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@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