Can biofuels hurt the environment?
Here's a twist to the biofuel movement. Expanding the use of biofuels could result in burning down rainforests to facilitate growing more crops.
For example, there are plans to open 6 million hectares (a hectare is 10,000 square meters) to biofuel plantations in Indonesia, and environmentalists worry that suppliers will burn down trees to clear land for palm oil and sugar fields. Burning down trees that absorb greenhouse gasses would wipe out any climate-change advantage associated with burning cleaner fuels in automobiles.
Just another example of how delicate the balance of nature is.
Here are some related stories on this balance:
- Forest conservation beats fuel conservation
- USDA grants $4.2 million to turn biomass into fuel, reduce fire hazard
- Biofuels just another politically-expedient attempt to look green
[Source: Reuters via alertnet.org]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
subsonica 1:10PM (8/29/2006)
The only real viale solution is electric cars (or pluggable hybrids insofar the gas engine is only used for emergency battery recharges)
Why on earth car makers are not producing them yet??? The technology is there, is available and the demand DO exist!!!
In the long term a network of electric charging stations need to replace existing fuel ones. Energy could come from solar panels atop the station's roofs and/or wind turbines and/or stirling solar-powered engines near the premises
Rest of the energy should come from wind-turbines, hydroelectric stations in dams or fision nuclear power plants (until we figure out how to generate energy from fusion reactors)
Meanwhile we should start as well using smaller, more efficient cars, sharing a single car for several people commuting, press our employers to enable telecommuting policies at our jobs and using public transportation to move inside cities. We need to stop burning fuels to move!
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prattacus 2:20PM (8/29/2006)
Subsonica: it's called capitalism.
This article reminds me of a curve I like to draw:
_________
| /
| /
| /
|/
The y axis is earth resources consumed.
The x axis is time.
The curve is the population.
The horizontal line at the top is the maximum the earth can sustain.
The population growth and what the Earth can sustaion are going to intersect some day, no matter what you do, unless you curb population growth.
That's the real problem.
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prattacus 2:21PM (8/29/2006)
eh, didn't work. But I think you get the drift.
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Stphane Dumas 3:07PM (8/29/2006)
subsonica
the main inconvient with hydro-electricity if to found rivers with good flow and rivers coing from mountainous areas are the ones for, but some projects had some contreversy like the La Grande River complex, a river flowing to the James Bay in Canada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project
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