If profiteering out of diverting food to liquid fuels is not grossly immoral,
then what exactly does immoral mean ?

If this crime is not stopped, it seems set to expand its impact,
contributing centrally to America's leading role in imposing
an utterly unprecedented scale of genocide through famine.

With the burgeoning impacts of US-lead climate destabilization,
this is not a matter merely of another six million killed or even of sixty million,
but with the failure of subsistence farming plus aquifer depletion plus crop-diversion,
there are well over six hundred million whose food security is now critically endangered.

Let us be quite clear - unlike sustainable forestry fuels,
the use of Agrifuels is patently genocidal.

A further pivotal lie in their propaganda is that Agrifuels displace fossil fuels' combustion.

They do not.

They merely add marginally to the global liquid fuel supplies.

Regards,

Bill

I think the problem is one of nuance. People want to know: is biodiesel good, or is it bad? Like: is organic good, or is it bad? They don't want to differentiate between this biodiesel (produced locally from old fryer grease) and that (produced by ADM from soy grown on former rainforest).

Having said that, I'd take a bike-sized version of that sticker...

The dopey corporate shills keep repeating that everytime their gas guzzling, GHG spewing,war mongering agenda is criticized it "enables" the enemy.

Industrial fuel farming is enabling poverty.  When one gallon of oil in the form of chemicals and tractor fuel is used to produce less than one gallon of ethanol or biodiesel to replace that oil, that raises oil consumption.  And GHG production.  And food prices.  And energy prices.  

Tax dollars borrowed from China are then used to subsidize each and every gallon of that fuel.  Expanding the national debt and pushing interest rates higher.

When food and energy prices rise it puts families that have struggled to buy their own homes out of those homes.  Thus enabling poverty.

With wind electricity powering plugin hybrids fuel consumption would drop precipitously, so would the cost of transportation.  With wind electric powered grids running geothermal heat pumps for heating and cooling, energy costs would drop too.

 Whole new industries creating new jobs would move families back up the economic ladder.

So do we choose to continue fuel farming,gas guzzling, and oil war, enabling poverty, or do we choose eco harmony and prosperity?

Fuel from grass or wood?  Or even waste cooking oil?  The only one that really pays in terms of energy is recycling the waste cooking oil.  And that is maybe enough to power one half of 1% of our gas guzzling?

Meanwhile scarce capital and political influence is diverted from convertion to a renewable electric transportation system and power grid, that would save 90% of fuel consumption and GHG production.  And usher in a real economic boom and sustainable jobs that would come with it.

Forget fuel farming, it's another classic diversion scheme.  Like the hydrogen economy.
 And the war on terror.  And the war on drugs.  And dimbulb limboob family values.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

I should have acknowledged the validity of your larger point, that biofuels currently in use (and perhaps in use for the forseeable future) aren't all that hot, from a carbon perspective.  

That point does get lost in the general public debate.

Biodiversivist -

some rather good news on the forest fuels front
is that Methanol,
with its renowned combustion charachteristics,
can be produced from wood very affordably at present simply by an updated FT process -

Where advances are still urgently needed are in the size of production facilities
to be appropriate for village-scale with > 3 miles feedstock haulage,
(and thus maximized local legitimacy and global replicability)

as opposed to the titanicist status quo facilities now used for converting methane to methanol.

The cellulosic route looks to me like an attempt to profit from intellectual property
rather than from sustainable energy supply.

Regards,

Bill

Everyone upset about fossil fuel, biofuel, or energy derived from either one...

Stop using transportation -- personal or public -- an all other machinery that uses fossil fuel, biofuel, or energy derived from either one. It is not enough to say you use less than other folks. It is not enough to say you use it for a higher purpose. If it is a limited or non-renewable resource, if it is wrong to burn fossil fuel or devote land to growing biofuel, it does not matter what your excuse is for relying on either one. Time to quit. Every gallon you burn contributes to global warming, pollution, and degradation of natural habitat.

Aftere you stop, please tell the rest of us how you managed to do so.

It is apparent, based on the discussions on this website, that an environmentalist who truly cares about the planet should not be burning and fossil fuel or biofuel. Why are you still doing it?

If you are waiting for everyone else to change first, you are going to be waiting a very long time.

Forward!

So people opposed to nuclear power should stop using all electricity from the grid or just STFU?  

