Biofuels - a crime against humanity - that and other topics related to rising food prices

[Makalakumu]

Fossil fuels give us at the very least a 1/100 return on our energy. With light sweet crude, that ratio expands exponentially. Thus, attempting to compare any alternatives to fossil fuels is like comparing peanuts to elephants.

Even with the best schemes, biofuel production would need to cover every square inch of our arable farmland in order to supply our current energy needs. So much for food.

And then there is the fossil fuels that are used to grow every crop in our nation. 40% of the price of our food is directly related to the price of oil. This is because we are basically putting 10 calories of fossil fuel energy into our feilds to get 1 calorie out.

Taking that into account, how can anyone take biofuels seriously without first taking steps to drastically slash the amount of energy we use? Without doing that, perhaps biofuel production is a crime against humanity. Think of all the people that could be fed simply through conservation...

 

[tellner]

I think you're off a little here.

First, the estimates on algae, at least the last ones I saw, were that without genetic tweaking we could get just about all the energy we need for transportation in a few thousand square miles. Some countries, Brazil for instance, really do have a shot at getting rid of imported fossil fuels.

There's also the fact that much of what we're talking about isn't getting rid of cropland to grow fuel. It's using calories that are currently being treated as waste and doing something infinitely more efficient than pouring food directly into the gas tank. The fact that you conflate all biofuels and only offer immediate radical slashing of consumption as an alternative does not exactly make you a credible party to the discussion.

 

[Blotan Hunka]

What we need is ONE viable, and affordable fuel to run vehicles. For general purpose home/busniess energy we should be exploiting things like wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, methane etc. followed by nuclear and lastly natural gas, coal, oil etc. Power to the grid is power to the grid and as long as my lights come on I dont really care which method. The natural stuff seems most logical from a renewable standpoint.

But for our cars and trucks, I think its been shown that people just are not going to go for 5-6 different fuel types and car industries are not going to support too many alternative fuel cars w/o the demand. Weve been kicking around electric, natural gas and other cars for years and they just havent caught on. We dont want to worry that if we are out on a trip that we wont be able to find the specific fuel we are running on. Gas stations are everywhere, thats their current advantage.

 

[Makalakumu]

The fact that you conflate all biofuels and only offer immediate radical slashing of consumption as an alternative does not exactly make you a credible party to the discussion.

Um, yeah...

Until I see some honest examination of the energy in = energy out equation for a scheme, I can't form any rational opinion on it. From what I know, no biofuel scheme even comes close to the 1/100 ratio you get from fossil fuels (If you have information that shows otherwise, please share). Thus, it only makes sense the first thing a society would have to do in order to make ANY biofuels option workable would be to cut consuption back to a point where the deficit in ratios balance out.

The problem with biofuels is threefold.

First, everybody leaves out the energy inputs in order to promote them. People of all stripes are so quick to make a buck that they'll pick and choose whatever numbers in order to "fit" the data.

The second problem is infrastructure. This is self explanatory.

The third is scale. Even if you can turn certain types of garbage into fuel and do it relatively efficiently, can you do it on a massive scale? The scale we are at now is that we burn 20.8 million barrels per day of oil. Do we have that much of a particular type of garbage lying around? Can we convert it to fuel fast enough to meet the scale outlined above?

I doubt it. That's why conservation MUST come first.