This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 8:50am and is filed under Agriculture, Farming, Economics, Environment, Food Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I don’t have the answer, but it’s an interesting debate. I’m going to paraphrase heavily from Dot.Earth, because frankly, this is way out of my area of expertise.
George Washington Carver was of the opinion (back when there were only 2 billion people on earth) that as we depleted the energy stores from ores and oil, we could fully replace them with energy produced on our farms. But, now that we are pushing 7 billion people, it is unlikely that we can grow enough biofuel AND food to provide our needs without developing every inch of land possible.
Ultimately, it is sunlight that provides our energy. It seems logical that the more directly we harvest that sunlight, the more efficient we will be. Looked at in that way, solar (and wind) power, followed by the stored solar energy in oil and other fossil fuels are arguably more efficient than using plants to convert sunlight to carbon.
The debate continues: Some argue that intensified agriculture can cut land use; concentrated agriculture leads to increases in production efficiencies. Others argue that as more of our crops go to ethanol, more land is pushed into row-crop production that is best left to other uses.
As a biologist (and therefor completely unqualified to offer an opinion), I believe that any system that has built-in redundancies in its abilities to meet its needs is inherently healthier and better able to adapt to changing circumstances than a system that has only one source. In other words, as long as we don’t go overboard and become completely dependent on biofuels, having additional options for our energy is probably a good thing.
November 18th, 2008 at 5:15pm
My family is reading “Alcohol Can Be A Gas” by David Blume right now, getting excited about one day producing our own fuel. Dave covers a wide range of potential feedstocks, mentioning that corn is one of the least efficient. Biofuels make sense when they use waste products, leftovers of the timber industry, invasive species, or perennial crops. They can be produced on a farm or community scale, doing away with the need to build costly and dangerous electricity transmission lines all over the country. Instead of subsidizing grain farmers to grow for the ethanol industry, why not subsidize the cost of building small-scale alcohol stills all over the country? That would remove the distortions that are happening in commodity crops and instead encourage innovative feedstocks to be used in the generation of ethanol all over the country.
January 30th, 2010 at 2:56pm
I think you’ve hit the mark.
As both a (ex)rancher (my parents own a goat/sheep farm in SoCal) and a renewable energy researcher, I’m pretty aware of the pro’s and con’s of biofuels. I get that optimizing biofuel potential is dependent on our ability to pick and choose where and how we use it (in fact, my current research is looking at CA’s highly-flammable forest overgrowth as a biofuels option…one viable way to cut the state’s fire risk, and making it affordable).
Problem is this: unfortunately, we have a lot of purist ideologies floating around and muddling up the world of renewable science. A bit like what happened with nuclear power, biofuels is getting a bad rap. The public is choosing to fight ideas that have highly publicized bad components (like nuclear waste, and food production losses). However, the truth is…all of our options have a bad component. The highly touted “solar power” option (which, notably is the least-technologically advanced, least-efficient, and least-”bang for your buck” we have) is frankly, just a bad idea. Solar has a fundamental material problem (not to mention the material solar is using–silicon–is environmentally destructive to refine).
Sure, silicon might be on of the most abundant resources on earth, but like all of earth’s resources it does not absorb ALL of the sun’s energy. It reflects a great deal. That fact alone makes it a pretty limited deal.
Wind, on the other hand, is the option that has the best potential to get real results (on much less land and for less cost then solar…the downfall being that wind is variable). Nuclear is still our most technologically advanced, big-change option (however, the publicity against it is amazingly negative….and not really accurate either). Biofuels is a good plan in certain scenerios (like the one I’m researching).
At the end of the day, we do need to divorce ourselves from this marginal, skim-the-surface thinking about what makes a “good” renewable and what makes a “bad” renewable. Acknowledge the limitations (that exist in all of these technologies), and acknowledge what it takes to sustain our global need….and move forward from there.
Any other approach is just bad policy and bad planning.
February 2nd, 2010 at 10:11pm
Ari: Thanks for such a thoughtful reply.
I’d like to agree, in particular, that we need to avoid the “good” vs “bad” thinking and arguments. That kind of thinking on any subject rarely contributes to finding solutions.