Re: Are Biofuels the Answer?

The article is not 100% wrong. 

Biofuels *do* compete with food production, it's just that the skewed system of subsidies to farmers hide that fact.

Case in point HFCS is a *biofuel* if you'll allow the analogy, and it's changed the food industry so severly that foods made with *sugar* are now on the premium and whole foods shelves.

Corn for ethanol has increased the price of milk significantly this year alone.  But remember according tho the Imperial Federal Gummint, inflation is under control(*)

By suggesting millions of acres of energy crops and algae, what you're actually proposing is a primitive form of solar energy.  But unfortunately it's an expensive form.  Even it we had a method of utilizing 100% of the biomass, plants only fix a fraction of the insolation that falls upon them, plus they need water, fertilizer, and energy to harvest them.

Now, if you'll allow the wastes from hog & chicken farming to be used for biofuel (methane) then you're really talking about... well it's not surplus, but it is not competing with the the food supply, because it's already been eaten; once. 

 Personally, I wish I'd  been in on the french-fry express when it got started, but today, so much of the grease is spoken for that supply & demand has made it le$$ attractive.  That and I just don't drive that much anymore.  But there's another rub.  When I was commuting ther would have been no way for me to accumulate enough fuel to satisfy my demand, given the number of hours in a week.  And now I fill up every 6-7 weeks so how can I justify the investment in tanks, pumps, scales, chemicals, etc...

 Variety is the only viable solution to the problem.  Hitching our collective wagons to any single source is asking for trouble.  AS for me I'm a solar guy.  I want to generate when the sun shines.  Any poere I produce is either used locally by me or returned to the grid.  Each system I install might only drop the fuel consumption at some distant coal plant by a few tens of pounds per hour, but it adds up.  They may still burn some that fuel at night, but over the course of time the surplus of unburnt fuel will add up.

(*) Excluding food & fuel; of course.