First, he says "environmentalists", by which I suppose he means groups big enough to have lobbyists in Washington and Brussels, have stopped their 20 year opposition to biofuels:Environmentalists' support for biofuels is tied directly to their support for action on climate change. For environmentalists, imposing a cap on greenhouse gas emissions on the United States is their primary objective. They see a carbon cap as the prize, and they figure that anything done in the process of achieving that goal can be fixed later Yuk -- this is like in the early 90s, dropping support for better CAFE standards in exchange for no drilling in ANWR.  Is a carbon cap (which I suppose means cap-and-trade) really worth it?

Second problem, which is worse, is the farm lobby power, in both the U.S. and Europe:While the EU environmental lobby is much stronger than its U.S. counterpart, it pales in Brussels compared to the farm lobby. In Europe, the important energy issues are energy security and climate change. Environmentalists were helpless when the farm lobby flexed its muscles in the most recent energy policy discussion and won a dramatic increase in biofuel use, having used both energy security and climate change as justification. Though environmentalists were livid, for EU politicians it was an easy decisionThe farm lobby is so powerful in Europe that most of the EU budget is subsidies for agriculture, and there are high tariffs for farm products, even from desperately poor countries.

There's a third fact that's scary, which is that Brazil's ethanol is by far the best -- which means the Amazon is in even more trouble.

We better go toward electric vehicles and public transit before there's no more soil left.

As mentioned by one of the blog posts.

The "chemist" who says this works thinks homeopathy works, too. He's a nut.

They've built a machine that liberates hydrogen from water, and then burns the hydrogen. Umm, the energy they get back from burning the hydrogen will be less than the energy it took to liberate it. This is not an energy source. This is an embarrassment to journalists.

Lately we are beginning to see mass defections from the "any biofuels will do" forces, with some moving into the "we need to move to second-generation biofuels ASAP" camp, and others joining the original sceptics and opponents.
Heh, me I'm in the camp of "virgin terrestrial feedstocks are bad"

True waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill, or as sewage is fair game.

And Algae might be able to make some impact.

Everything else is simply bottlenecked by a lack of topsoil, water, and the limitations of photosynthesis itself and how weakly it transfers sunlight into energy.

As is, it seems like eating up 500 year old topsoil, and eating up 500 year old ground water resources is assumed to regenerate itself in less than one year.  When thats simply not the case.

Even rainfed agriculture, that fresh water would have been used for some purpose elsewhere.  And by polluting it for the purpose of agriculture that purpose elsewhere is being subverted.

If you simply included the energy cost of water remediation in these biofuel processing facilities, that would kill almost all their energy gains.

Also from your article:

Energy experts like University of Akron Professor Emeritus, Rudy Scavuzzo, Ph.D, say the burning of salt water is nothing more than a new twist on a high school science experiment.

Scavuzzo told Channel 3's Mike O'Mara that the Kanzius invention requires too much energy to be worth celebrating.

"There is no breakthrough", said Professor Scavuzzo, "because there are more efficient ways of breaking water down to hydrogen and oxygen."