... I can't recall him mounting any defense of corn-based ethanol.

How is Branson doing anything but the "cellulosic is better" shtick that has become ubiquitous?

grist.org

Yep, Barack has swallowed the same ethanol cool aid as Vinod.  Bah-rock star party on!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Has Clinton come out against cellulosic ethanol?

grist.org

After tonight's loss here in Wisconsin.  Just going through the motions.

She had expressed skepticism about ethanol (before the GHG doubling revelations) and mentioned that she wanted plugin hybrids manufactured in the US.

It's moot now.  Only one eco-hope left.  Gore has been rumored to be the fixer as the primary approaches futility.  If the race is close enough, perhaps he can get Barack to listen to reason on clean coal, nukes, and fuel farming.

Politics, it's all abourt leverage.

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As long as it is farmed chemically and then burned as fuel it increaes GHG over simply guzzling oil based fuel.  no new studies or discoveries will change that.

Furthermore fuel farming keeps the gas guzzling going with faux greenishness, it is a diversion, as we are so used to.

To prevent transportation going plugin hybrid.  If cars go from burning gas to burning clean kwh, that money that goes into the gas pump credit card slot, will go to electric utility companies.

Halliburton and friends have not had time to take advantage of the bill passed in the dead of night a few years ago.  It was written by lobbyists to allow companies like this to consolidate the owership of local utilities.

Big oil doesn't want to lose that cash flow.  And they certaionly don't want consumers becoming energy producers, charging their cars from their own solar panels.  Gotta sell that last drop of oil for a bazzilion dollars per gallon, then have the electric power monopoly game all wrapped up.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

I need convincing that switchgrass and other cellulosic ethanol products are so bad.  Where is the real evidence of this?

A few months ago both Wired and National Geographic wrote of these facts about switchgrass:

 can get up to a 36 to 1 energy return

 crop to wheels, produces up to 90% less CO2 than gasoline

 barely needs fertilizing

 can grow in harsher environments where there are less crops or forest; like in the Dakotas

It would take HUGE negatives to knock those stats out.  It seems that any one-time hit of released CO2 from plowing up the tundra would surely be offset not only by the grass that would soon grow there but also by the enormous amounts of gasoline being displaced elsewhere by this ethanol.

So, whats up with this hatin' on Switchgrass?

I tried to email Vinod to try and get him to address this.  My computer crashed when I hit "Contact" on his website.  Coincidence?  Hehey.

"Why are you hiding?" (best mexican pro wrestling voice imitation, wearing my amazingdrx wrestling mask).  "Are you waiting for new counter studies to be completed?"

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Hey Bio,

I also will keep an open mind about these negatives against switchgrass, but the theories against it seem to rely on many circumstantial things.  So it has to be done right -- then lets do it right.

A lot of enviro tech has some catches.  Carbon capture comes to mind.

In the mean time, as an environmentalist, I am supporter of switchgrass ethanol to help knock down those CO2 wedges.  The gasoline part of plug-in hybrids need to run on something.

HEMP.

Compare cellulosic ethanol energy and cost to making stove biomass pellets displacing natural gas used for transportation and power.  Subsidized ethanol enables system entropy.

Grey Falcon,

Thanks for the feedback.  

Why do you think Argonne Labs is lying?  Do they stand to gain financially by exaggerating and making speculation appear as fact?  Nevertheless that is good to know for my reality check.

My mind is open because I am here on the board asking questions instead of just stating my own opinion.  I'm not necessarily blindly attached to the "method" of switchgrass ethanol, but as a non-scientist I read things like National Geographic and Wired,  and listen to TV interviews with people like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.  And these sources have been good to me -- they educated me about the mistake of corn ethanol, ect.   But they also made huge overtures to the benefits of switchgrass.

The only contrary information I have ever encountered was the story here last week about a couple of new studies that theorized that the disruption of soil would outweigh the benefits.  But then that same article had quotes from the authors  holding out some positive opinions of the "better" ethanols.  That was downright confusing and I don't have an expensive subscription to the science journals with those two studies.

Is all of your skepticism about switchgrass born from these two recent studies?  Is there some other school of knowledge that I and people like Lovins are unaware of?

Oh, and you are right:  of course the goal is what is important -- not the method.  I'd love for solar, wind, ect. to handle everything.

Natural prairie is mainly switchgrass, but it's nature  consists of self fertilizing and drought resistant plants in a healthy carbon sink soil ecosystem.  It was 20 feet deep before it was plowed.  Storing millenia of CO2 out of the atmosphere.

That's the best, lowest input, highest carbon sequestering,  biomass farm.  If only around one third of the grasses were harvested, in away that prevents fire, that would actually prevent exctra GHG release.

But if it's burned as fuel in a 6% efficient, 3 ton gas guzzler, the cO2 still gets released.  Better to leave the transportation job to plugin hybrids that are charged on wind powered kwh from prairie wind farms.

Then use the mown grass biomass in biodigestion to produce biogas to backup the renewable grid.  Combined with farm waste like manure, it yields organic fertilizer and saves water by recycling.

Real farm and energy policty that work together will have you paying the farmer down the road 75 cents per gallon of gas equivalent in clean kwh.  the family will spend the money locally.  

Better than sending 3 bucks per gallon to exxonmob, the war, and halliburton.

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