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posted by martyb on Friday January 30 2015, @07:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-fuelish-attempt? dept.

The New York Timesreports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes that turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand and that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world’s growing population. “I would say that many of the claims for biofuels have been dramatically exaggerated,” says Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, a global research organization based in Washington that is publishing the report. “There are other, more effective routes to get to a low-carbon world.” The report follows several years of rising concern among scientists about biofuel policies in the United States and Europe, and is the strongest call yet by the World Resources Institute, known for nonpartisan analysis of environmental issues, to urge governments to reconsider those policies.

Timothy D. Searchinger says that recent science has challenged some of the assumptions underpinning many of the pro-biofuel policies that have often failed to consider the opportunity cost of using land to produce plants for biofuel. According to Searchinger if forests or grasses were grown instead of biofuels, that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air, storing it in tree trunks and soils and offsetting emissions more effectively than biofuels would do. What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form. “It’s true that our first-generation biofuels have not lived up to their promise,” Jason Hill said. “We’ve found they do not offer the environmental benefits they were purported to have, and they have a substantial negative impact on the food system.”

 
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  • (Score: 2) by buswolley on Friday January 30 2015, @08:13AM

    by buswolley (848) on Friday January 30 2015, @08:13AM (#139409)

    Biofuels were never green, just renewable...not even sustainable.

    Plastics. How do you make them or replace them without oil?

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  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday January 30 2015, @02:36PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 30 2015, @02:36PM (#139491)

    Surprisingly, you can make plastic from plants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic [wikipedia.org]

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    • (Score: 2) by redneckmother on Friday January 30 2015, @03:53PM

      by redneckmother (3597) on Friday January 30 2015, @03:53PM (#139520)

      Plant base plastics are attractive to rodents. Have you ever seen what a squirrel can do to an engine wiring harness?

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      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 30 2015, @07:55PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 30 2015, @07:55PM (#139616) Journal

        Even Lead is attractive to rodents. And plant based plastics can certainly be non-nutritive to rodents, while Lead is actively poisonous.

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      • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday January 30 2015, @11:15PM

        by Hartree (195) on Friday January 30 2015, @11:15PM (#139674)

        Not all plant based plastics are. And the wiring that the SKWRLs like to chew on is mostly coated with petroleum based plastic.

        We use petroleum as it's a cheap and easy to process source for the small carbon molecules that get linked up to make plastics. But, it's certainly not the only source of them.