biofuels

Wall Street Journal editorial mischaracterizes both my position and biofuels

To my surprise, on Tuesday I found myself cited by the Wall Street Journal as a strong advocate of subsidies for food-based ethanol, and as a recipient of "federal dole" who ought to "take a vow of embarrassed silence." While I appreciate the Journal's foray into fiction writing (and I'd love to discuss my status on the dole with my accountant, who recently filed my taxes), I would like to clarify a few facts and offer a more rounded view of biofuels and ethanol in general.

A few facts:

South America’s industrial-ag powerhouse eyes rainforest potash deposits

I’ve been writing for a while about industrial agriculture’s fertilizer problem — about how mass-scale food (and biofuel) production relies on finite, geopolitically problematic, and environmentally destructive resources to maintain soil fertility. (See posts here, here, and here.) Well, that story is heating up down in Brazil, an increasingly important hub in the global industrial […]

Seattle Times columnist needs a new ride

Via the Sunday Seattle Times: Danny Westneat has wrecked his car and needs a new ride.

Now, I don't expect it to be easy being green. But this is ridiculous. What was hailed as our leading green alternative to petroleum [biodiesel] is now an affront to humanity?

I wonder which print media gave him this false impression that biodiesel was our leading green alternative?

But when we asked around about biodiesel, it didn't take long before the scolding started. Biodiesel pollutes more than oil, said one e-mailer on a community site where my wife asked for advice. Another questioned our morality, saying it's wrong to use food for fuel when people are starving.

I find it ironic that a newspaper journalist had to learn all of this on an internet forum. Why didn't they just search the Times archives for articles instead? And what is wrong with stuffing 15 acres of vegetable oil annually into your gas tank? Hint: The price of cooking oil in Africa has gone up 60 percent.

Traditional print media and complex issues

On Saturday I received an email with a link to an article by Lisa Stiffler in Friday's Seattle Times. I'm going to use it to demonstrate how newspapers can muddy the water when it comes to complex issues.

First, her article is a perfectly good one -- and a very typical one. You can't put a hyperlink on paper. You can't afford to waste space for footnotes. You are constrained by a word count. You also have to craft a story, keep it local, and do your best not to show whatever bias you may have (and we all have our biases). A quick check by an editor hardly qualifies as peer review. After all, it's a newspaper, not a research article. Finally, there is no commenter feedback to point out errors. Letters to the editor are, statistically speaking, a waste of time.

Here is a quote from The New Yorker that I scrounged off one of Dave's link dumps:

Journalism works well, Lippmann wrote, when "it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch." But where the situation is more complicated ... journalism "causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation."

These criminals are slippery — very slippery

The Christian Science Monitor notices a rash of slippery thieves making off with the newest hot commodity: grease.

The newsweekly uncorks a whopper in defense of crop-based fuels

The massive biofuel mandate embedded in the 2007 Energy Act, signed amid much bipartisan hoopla, is coming under heavy fire. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that two dozen Republican senators have formally asked the EPA to lower the mandate in response to heightened food prices (a power granted to the agency in the Energy […]

I read a letter to the editor, the other day, I opened, and read it, it said they was suckas

A trio of fine letters in The NYT today, taking Richard Cohen to task for his reflexive praise of sugar-cane ethanol.

If biofuels are sustainable, we should be able to show it

A friend recently sent me a one-page press release from an ethanol lobby group that purported to debunk "myths" of biofuels. Our ensuing discussion helped me clarify why even people who once were excited and optimistic about biofuels (like me) are now so opposed to production subsidies (as opposed to R&D).

My friend asked (paraphrasing), "If not biofuels, then what?" and noted that what we're doing now -- "squeezing oil out of rocks" -- is not exactly good for the planet.

For me, the bottom line is simply this:

Ethanol is no more a renewable fuel than hydrogen is.

Rather, ethanol is a way for us to consume natural gas, diesel oil, and coal (not to mention a huge volume of water and vast acreage of cropland) to make motor fuels. All this is on top of serious problems raised by studies about land diversion for carbon emissions and food availability.

It's important to remember that fossil fuels are biofuels (fuels made from once-living matter), so using that term alone isn't helpful.

Let’s raze more Amazon rainforest!

Blairo Maggi is a powerful man in Brazil. He owns a company called Grupo Andre Maggi that runs vast soybean plantations in the state of Matto Grasso, which straddles the Amazon rainforest and what the Nature Conservancy calls “the world’s most biologically rich savanna.” The New York Times has called Maggi “the largest soybean grower […]