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Biofuels Coming With a High Environmental Price?
DurandalTree writes "With the spectre of global warming on the horizon, biofuels have been touted as the solution to motor vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions. But with biodiesel use on the increase, it appears a distinctively environmentally unfriendly footprint is being left behind by some of its prime sources; affected food prices are surging out of reach of the poor and rainforests are being destroyed to create larger plantations."
One of the the first renewable fuels was firewood, and using it in quantity caused quite an impact on forests.
Nothing occurs in a vacuum any more. Efficiency and economic viability of any product is tied to the current supply chain, and any change in the balance of this order of magnitude will be felt everywhere. I always thought it interesting when there were stories on biodeisel being made from recycled cooking oil nobody ever mentioned that there is a fairly limited supply of said oil when compared with the demand for automotive fuel. Sure, there's lots going to waste, but making the waste product a viable commodity in a quickly growing market is bound to create scarcity. All of a sudden, stuff that's free because it is waste now has an actual market value.
Are we really so myopic that the lure of "free fuel" has completely distracted us from the fact that nothing on this planet is being produced in such quantity that changing the market for that product radically will not affect the marketplace?
I guess the answer is, "yes."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Growing fuel in the dirt is very hard on the planet. Not only does it suck up a lot of land (on top of what we already need to grow food) it also covers that land with one single crop that needs all sorts of nasty things such as pesticides and fertilizers.
The best bet for biofuels is something that has less of an impact on the soil and the planet, such as algae based biofuels. Algae is grown in tanks, so the process requires less land, and any chemicals used in the process can be contained so it isn't spread over open land.
Yes, switching to these kind of fuels will leave less of an environmental impact, but it will hurt poor people the most who consume corn frequently and will certainly lead to an increase in price in corn-produced food. (Think Corn Syrup in soda) This is why we can't radically switch to biofuels like some people are calling for.
People don't care enough to change less.
The simple answer is to reduce energy usage, but people don't want to.
Stop travelling, have new stuff, heat/cool their houses, import food etc.
Myself I fully intend to visit a few more far off locations, I want a new couch and bigger TV, I want my house warm in the winter and cool in the summer and I want a broad selection of fresh fruits and vegetables year round.
That's gonna use a lot of energy, even if I gave up my car to walk to a market. People don't want to change, and they won't yet.
The latest trend I saw is directly blaming the "rich", which pretty much includes most of us with computers and the time to argue on slashdot. I don't see us making huge changes.
This is one of those things that should be obvious but that's very difficult to explain to some less critical radical environmentalists.
Energy demand = Growing rapidly without forseeable upper bound
If you switch from fossil fuels to biofuels, all you do is change the problem set, from pollution and peak oil to deforestation and starvation. There is one solution and one solution only: energy efficiency and conservation. I suppose you could say there is a second, getting energy from outside the system (i.e. space) but that still leaves the problem of getting the energy back out of the system (i.e. pushing it cleanly and transparently back into space once used) so that we don't simply heat/pollute the globe beyond control.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The only reason it's so cheap is the corn lobby demanding big payouts from the government. It's not even particularly healthy, corn syrup isn't the best form of sugar for you. And it's a crap source for ethanol production too.
Deleted
When will people listen???
Biofuels are simply not environmentally friendly in any way, shape or form. They are seen by some as a temporary solution to dwindling oil stocks. Not as the environmental saviour some idiots have imagined them to be.
The best example of where such a model falls down was the Australian wool industry. Wool was selling at a low price. Leading economists said the answer was simple - kill lots of sheep to make wool scarce. It didn't work, they forgot that cotton exists. I wish I was making this up but this piece of utter stupidity that ruined many farmers really did happen.
Not at the levels projected/required!
Corn is produced through an incredible usage of fossil fuels. From the fertilizers, through the mechanized Ag cycle. It's just awful! A petro-carbon boondoggle, for Monsanto and the usual Cheney back-room.
Then there's the "let's burn food!" aspect.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I'm sorry, but what?
If you want to be literal, then basically nothing we do is environmentally friendly. At least, nothing modern. In fact, the only environmentally friendly thing we could really do is to bury ourselves and become fertilizer.
