Does Biofuel cause more harm than good?

You know if we legalized hemp we could solve that whole not enough crops/deforestation problem.

industrial hemp isn’t legal in the US?

Unfortunately, as so often, special interest groups were the culprit again.

Some of these groups have used their influence to achieve standardization towards corn, whereas sugar cane carries more energy, is easier to process, easier on the soil, and needs less soil regeneration phases.

Currently, world market prices for corn are rising due to the biofuel industry buying madly, which of course is very much a burden to low income countries depending on corn as a staple food.

I have read scientists who say that the process of getting biofuels to the market makes it not much more efficient than fossil fuels in the long run. But of course there are others who say just the opposite. I have also read the same about the manufacture of wind mills and solar panels, they need replacing before they make up for the materials used to create them.

It is difficult to decide which group is correct.

@rooeytoo

Actually, you bring up a good point. I think the one “strong” benefit is obviously “renewability”. We kind of ran out of dinosaurs, so much for fossil fuels.

Biofuel could work but once again politics is involved, we have that problem in South Africa.
It could create more jobs and even save the environment.

I think bio-fuels are the wrong answer to our pollution problems…

@flameboi – Would you mind explaining a little further?

@KrystaElyse well its legal, but its way wayyyyy to over regulated to the point where its not even worth the farmers to grow it. You need all kinds of ridiculous permits and licenses to grow it and need fences all around your fields as well as many other security measures. Stupid shit because the government thinks people are going to hide pot plants in the hemp crop (which is impossible to do-_ -)

What people don’t realize is that to grow all the “bio” for the biofuels, we need fossil fuel inputs. If (when) oil gets expensive, that will indirectly raise the price of producing ethanol as well.

Currently, as @TaoSan says, special interests (in this case, the corn lobby) has influenced legislation geared toward keeping corn the primary raw input for ethanol in the US. Brazil has done amazing things with sugarcane (which also skips the part where corn starch needs to be made into sugar to be fermented), but Brazil is sugarcane’s natural habitat. To import all that sugar (if they were willing to sell it to us) – would take lots of fuel.

There’s a lot of potential with somehow converting cellulose into fuel. There’s studies on how much we could make, and at what cost… everything except how to make it. We still don’t know how.

But until then, we’re using fossil fuels to turn food crops into fuel, pricing people out of meals so that we can drive around (to some degree). I suppose that’s the free market at work, but it can’t hold together like that forever.

Also, here’s an interesting infographic. I wonder if it’s true? (It’s from here.)

@laureth again the beauty of hemp, it doesnt really require much to grow.

I don’t think it’s wise to rely very heavily on any one source of energy (in more broad terms than just “fuel”). We should branch out into solar (photovoltaics), wind, geothermal, solar-thermal, hydrogen, hydroelectric, biofuels, and our trusty old fossil fuels also. Economically when we start trying to rely on one source it creates a huge demand for that and makes the price skyrocket (demand pull inflation).

I suppose my actual answer to the question is “What about biodiesel made from recycled cooking oil?”