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.