But a biofuel can be mostly environmentally friendly. There are problems with issues like nitric oxides, which are produced by burning many fuels - gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, and vegetable oil alike. But then, burning wood releases many things that we would prefer not to breathe, and it is a natural occurrence.
One thing that you can say for biofuels is that they themselves are carbon-neutral. Other processes related to them may not be, of course. But if all of our energy was derived from biofuels, it would all be carbon-neutral.
Arguably the best fuel to use for these various reasons would be hydrogen. It is not an energy source, but then, neither is biofuel, which is the liquid result of processing plants made mostly with solar energy. Hydrogen burns most cleanly (the outputs are water and heat) but of course the energy has to come from somewhere, and it has a laundry list of problems, probably the most serious of which is hydrogen embrittlement which destroys everything dealing with hydrogen eventually.
An option I like a great deal for transmitting power is the use of compressed air. MDI's air car technology is quite environmentally friendly.
But put quite simply, the biofuels are our best hope for reducing our environmental impact in the short term, and one article that says that one flawed method of producing biofuels is causing problems is quite simply not evidence that the entire concept is flawed.
You make clever use of propaganda in your comment, but I notice that there is no actual content, no facts, no science. Please come back when you have some meat to place in your comment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Every time this subject comes up, people pipe up that we need to stop consuming, stop using power.
Well, I don't intend to go back to living in a world of horse flop in the streets, coal in my stove, pumping water every day from a well a half mile away. Nor should I. Nor should anyone else.
What is flabbergasting is that the same crowd that joneses for Star Trek all the time is so fast to posit that we need to live simply so that others may simply live. If there's anything Trek should have taught you is that life is not a zero sum game, mankind can design and reason its way out of situations it creates, and there are more than enough resources to go around and you just need to figure out what they are and how to use them.
We are truly stupid if we turn backwards right when we figure out how to do high efficiency fusion, store energy as extra mass, and other off the wall things we've cooked up in sci-fi but haven't gotten around to figuring out in the basic physics departments. We will be condeming all future generations to poverty of not only economy, but morality and ethics, because with poverty of nations go all those things we so hate in our pasts: war, slavery, conquest, exploitation, disease, starvation. We have more than enough of those things left now. We have been fighting damn hard to change ourselves for a long time. To rise from that horrid muck.
There's a difference between being more efficient and doing an about face in our march forward. And getting things done from building pyramids to cities needs energy of one kind or another. We can't simply stop using energy. We can make things use less and still use. We cannot stop using.
Damn us all now if we reflexively retreat from advancement now like idiot children. Damn us to hell.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
US electric consumption is roughly 1/1000 of your figures. Net 2005 generation was 4038 billion kWh (not MWh).
The insolation in mid-Kansas is about 1550 kWh/m^2/yr. At 15% efficiency, this would produce about 230 kWh/m^2/yr of electricity. Divide 4.038e12 kWh/yr by 230 kWh/m^2/yr and you get 1.76e10 m^2, or 17,600 km^2. Total impervious area in the USA (roofs, pavement, etc.) is 112610 km^2, so we'd need to put PV on about 16% of what's already covered. This can be done when we re-roof.
True, covering the rest of our energy needs would take more, but that's no reason to curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The argument for conservation is not that we turn the clock back--- people in the past weren't terribly friendly to the environment either--- that's a strawman. The argument is that we make an honest attempt to balance our books. We are profligate spenders and mindless consumers. We argue about biofuels and watch *NASCAR* for cripes sake. We ship oranges from Florida for processing in California and back for sale in Florida (yes, really). We ship Wisconsin cheese to New York and New York cheese to Wisconsin. We ship potatoes *to* Idaho! We commute hours a day to/from work to live in huge cookie cutter developments that waste heat/cooling/electricity while letting the urban centers decay. We grow corn on marginal land to feed animals in feedlots that are designed by evolution to graze for themselves--- then we use antibiotics to treat all the diseases they pick up in the feedlots and chemicals to treat the fact that they can't digest corn. We waste non-renewable petroleum on disposable plastic packaging and risk running out of it for pharmaceuticals. We don't need to haul water 1/2 mile from the well (though I've done it), we just need to stop being *idiots*.
