Could biofuels be a bonanza for Florida?  NO

Conservation of the state's natural resources is
more essential and could be a bonanza for the state.

Cellulosic biomass production would use excessive fertilizer
fuel and water consumption as well as pesticides.

Where does phosphate fertilizer come from to grow biofuel crops?
Florida.

There is no benefit to Florida after it has been stripmined
to death.  PSC of Saskatchewan, Canada, plans on strip mining
100,463 acres in a large bend of the Suwannee River.
Mosaic Co. plans on mining 21,000  acres  on the Peace River.
The Manson-Jenkins tract also represents the first of
several proposed mines totaling 60,000 acres that
could be permitted adjacent to Horse Creek on the
Peace River.

There is no benefit to destroying wetlands, poisoning the
water or disturbing river systems.

Switchgrass is a lowland wetland grass. Repeated
harvesting will require massive amounts of fuel, fertilizer
industry has depleted 16 feet of soil in the Everglades.

The remaining soil will eventually  disappear until there
is nothing left but limerock. End of farming.

Our state's soils should be preserved for food production
not wasted on fueling the American car culture.

Excellent response. People need to tread carefully before assuming that agricultural-based products are "renewable."

The most important reason for not using corn as a source of fule is the fact that we dont have enough soil and water in the world to produce food for the starving people of africa.

No Child Left Behind, Clear Skies, WMD's, etc. etc. ad nauseum. At this point, I believe everything out of the mouth of George Bush is smoke, mirrors, or snake oil. There's a sucker punch hidden somewhere in Dubya's born-again bio-fuel dog and pony show. He hasn't said a word about conservation, higher automobile mileage standards, urban mass-transit, inter-urban mass transit,(Amtrak is being left to die on the vine,)or any of the other energy ideas promoted since Jimmy Carter's sweater speech.
George W. Bush was bred, born, and raised to be a shill for the "awl bidness". I don't believe for a second that anything has changed.  

Can we not get North Americans into far smaller, less thirsty cars? That would do far more for the environment than any "alternative fuel". Even better, can we not begin to rebuild out rediculous society so that people live far closer to where they work, shop and play than they now do? Think what that would do for obesity, traffic jams, and the finances of Al Qaeda!

Bush spent 1 billion dollars on advertising campaigns to push his policies on gullible Americans, and then cut funding for alternative energy 'research', and wants to sell off public parks to developers to fund his oil war? This is public funded advertising, to give the appearance of doing something about a problem that couldn't be hidden any longer, despite efforts to disguise, mislead, and discourage people from wanting change.

And what's worse? The fact that even if he did accidently get biofuels going, it might be a disaster for diversity, native landscapes, and poverty relief, as food markets compete with fuel markets to feed the American obsession with private transportation (Plan A).

Surprised?

I'm so glad to see that at least some people actually get it.  Eliminating the environmental harms caused by driving will not be accomplished by technology, though the latter might mitigate some of those harms.  For the umpteenth time, there are no magical solutions.  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, period.  Just the building of roads is very environmentally destructive: compaction of soil, paving over the Earth, fragmentation of wildlife habitat, killing of plants and everything below the pavement, etc.  To the extent, that we choose to live in harmony with nature, we will avoid causing destruction.  To the extent that we do otherwise, we destroy life.

Thanks, Karen, for clearly stating what should be obvious to anyone who values wilderness and also wants to feed all of humanity. Adopting biofuels on a large scale would be a disaster that might actually result in human-tragedy faster than an Earth-tragedy. Both Earth-firsters and People-firsters should make it clear that this is no long-term solution, only a delay tactic, one with it's own consequences. The thought of wasting the Earth's precious gift of food on private transportation for the wealthiest humans while others starve is repulsive.

We must stress efficiency and public transportation over short-cut pseudo-solutions that only delay the changes that are needed to solve our problems.

Face it folks, we must advocate for an end to private transportation, in our lifetimes- anything else only extends our consumerism and deepens the wound to the Earth.

for saying this so I didn't have to, though I guess my previous posts make my position clear.  We could start by removing private motor vehicles from urban areas, in which subways could be built so that people have no need for cars.

The amount of land required to offset a significant amount of fossil fuel transportation uses is much in debate. Under current crop yields and conversion efficiency, corn yields about 358 gallons of ethanol per acre annually and switchgrass 165 gallons per acre. Replacement of current U.S. gasoline demand (139 billion gallons per year) by corn ethanol would require 407 million acres and replacement by switchgrass ethanol 840 million acres on an equal energy basis. These land requirements exceed the current total U.S. cropland, leaving no land for growing food. The Natural Resources Defense Council has proposed a program to reduce land requirements for switchgrass to replace not only current demand for gasoline, but that projected from current trends to be in demand by 2050 (289 billion gallons per year) to as little as 6 million acres. 66 percent of this gain is the result of conservation and 34 percent the result of technological improvements in crop yield and conversion processes and juggling existing cropland uses.
The rush to biofuels has some major problems: Almost the entire focus of current considerations is on replacing present and future demand for fossil fuels with plant products. The highly concentrated energy contained in fossil fuels came from the same generic feedstock as we are presently proposing, yet it was distilled by millions of years of geologic processes. Today's biofuels do not have the benefit of those processes, so their energy yield is far below that of fossil fuels.
To put the matter in perspective, worldwide primary power consumption is about 13 trillion watts (Tw) per year, with fossil fuels supplying 11 Tw of that power (85 percent). Replacing just the U.S. fossil energy consumption with bioenergy confronts a basic energy imbalance: each year the nation uses 85 percent more fossil fuel energy than the total energy amount stored annually in all U.S. plant biomass. Replacing current world fossil fuel demand with biomass would put more than 10 percent of the earth's land mass--nearly all agricultural land--into fuel rather than food crops. This means that the earth simply cannot grow enough biomass to supply energy at U.S. consumption levels.With world demand projected to require another 30 Tw by 2050, our choice becomes driving or eating, but not both.
This focus on what goes into the tank also ignores the fact that the tank, and the vehicle carrying the tank, do not come out of thin air. Many of the components of vehicles come from mined products that are increasingly scarce, the recovery of which requires ever-increasing amounts of energy.

So how did you go about killing the car? Do you walk to the farmfields? How about the subway, what's powering that? And how do you go about heating your home?

It seems like now all I hear is ethanol this and ethanol that. It's going to be the saviour of everything. I keep thinking back to this episode of West Wing I saw where Toby talks about how it takes more fuel to make ethanol that it actually saves. It's sad that all of this hype is for naught but good to know I'm not crazy.