"Forests paying the price for biofuels"

[Nowhere]

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg18825265.400.html

I suppose it puts into perspective claims of some greens that biofuels, not nuclear energy, are a solution...
But I guess also that way too many people want to preserve current fuel chain instead of working to develop fully clean sources (for example nuclear energy + fuel cells/batteries, or something like that) while in the meantime minimazing use of oil (small efficient engines, hybrides perhaps?), but without simply diversyfying damages...

[Dr Mordrid]

Like most greenie solutions, they aren't.

Dr. Mordrid

[KRSESQ]

The expectation, of course, was that the biofuel material would be produced in the country of use. The fact that promoters did not anticipate that buyers would look for the cheapest source (3rd world nations) demonstrates an appalling lack of any knowledge of global economics.

Kevin

[RichL]

Things like this make me want to scream at the overall idiocy of the human race.
Biofuels are a sodding brilliant idea : a renewable, low polluting fuel that can be used in current engines with little or no modification.
And immediately everyone says "Hey, if we pay some dirt farmers in the Amazon a few pence per year, they'll cut down the rainforest and grow it cheaply!"

The Wikipedia entry on Biofuels is very good, particularly the algae idea.

[Brian Ellis]

At the best, biofuels can only be a niche product. Brazil relies heavily on alcohol to drive cars, having devastated large areas of the Amazon basis to grow sugar cane. The hic is that to distill the alcohol from the fermented cane juice requires more energy than the energy contained in the alcohol produced. Where does this energy come from? Wood from the devastated rain forest. As the nearest rain forest "retreats" from the distillation plant, so more and more diesel trucks have to travel longer distances, burning fossil diesl fuel, to produce the alcohol. Just crazy.

Rapeseed (colza, canola) oil is the most profitable (yield/hectare) for temperate climates and has the advantage that the harvest is sufficiently early that a different crop (e.g., maize) can be grown on the same land in one year. However, like palm oil, it has multiple other uses (frying, margarine, soap, chemical feedstock etc.) which pushes demand. The important point is that land used for food production should not be converted to biofuels. Land unsuitable for food is unsuitable for rapeseed, but cannabis can be grown on much wasteland and hemp oil is OK. There are varieties of hemp that are very low in THC (C. sativa varieties, as opposed to C. indica ones). Of course, hemp also produces useful fibres, but the cultivation techniques for this are incompatible with oil production and vice versa.

Palm oil is the highest yielding per hectare, but at the cost of delapidating primary tropical rain forest. Overflying Malaysia and Indonesia always fills me with horror when I see the hundreds of km² with neat rows of oil palms.