If we actually stopped and thought about what we were doing a small fraction of the time and budgeted what we had, we might have a chance of getting to that future you talk about. Otherwise, all that will happen is that new technology will beget *more waste*. How far has the space program gotten in the last half century? People flush the economy and ecology down the toilet and complain about research being a waste of money, so landfills fill up and space exploration languishes.
Very few people are as wasteful as the US. This extends through energy use/waste and food use/waste. The whole system is propped up by agricultural subsidies which keep the system inefficient and unsustainable.
The typical US diet uses a hell of a lot more arable land than the average diet. The resulting land use is a major land destructor and uses a lot more water, oil land input than it should. One of the biggest problems is high meat consumption.
If people ate the grain fed to beef, instead of the beef, they'd only need to consume one tenth of the grain (ie grain to beef is only approx 10% efficient).
Each pound of beef requires about 3-4 pounds of oil.
Thus, switching to significantly reduced meat intake would use vastly less oil and free up a lot of land that could be put to other uses (eg. biofuels).
Of course, the farming and oil industries don't really want you to change the current high consumption and are happy for you to keep funding this insane system through subsidy handouts.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I agree but it's not just suburbia that is wasteful. We in North America, (and other parts of the world) have based our prosperity off the exploitation of cheap natural resources, while utterly failing to take into account the true cost that the exploitation. We developed all aspects of our society on the assumption that we will always be able to continue with an endlessly escalating usage of all our resources. Simply substituting one fuel for another, may buy us some time but it will ultimately fail to address the root of the problem, which is unsustainable consumption. In order to finally tackle the greenhouse gas problem (frankly ALL environmental problems!) we are going to have to use less (of everything). How we accomplish this is going to be interesting, we may finally have to account (and pay) a full replacement value for that which nature provides us, or (more likely) some people are simply going to have less access to resources that we once took for granted, as those who can pay will increasingly have preferential access.
It seems nobody (getting modded-up) here understands. Of course it's going to be difficult to start biofuel production, and any change of this level is going to cause short-term shortages, and higher prices.
Nobody is going to starve. It's just that we've all become so used-to subsidized corn, that we never expected having to deal with market forces. Now that we do, everything is changing. Farmers are looking for new cattle feed, companies like Coca-Cola are looking for other sugar alternatives than corn syrup, et al. The market is starting to take action on this change, and there's no reason to believe it won't work just fine.
That rain forest is being burned is a huge shame. However, biofuels certainly don't require the burning of rain forest, so they aren't really the cause. What's more, even in the current state of affairs, that kind of pollution is only a one-time issue, while that land will continue to produce biofuels for many, many years.
Claims of limited arable lands are nonsense as well. Water can and is being transported to arid regions for crops. Every farmer in the developed world fertilizes their own fields, and there is no shortage of compost available. Once again, it will require some changes, and initially higher prices, but it really is the kind of thing the free market is perfectly good at handling, if you just give it a few years to work itself out.
People are touting cellulose ethanol, which is a good option, but it's going to have precisely the same drawbacks, just less pronounced... Food prices rising because cellulose is currently used in hog and cattle feed. Expansion of farming to meet the demands. Rising prices of crops, as existing farmland is stretched to produce enough fuel. Increase in use of petroleum fertilizers, as cheap cellulose is no longer available for compost. etc.
Things like algae for production of biofuels have plenty of potential, but it isn't just going to spring-up overnight. You really need to create a guaranteed demand for the product, before anyone is going to be willing to invest in such technologies. Indeed, the more expensive corn ethanol gets, the higher the potential profit in developing algae solutions.
Just saying "to hell with it, developing biofuels is too challenging" is just going to prolong our problems. Giving up on a good option, because it produces complications like higher corn prices in the (very) near-term is horribly myopic. We'll be reaping the benefits of widespread production of biofuels for at least the next century, and probably longer. Those in the poorer parts of the world, affected by the food prices, will also.
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