Exactly. The simplistic and knee jerk reactions are hard to understand.

It's as if all CO2 emissions are the same, end of story, turn off brain and ears.

Not to mention all the other environmental benefits of alcohol.

We do know that the United Arab Emirates has hired a top, expensive DC-based PR firm to spread anti-alcohol FUD.

I personally think that an undercurrent of snobbery against Midwestern corn farmers, and a desire to not let poor Third World farmers prosper, is part of this.

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Oil companies are not the only ones with an agenda. Are you that naive to think people involved in the biofuel industry are not driven by their own agendas and greed?

What world do you live in?

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Noz:
Greed works. That's the real world. Dueling lobbyists, in an inherently corrupt system, are fighting to control the future. We desperately need the leadership of statesmen who are incorruptible to save us from the self serving bastards. Be skeptical, and always follow the money. It's the only way you will ever have a clue.

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Both of you are full of a substance that makes for a very, very good methane feedstock.

Ironic that you're jabbering about knee-jerk reactions when it's plainly obvious that neither of you read the article.

Fortunately, I did. It looks at more than simply tailpipe net CO2 emissions and looks at all greenhouse gas emissions from all steps of the biofuel production process. Two primary sources account for the release of a great deal of greenhouse gas from stable sinks.

The first is soil disturbance and deforestation, which releases carbon from soil organic carbon (SOC) and biomass (trees) sinks. When you cut down trees and burn them, and churn up soil, the SOC and biomass very quickly decomposes, releasing CO2.

Then, when you grow crops on it, if you're not growing organic, you're dumping tons of fertilizer on it. Soil microbes eat that fertilizer and spew out nitrous oxides, which are incredibly potent greenhouse gases.

The combination of released biomass/SOC CO2 and fertilizer-derived nitrous oxides together has a greater greenhouse impact per unit of fuel yielded than fossil fuels. You're simply moving the source away from the tailpipe, nothing more. Researchers such as David Tilman, David Pimentel, and Tim Seastedt have all exhaustively demonstrated the failures of crop-based ethanol. "Snobbery" has nothing to do with it; the science has been known for a good ten years.

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Harlan:

Greed does not work. Greed is what has gotten us into this mess in the first place. We are heading for disaster in a bad way...if we are not already there. And greed is what is stopping us from doing the right things.

While lobbyists perform charlatanism, our clocks are ticking and we are no where closer to where we need to be.

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Snark, David Pimentel is a radical Malthusian and an extremist opponent of all modern agriculture, who supports reducing Earth's population by two-thirds and cutting the US standard of living in half. He is a mere insect entomologist, writing far outside his field of expertise when he makes claims about the energy content of ethanol. Your citing him instantly, thoroughly, and permanently discredits you, not only in the eyes of pro-human rather than anti-human environmentalists, but also anyone who cares about reason, science, and evidence.

Just as an example, we can look at Pimentel's most widely cited study (cited not in professional journals but by conservative and free-market zealots), co-written in 2001 with oil-industry man Tad Patzek, claiming that ethanol has negative energy content.

It was swiftly crushed in 2002 by someone who actually knows the topic, MSU chemical engineering professor Bruce Dale, who exposed fatal flaw after fatal flaw in Pimentel's agenda-driven hackery:

-Pimentel's corn yields dated from 1992 (and are thus underestimated)

-Pimentel's figures for energy required to produce ethanol and the ethanol yield dated from 1979, and his figures for energy to produce fertilizer are 1990 world values per the UN - not recent US values (and thus grossly underestimated).

-Pimentel assumes all corn is irrigated (only 16 percent is, and virtually no irrigated corn is converted to ethanol). FAIL, since Pimentel assigned huge energy costs for ethanol crop irrigation.

-Pimentel fails to assign any energy credit for the high protein animal feed produced as a by-product of ethanol production.

The Dale study showed that not only was the energy balance for producing ethanol significantly positive, but the much more relevant metric of the amount of liquid fuel produced vs. expended was enormously favorable - at least six gallons to one, later revised with better data to TWENTY to one. A later study published in Science (you may have heard of it, somewhat influential) heart-staked the Pimentel study corpse yet again by showing the petroleum expended vs. ethanol gained ratio at more than ten to one.