And people opposed to genetic tampering should only by certified organic food or STFU?  

And people opposed to Chimpy's excellent adventure in Iraq should stop paying taxes that fund the war machine or STFU?

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Regarding the first two cases, yes.

One should not purchase goods they generally condemn. The easiest way to stop production of an item is to stop buying it and then, and only then, find a way to persuade others to stop buying it.

Regarding the third case, no.

I think it is a bit more complicated. Production of the undesirable product is not consumer driven.

Forward!

King County (Seattle Metro area) has a program running now that recycles municipal biosolids (digested seweage sludge) as fertilizer on Yakima Valley canola crops.  Yes -- poop for oil; fertilizer wise, it works just as good (or better) than the usual chemical brew.  The harvested canola oil then gets transported back to the Seattle area where a processing plant makes biodiesel.  Seattle metro buses then burn the biodiesel; everyone smiles gamely.

Now, using "organic" fertilizers in an industrial ag process like this one might not have a huge impact on the overall carbon balance of this particular biodiesel stream.  Given the transport energy costs of moving the (heavy!) mounds of biosolids down to Yakima and then moving the resulting canola oil back up to Seattle, it may be that the carbon emissions per unit of fuel is probably not much better than mined-and-refined diesel.

BUT: 1) at least the precious fixed nitrogen in the poop has already been energetically "paid for" by the upstream processes (ie. the fertilizers that made the food crops that ultimately became the poop); 2) at least the canola oil comes from more-local sources than mid-western soy or (god forbid) Indonesian plantation palm oil.  

Main point is:  Has anyone else noticed that the discussion of the "carbon neutrality" of biofuels makes little reference to the massive energy expenditure made annually in producing the synthetic fertilizers necessary to do ANY of the farming that we do?  There's an awful lot of atmospheric carbon up there that owes is existence to our soil use practices, not to anybody's bloated SUV.

GreyFlcn wrote...

>>> That said, we won't have to worry much longer about biodiesel.

Instead we'll just switch straight to Actual Diesel created from plants. <<<

Uhhh... what's the difference between biodiesel and the "Actual Diesel created from plants" you mention?

It would appear that someone simply developed a better and more efficient process for producing diesel fuel from plants. Isn't that good news? Less energy in. More energy out. Cleaner. More energy from less land. Less pollution..

The link you provide actually contradicts the suggestion that biofuels are accompanied by blind optimism. Folks are working on improving the yield and quality of the product. We won't habe to choose between food and fuel. The market might actually provide a renewable source of fuel for automobiles and planes.

Are environmentalist afraid that corporations, researchers, and Federal labs are actually going to find a solution to our energy problems? Afraid you won't have something to compain about? Afraid we'll actually find a way to maintain our desired standard of living, help others improve their quality of life, AND repair our natural environment?

Hey GreyFlcn... I'm starting to wonder if you own stock in a company selling a competing product. How can I trust your figures? Do you have a lot of money invested in solar? Afraid biodiesel will actually become practical?

Forward!

Just to quote a bit from that article:

Roland Clift, professor of environmental technology at Surrey University, sits on the scientific advisory council of Defra, David Miliband's environment department.

He will tell the seminar that promoting the use of biofuels is likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions.

"We calculate that the land will need to grow biodiesel crops for 70-300 years to compensate for the CO2 emitted in forest destruction."

Thats pretty damned scary, considering it would take that longer merely to get back to the status quo.

Especially considering how dangerous the status quo is looking.

Do we really have to re-explain the fatal flaw in that "reasoning" to you once again wisci?

If you can't see it yourself, how does your company expect to get the next great GMO product out of you?  

better hope they aren't monitering your internet activity.  Hehehey.  All GMO engineering is a matter of homeland security, isn't it?  What if terrorists got a hold of the design for the next generation roundup resistant DNA?  gasp!!!

Newsflash!  Al Gore uses a lot of electricity!!!  get right on that wisci.   What are the implications for GHG climate disaster theory?  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Substitute
"BioFuels" for "Coal-to-Liquids"
"Algae" for "Carbon Capture"
"Waste Vegetable Oil" for "Waste Tires"
in any of your logic.

And then see if it still makes sense.

"We should do Coal-to-Liquids now, as a transition fuel to when sometime in the future we can do Carbon Capture.  We can use recycled Waste Tires to power a significant portion of our cars, and they give them away for FREE!"