Depleted Uranium Forums (DU-BBS)

A recent article on AlterNet by Julia Olmstead (a graduate student in plant breeding and sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University and a graduate fellow with the Land Institute, Salina, Kan. She wrote this for the institute's Prairie Writers Circle) has been drawing a lot of discussion.

She states that biofuels are a red herring in the search for sustainable fuel sources. She throws out "facts" saying the cost of production is too high and that we'd never be able to grow enough feedstock to meet our needs. These claims seem dubious to me.

http://www.alternet.org/story/38540/

A couple of excerpts:

Quote:

To produce enough corn-based ethanol to meet current U.S. demand for automotive gasoline, we would need to nearly double the amount of land used for harvested crops, plant all of it in corn, year after year, and not eat any of it. Even a greener fuel source like the switchgrass President Bush mentioned, which requires fewer petroleum-based inputs than corn and reduces topsoil losses by growing back each year, could provide only a small fraction of the energy we demand.

Quote:

The United States annually consumes more fossil and nuclear energy than all the energy produced in a year by the country's plant life, including forests and that used for food and fiber, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy and David Pimentel, a Cornell University researcher.

A really can't believe that last statement. I think she definitely needs to back up her assertions better than this. Also, nearly everyone with even basic knowledge about biofuels agrees that corn and soybeans are NOT efficient sources of ethanol or biodiesel. She fails to mention hemp, clearly the best candidate for an efficient, eco-friendly, and cost-effective feedstock.

As I added in the comments below the article: What is the author trying to prove anyway? We should be very careful about slaying our solutions, shouldn't we?

Here is another current report on ethanol published by the Institute for Local Self-reliance:
http://www.ilsr.org/columns/2006/062106.html

The author argues that US federal subsidies for the ethanol industry should be removed since ethanol can compete just fine against $70-a-barrel crude oil. Sounds reasonable. Now if only we would let the farmers grow hemp.

Beagle17