The Dale study HAS been widely cited in professional literature, which makes one wonder why oil-funded think tanks ignore it and spam out Pimentel's oilman-collaborating hackery instead.

(I am indebted to another man who actually understands fuels - former NASA rocket scientist Robert Zubrin in his invaluable book "Energy Victory", pages 126-135, for this information. The book itself even more brutally shreds Pimentel with facts.)

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I love how you're attempting to lecture a grassland ecologist on grassland ecology. By all means, continue.

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"Snark, David Pimentel is a radical Malthusian and an extremist opponent of all modern agriculture, who supports reducing Earth's population by two-thirds and cutting the US standard of living in half. He is a mere insect entomologist, writing far outside his field of expertise when he makes claims about the energy content of ethanol."

Robert Zubrin is just as far out of the field as Pimentel - if not more - and you seem to have no problem sucking up to him on the strength of his research on rockets that burn hydrogen and hydrazine, so what's the beef?

Your ad-hom strawman is cute, and I certainly get that you oppose Pimentel on ideological grounds, but none of this has anything to do with his science.

"It was swiftly crushed in 2002 by someone who actually knows the topic, MSU chemical engineering professor Bruce Dale, who exposed fatal flaw after fatal flaw in Pimentel's agenda-driven hackery"

How do you know they were fatal flaws? You're clearly not an ecologist yourself, because you clearly haven't the faintest idea about soils or agriculture, so are you simply basing your evaluation on who confirms your bias best?

Dale's conflicts of interest are well-known; he holds a patent on ethanol production. As such, his analysis is tainted.

"Pimentel's figures for energy required to produce ethanol and the ethanol yield dated from 1979, and his figures for energy to produce fertilizer are 1990 world values per the UN - not recent US values (and thus grossly underestimated)."

This, and Dale's other criticisms, are actually correct, but yield and supply is not my concern. I don't care whether you can get usable, energy-positive fuel out of corn, because the real issues at work here are land-use change and greenhouse gases. That's what I'm talking about. Pimentel's work is of variable quality, but it strongly and defensibly demonstrates that soil disruption and fertilization negate any climate benefit to biofuels. And if you're not cutting greenhouse emissions, who the hell cares? Why not just keep burning gasoline, but more efficiently? It'll always be cheaper than some overprocessed corn or grass derivative.

"The Dale study showed that not only was the energy balance for producing ethanol significantly positive, but the much more relevant metric of the amount of liquid fuel produced vs. expended was enormously favorable - at least six gallons to one, later revised with better data to TWENTY to one."

Too bad Dale didn't take into account the greenhouse gas emissions from soil and fertilizer. Yield isn't my concern; environmental impact is.

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Snark, after I showed how extremist Pimentel is, and fatally flawed Pimentel's greatest-hit "study" is, with its suspiciously outdated figures, completely wrong assumption, and gaping holes, you're still pointing to him as a reliable figure for anything?

Also, typical of too many current environmentalists, you are displaying climate change monomania, with an even more narrow personal focus, soil issues. Bragging about being a grass and soil ecologist is nice, and yes I won't be able to dive into the (ahem) weeds with you about those issues, but lift your eyes up and look around.

But the world doesn't revolve around your pet issues. There are many other things at stake here.

First, we have economic considerations. Gasoline prices played a major role in wrecking the economy last year; we need to liberate ourselves from OPEC.

Second, geostrategy. OPEC funds extremism and terrorism. We spent more money on foreign oil last year than our defense budget; funding the enemy in the War on Terror is asinine.

And finally, since I suspect you will scornfully dismiss such burningly urgent in a burst of sweeping, impatient enviro-zeal, on the environment,

Ethanol is far CLEANER than gasoline for a whole host of reasons.

I list seven distinct reasons here (two of them being global warming and NOx which I know you will dispute, based on discredited extremist Pimentel's "research").

http://tinyurl.com/b2xo52

The other five include sulfur, carcinogens and mutagens, solubility in water, biodegradability, and finally and most importantly the absence of soot, smoke, and particulate matter.

