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DON'T LET THIS ALTERNATIVE ENERGY
03-06-2010 6:18 pm - David Fessler
As the old sixteenth-century saying goes, "You can't make a silk purse from
a sow's ear." Translation: Sometimes, you can dress something up as much as you want, but it doesn't change what it really is. Or in the case of biofuel, what it isn't.

And to coin a more recent adage, "putting lipstick on a pig" is exactly what biofuel advocates continue to do. Biofuels aren't viable. Here's why...

The Biofuel Brainwash - A "Greendoggle."

That's how I'd describe the misrepresentation of the biofuel industry.
Even with its high greenhouse gas emissions, burning coal represents a
better solution than biofuels. Especially when you consider biofuels'
detrimental factors.

Right off the bat, it doesn't make much sense to take the world's main food
staples - corn, wheat and rice - and turn them into fuel. But just five years ago, bio-ethanol, bio-diesel and bio-gasoline were billed as America's solution to imported oil. And all it took to drive prices skyward was dwindling crude oil supplies, rising prices, increasing global demand - and a healthy dose of biofuel hype.

On the surface, biofuels seem like a great renewable energy idea. The
argument is that carbon produced from biofuels is "better" than carbon from
fossil fuels. Why? Because when the plants (i.e. fuel) are grown, it offsets
the carbon production.

Congress bought the hype, passing a law, mandating 35 billion gallons of
ethanol production a year by 2017. And to grease the wheels, lawmakers
tossed a $0.51 per-gallon subsidy at ethanol producers. Bio-diesel producers
received even more - $1 for every gallon produced.

Farmers jumped for joy at the prospect of making some serious dough. Crop
rotation plans were dumped in favor of one thing: Corn. And lots of it.
Ethanol production plants popped up across the Midwest. Between 2000 and
2008, the number vaulted from 50 to 140. Sixty more were under construction.
Who knew that America's solution to imported oil was in U.S. soil all along?

But back the corn truck up... Biofuel Reality Check

In the quest for energy independence, politicians overlooked a few key
details.

* As farmers piled all their resources into growing corn for ethanol,
just about every food made with corn rose in price.

* Food producers then found themselves paying three to four times what
they paid for corn just a few years before. And they did what any business
does: passed the costs along to consumers.

* Aid organizations cut food donations by 50% (more in some cases).

A Wall Street Journal editorial said: "Cornell's David Pimental and
Berkeley's Ted Patzek found that it takes more than a gallon of fossil fuel
to make one gallon of ethanol - 29% more. That's because it takes enormous
amounts of fossil fuel energy to grow corn (using fertilizer and
irrigation), to transport the crops, and then turn that corn into ethanol."

A University of Minnesota study in 2008 was even more sobering: "Converting
forests, peat lands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food-based biofuels
in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a huge biofuel
carbon debt. When land-use changes are taken into account, 17 to 420 times
more CO2 is released than the reductions gained when these biofuels displace
fossil fuels."

As demand for corn and other biofuel stocks soared, farmers just started
planting corn, ignoring a century's worth of data on the benefits of crop
rotation. And due to the glut of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice were all in short
supply, causing their prices to rise, too.

For example, soybeans had to be grown elsewhere. That turned out to be
Brazil. But large-scale deforestation in the Amazon Basin (to increase the
available land for soybean production) just adds to the insanity of biofuels.

Speaking of insanity...The Backwards Way to Boost Biofuel

In Sumatra and Borneo, nearly 10 million acres of forest have been burned to
create fields for palm oil plantations for biofuel. In Malaysia and
Indonesia, they're about to erase 25 million acres of prime forest.
There are two things wrong with this...

1. Burning the forest produces 93 times the greenhouse gases that
burning the fuel produced on them would.

2. The trees are nearly twice as efficient absorbers of CO2 than the
palm plants grown for fuel stock.

The expiration of the $1 per gallon federal biofuel tax credit in January
means many biodiesel companies are no longer commercially viable - and might
signal the end for this biofuel "Greendoggle" in the United States.

However, some members of Congress are trying to reinstate it. One can only
hope that saner heads will prevail.



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