All the hype around Global Warming or rising gas prices at least, has caused a lot of people to start thinking about what they do to the environment. I'm afraid that it has become quite the fad. Unfortunately, we fail to read the fine print a lot of times.
Last week on NPR they did a series about the rising cost of food across the world. I was rather taken aback when they mentioned that the amount of biofuel that it would take to fill the average SUV once, takes a one year supply of food for one adult human. There are people in this world that are starving, and we are using their potential food source to fill our cars? I really don't know how I feel about that. I know that we are working on "second generation biofuels" that use organic waste and not the good stuff that we could eat, but if it takes an entire year of food to make 25 gallons of biofuel, that seems like we are wasting a lot of energy. I suppose I could do the calculations, but I'm not really feeling that nerdy at the moment. Once again, I would have to do the chemistry, but I think it is safe to say that biofuels still put a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere along the lines of what standard gasoline creates. There would most likely be trace amounts of things like ammonia from manufactured fertilizers and residual pesticides that could cause problems down the line. I don't think biofuels are the answers to our energy woes, I don't really see that this solution solves many problems. Just my thoughts, take it or leave it. I'll probably blog more about these kinds of issues in the future....
4 comments:
I completely agree with you. Interesting articles earlier this year in Science magazine that looked at the impact of biofuels (I'll e-mail you the links). Eye opening....especially depending on what kind of land you are converting to grow corn.
I don't think electric cars are the way to go either. A lot of people talk about how much better electric cars are for the economy and they don't stop and think about where the electricity comes from...usually coal.
Yeah, I haven't liked electric cars much, it just moves the pollution from one place to another, and since you are changing types of energy again, in the long run you might end putting more pollutants into the atmosphere.
Last summer when we were driving through the pan handle of Texas, we noticed that a lot of fields that used to be planted in wheat were corn instead. We wondered if it was due to the increased demand for biofuel. Wheat prices have tripled in the past year due to a short supply. It all comes down to basic economics. I say, forget the biofuel and just feed people.
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