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Cellulosic ethanol is a nice to have, but all too often a reason for treating alcohol fuel as a maybe someday later issue. But there are already 17 crops at least than can yield profitable and useful quantities of ethanol fuel, and all other biomass including switchgrass can be made into methanol (with an M) today, no further research necessary.

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"Neither Miscanthus nor Switchgrass require farmland, fertilizer or irrigation once established."

And if you think that farmers won't immediately begin fertilizing and irrigating the living crap out of their switchgrass to boost yields, when and if they begin planting it, you're out to lunch.

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Hate to tell you, but no, they won't be pumping lots of fertilizer and water to it. Not at projected Diesel and N prices. And with the target price for biomass feedstocks rather low to make cellulosic fuels a viable business, there's no way you'd waste resources that way.

The whole idea behind these fairly tough, well-adapted energy crops is that they do well with reduced inputs. Many of these species also grow much better on marginal lands than most commodity crops would.

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You don't have to clear-cut a rainforest to grow ethanol. Brazil grows its sugarcane ethanol in the southern grassland area; the wetter jungle soil would rot the cane roots and kill the plants. However Brazilian ethanol remains dogged by the myth of clear-cut rainforest. They even passed a law banning sugarcane plantations in the Amazon basin as pure PR; about as relevant as Russia banning banana plantations in Siberia.

Still the stubborn lie refuses to die no matter how many stakes go through its heart.

The oil cartel's well funded PR lobby, and the Gulf states' purchases of large shares of US media stocks, are doing their job well.

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Furthermore, while just randomly guess about how many acres it takes to fuel your car and what is and isn't sustainable, former NASA rocket scientist Robert Zubrin, whom I think you will concede knows a bit more about fuel energy content than you do, has provided a chart on page 149 of his book "Energy Victory" documenting the Ethanol yields of various crops as measured in liters / ha / yr.

For example corn gives 4,136 liters / ha / yr, while cassava offers 5,100, sugarcane offers 8,100, Yams a whopping 11,200, etc. Also with methanol in the picture you can use the stems, roots, etc to make methanol (today, with no further research unlike the maybe someday status of cellulosic ethanol), increasing the alcohol fuel yield still further.

Also there is enormous quantities of untapped agricultural land, huge numbers of desperately poor people eager to find a cash crop to sell, and cropland isn't fixed: per acre yields are constantly rising.

Finally methanol can be made from any biomass including trash, weeds, grass clippings, even sewage. We're not likely to run out of those any time soon.

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I really was't trying to start an argument or touch a nerve.

I'm sure Robert Zubrin is really smart and who doesn't like a good chart. So if I drive 12,000 miles a year, get 25 miles to the gallon (just a passenger car... could be better, but better than most people), I need about 480 gallons a year. According to your numbers, I'd need about .44 ha of corn to sustain my driving. Extrapolate that to 300,000,000 Americans, that's 132 million hectacres or 510,000 sq miles or 1/7 the US land (I think that's correct). Common sense says that's hard imagine.

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Not all 300 million of us are drivers: huge numbers are underage, elderly, handicapped, live an urban carless lifestyle, imprisoned, etc.

Also you neglected the key issue of methanol, which can get you more alcohol per crop acre as well be generated from other biomass (and if you are willing to forego carbon neutrality, coal and natural gas).

While we are cultivating only a fraction of our available arable land, thus with plenty left over for expansion, and while we are already supplying about 10% of our fuel (E10) with a hair over 1% of our arable land, and while per acre crop yields are always rising (up 17% since 2002 alone; Iowa now outproduces the whole 1940s USA), you're probably right that an alcohol economy would generate more demand than US farmers can handle alone.

That's GOOD - it means there would be a powerful driver for world development, with long-neglected poor areas languishing beyond our protectionist agriculture trade barrier walls finally having a cash crop we'd be willing to buy.

For more available crop lands and other anti bio fuel FUD fighting, see here:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/in-defense-of-biofuels

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