Brazil's ethanol cars hits the 2 million mark

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> Essentially he's probably right in that if you go at biodiesel / bioethanol production in a stupidly energy intensive way then the whole process could well be energy negative. However I'm pretty sure from looking at his study that if you planned it carefully to minimise energy usage / CO2 production throughout the process this need not be the case at all.

I think that's possible, but I don't know of any research along those lines.

I'd be very interested if someone knows of some and can point to it.

 

[Cobbles]

Timely response from SustDev
http://www.sustdev.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1451

Fascinating.

So how does the food get from areas of production to where it's needed?

Carbon fuelled transport presumably?

This sort of theorising always presumes that foodstuffs will magiically be evenly distributed globally.

Political considerations are far more likely to determine food supply - e.g. if Mr Mugabwe has decided that his people aren't starving despite having reduced agricultural production of everything to 0, then he's not going to be worried that more US grain/EU sugar beet is being used to make fuel. That's a point of more interest to those in the developed world who have the leisure to nip round to Asda for a packet of mangetout to take to their next "global-disaster-let's-solve-it-round-the-chardonnay" pot luck supper.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

If you sit down and work out how to minimise the energy input for food production, which is in effect what feedstock production for biofuels is, then you do end up with a pattern that drastically reduces transport needs and localises food production. If you just do organic farming then do everything else as business as usual, you only get rid of the oil costs for the fertiliser and pesticide, not all the other costs for machinery, transport and so on. You only seem to be able to get rid of those by moving to a pattern where most people eat food that's been grown within walking distance most of the time.

 

[Herbsman.]

Biodiesel beats ethanol in biofuel battle

Forests paying the price for biofuels

two interesting articles for y'all

 

[ICB]

More on Ethanol: The Answer to Oil or a Pipe Dream?

EU approves more crisis action to contain wine lake

Bernie's comments re: small-scale integrated solutions being far more likely to achieve proper results rather than attempts at massive manipulations of planned economies seem to be pretty on the money.