Both are limited by resources and land. Both are the least efficient crop used to make those fuels. The process will not make more fuels from less land and water, it will just increase the profit margin and thus the pressure to grow more of it.

Or, did I miss something?

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: http://www.saveourbiodiversity.com

   There certainly are a choirful of folks who chant "cellulosic" and "carbon sequestration" the way that the devout chant the rosary, but there are those of us here who are very much not in that choir.

    The entire ethanol enterprise, whether corn or cellulosic, is devoted to ensuring that business as usual continues: that we can keep sprawling out over the landscape, keep chauffering our food an average of 1500 miles, keep the entire carburban project going, right down to the strip malls and the gigantic box stores full of cheap plastic crap from China.

    After the "technology will save us" gospel of the economists, ethanomania is probably the next most dangerous fantasy, because it will absorb all the capital and resources that should be going towards a radical reorientation of society vis a vis energy use.  ("Clean coal" is the next one.)

    For those interested in looking into the claims and evaluating them, there is no better website that the i-r-squared blog by Robert Rapier, a chemical engineer.  While he is hopeful that perhaps cellulosic ethanol can someday be made to pay, he notes that, even if it did, the excess energy produced is so low that the "ethanol economy" doesn't differ all that much from one without ethanol (unless you count all the coal burned in distilling the ethanol).

    Just as "Stay the course and hope for the best" is savage idiocy in Iraq, so too is "Keep funding research and hope for the best" an inadequate policy for our energy dependence.

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For just a good sample article, see  http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/08/guest-post-on-cel...

    The following is a guest post by Don Augenstein and John Benemann. They have many years of expertise in biomass conversion. This essay is in response to Vinod Khosla's recent posting on ethanol. In my opinion, it is an excellent essay. First is the introduction by Don Augenstein.

Introduction

This post presents a perspective on ethanol from lignocellulose by my friend and co-worker, John Benemann. We have worked on, and been immersed in, biofuels and analyses of fuels from biomass processes for over 3 decades. We are to substantial degrees biotechnologists, as well as chemical engineers and have successful processes going today (methane from wastes. You can google Don Augenstein).

We have worked long and hard on biofuels for entities including Exxon (long ago), the Electric Power Research Institute, and others. Our carefully considered view, for which we will be happy to provide abundant evidence is that severe barriers remain to ethanol from lignocellulose. The barriers look as daunting as they did 30 years ago. Ethanol from lignocellulose may indeed come to pass. But the odds against are so dismal that a hydrocarbon fueled 200 mile per gallon passenger automobile would be more likely to be developed.  (much more ....)

http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?link...

Kew boss: 'World must wake up to the dangers of biofuels'
Source:  Copyright 2006, Independent (UK)
Date:  September 9, 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1431083....

   The world should wake up to the dangers of the mass production of biofuels, which are increasingly seen as a major solution to global warming, according to Professor Sir Peter Crane, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

  Extensive production of biofuel crops, such as oil palms, could destroy remaining areas of rainforest and bring about a new cycle of worldwide intensive agriculture involving vast applications of artificial fertilisers and pesticides, and requiring enormous water resources, said Professor Crane, who as the head of Kew Gardens is the world's leading plant scientist.

  "There are big opportunities with biofuels, but there are big problems too," he said. "It's not a free lunch."

  Professor Crane, 52, is retiring from Kew after seven very successful years to take up a chair at the University of Chicago, and gave his biofuels warning as part of a valedictory interview with The Independent.

  It comes at a critical moment. The production of road transport fuels made from crops, which do not add to the greenhouse gases causing global warming, is now starting to take off around the globe, and is likely to grow vastly. It will be one of the main agricultural developments of the 21st century.

  The attraction of biofuels in the fight against climate change is that they are "carbon neutral". Unlike the fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal, which when burnt add to the net amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the CO2 which biofuels produce when ignited has been absorbed from the atmosphere by the crops used to make them, and so the net atmospheric amount is not increased.

  The best known biofuels are ethanol, a petrol substitute made from sugar cane, sugar beet or maize, widely used in Brazil and coming into use in many other countries, and biodiesel, which is made from oil palms, oilseed rape or recycled vegetable oil.

  American output of ethanol from maize is now rising at 30 per cent a year; Germany is raising output of biodiesel by nearly 50 per cent a year and China has built the world's biggest ethanol plant. Britain jumped on to the biofuels bandwagon this year with an obligation on British petrol companies to blend a fixed proportion of biofuels with all the petrol and diesel that they sell on garage forecourts.

   But Sir Peter sounded a strongly cautionary note about the new developments. "If we're serious about biofuels, we're going to have to produce them in a much more sustainable way than intensive agriculture has given us in the past," he said.

  He voiced a concern which has already been highlighted by some environmental groups - that mass expansion of biofuel production might lead to a new round of rainforest destruction, especially with crops such as oil palm.

  Oil palm needs warm humid conditions and is largely grown in south-east Asia on land from which rainforest has been cleared. "Expansion of oil palm production is going to have to be handled extremely carefully to ensure that it doesn't start to eat into the remaining pieces of rainforest that still exist," Professor Crane said.

  He went on: "We're going to have to get biofuels off land that's already degraded, perhaps land that's not valuable for other purposes, for conservation or for agriculture. And we've got to do it without creating other problems with the kinds of inputs that in the past have gone into intensive agriculture."

  It was possible that intensive biofuel production might involve too much nitrogen-based fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides, in order to get the desired level of production, he said, as well as taking up enormous amounts of scarce water in irrigation. . . .