[Sustain] [Transpo] Excellent Short Audio On The Biofuels Myth

[Eric Brooks]

I do not believe that even algae will work, and I am certain that 
cellulosic will not.

We can't get around conservation of energy here. The algae has to be fed 
with something. The carbon has to come from somewhere. There is no free 
lunch. Hence anything that will give us massive amounts of burnable 
fuels, will have massive amounts of impact on the planetary ecosystem.

And as my previous post noted, the players that are getting into this 
biofuels game are some of the most evil people on the planet.

If they (IDB, Jeb Bush [ethanol council], Kissinger & Associates) are 
involved in it, it cannot possibly be a good thing, even if it has the 
potential somehow to be good.

And I don't believe that it can in any case.

They mentioned algae. They dovetailed it and all of the other crops with 
genetic engineering. This stuff is all bad news that must be stopped 
before it distracts us from taking real action to end the climate 
crisis, while we instead wait a precious, deadly, decade or two for some 
magic bullet that will allow us all to drive cars.

Why are we talking about convoluted esoteric ways to get liquid carbon 
fuels out of algae, when we could meet our energy and transportation 
needs with solar, wind, tidal, wave, etc. and electrified mass transit? 
These are off the shelf, affordable technologies, that can be employed 
now; not speculative scientific processes which seek some sleight of 
hand with which to defy the basic laws of physics.

peace

Eric

jmc at sfgreens.org wrote:
> I think the interview does a good job of addressing problems with
> current biofuel sources (corn in the US, sugarcane in Brazil).  It
> doesn't cover the technologies that are still in R&D or moving from
> R&D to production (e.g., algae, cellulosic ethanol).  I think some of
> the current research has great promise, although of course biofuels
> will be only part of a possible renewable energy-based future
> (conservation and reduction of sprawl will be more important).
>
> Interestingly, both Fidel Castro and the Bush-appointed head of the
> DOE have come to this same conclusion, as discussed here:
> http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/29/2342224
>
> Slashdot has pretty good coverage of biofuels, although of course
> half their readers are crazy libertarians.  Here's more coverage
> of the same story as in the radio interview:
> http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/02/2144205
>
> JMC
>