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What’s the most energy-efficient crop source for ethanol?

Biofuel is the hot topic lately in the green blogosphere. There's legitimate dispute about the political and environmental wisdom of plant-based fuels, but at the very least everyone should be starting from a valid, shared set of numbers (oh, to dream).

In an attempt to offer up such numbers, I'm going to ... rip off somebody smarter than me. Namely, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, and author of the recently released Plan B 2.0, which is the best big-picture summary of our environmental situation I've ever read (and I'm only 2/3 through it!). The entire thing can be downloaded for free from EPI's site.

There are two key indicators when evaluating various crops for biofuel: fuel yield per acre and net energy yield of the biofuel, minus energy used in production and refining. This table (taken from Chapter 2) compares crops based on the first indicator:

T-shirts are all sold out!

GM's Live Green, Go Yellow PR campaign to greenwash its ethanol efforts is off to a roaring start -- namely, "overwhelming demand" quickly exhausted its supply of free T-shirts. But never fear: "Please try again later -- they'll be back soon!"

The campaign tries to spin some good news out of GM's monumental financial woes. GM has already sold 1.5 million "flexible-fuel vehicles" -- principally those that burn an 85% ethanol mix -- largely thanks to a loophole in CAFE fuel-economy regulations that grants FFVs "extra credit." GM's truck-heavy vehicle mix has needed all the extra CAFE credit it could get in recent years, so it's on track to sell 400,000 FFVs in 2006, and all but two of the 11 FFV models are trucks. GM and Ford spent recent years riding high on booming truck sales, using loopholes to barely stay inside CAFE regulations without having to actually improve fuel economy.

Color Us Grateful

Do you work for Hewlett-Packard? Do you love Grist? We’re seeking Grist-loving Hewlett-Packard employees to help us get a new color printer via the company’s employee giving program. If you could lend us a hand, drop a line to emailE=(‘rmorton@’ + ‘grist.org’) document.write(‘‘ + emailE + ‘‘) . Thanks!

Well, They Had to Chop Something

BLM suspends funding for forestry research that contradicts Bush policy The Bureau of Land Management has abruptly suspended funding for a team of scientists who published findings undercutting a Bush administration timber policy. The Oregon State University researchers’ report, published last month in the journal Science, suggested that forests scorched in southwest Oregon’s 2002 Biscuit […]

That’ll Teach You to Put Pee in Frogs

Lethal frog fungus spread by pregnancy test, researchers suspect Weird non sequitur of the day: A skin fungus that’s killing off frogs worldwide may have been spread by a pregnancy test. Yeah, we got that same confused look. A few decades ago, African clawed frogs were used to detect pregnancy — with surprising accuracy. The […]

Money for Nothin’

Bush’s 2007 budget includes Arctic Refuge drilling, cuts EPA funding Unsurprisingly, greens will find little to love in President Bush’s proposed $2.77 trillion budget for fiscal year 2007. It calls for oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, estimating $7 billion in revenue by 2008 from leasing drilling rights — nearly triple the $2.4 […]

Singin’ in the Rainforest

Deal will protect vast Great Bear Rainforest in Canada We love the smell of vast tracts of protected rainforest in the morning. Smells like … victory. Today in British Columbia, Canada, a coalition including the provincial government, Native groups, forest advocates, and timber companies is expected to announce an unprecedented agreement to protect the 15 […]

WSJ says cutting subsidies would make ethanol more viable. Oh really?

The Wall Street Journal ran an article yesterday on "How Brazil Broke Its Oil Habit."

The article attempts to draw lessons for the U.S. from the Brazilian experience, where sugarcane-based ethanol supplies 18 percent of the transportation market. The author, David Luhnow, seeks to apply "lessons from the sugar fields of Brazil to U.S. cornfields."

The first problem I see here -- and more scientifically sophisticated Gristmillers like biodiversivist and greenstork are invited to weigh in here -- is that sugarcane seems a much more efficient way to create ethanol than corn. Ethanol is just alcohol, right? The process of making it means converting sucrose to alcohol. And sugarcane has a lot more sucrose, on a per-weight basis, than corn. Right? Thus it would require more energy input to create a given amount of ethanol from corn than it would from sugarcane. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Secondly, Luhnow states that ethanol didn't really take off in Brazil until the government stopped subsidizing sugar farmers. This moves him to write:

Umbra on flooring options

Dear Umbra, If I have to replace my old carpet, what are the environmental pros and cons of the different choices? (Ceramic tile, carpet, or the laminate flooring sold at Home Depot seem to be the most common.) And can I recycle my old carpet? Claudia Bloom Mesa, Ariz. Dearest Claudia, I’m going to lay […]

The return of SOTU: Oil ‘addiction’

A post on Andrew Sullivan's blog last week got me thinking: Is "addiction" the right word?

Bush's SOTU statement that "America is addicted to oil" was treated as the Big News of the speech, as though he'd admitted to some deep dark secret. Even groups hostile to his administration lauded him for it; many of them have used the metaphor themselves.

But it strikes me as an extraordinarily poor way of describing the problem. It's imprecise in a way that serves Bush's interests in subtle but important ways.