The European Union bans certain biofuel sources in draft law

I read an article about this on the BBC. At the same time we were passing legislation to make bio-fuels mandatory, the EU is rethinking the whole issue. Bio-fuels made from food, such as corn etc., hurt food prices and especially in developing nations where the normal expense of food is a much higher percentage of earnings than there or in the US. They must import that more costly food, and besides who is going to donate crops to the poor nations when you can sell it for big bucks making ethanol?
In other parts of the world, the "gold rush" to supply bio-fuels is causing an increase in deforestation to grow it. This only causes less forest to absorb the CO2 already in the air, actually contributing to the problem, besides the other habitat destruction etc.
By the way, do you know what some of the fastest growing stocks are? Pesticide and fertilizer manufacturers. Yep, lets put more of that in our groundwater and run-off... coral reefs just love it?
There are concerns about other pollutants from this fuel as well, not to mention it actually lowers gas mileage, causing you to use yet more fuel in your car... off-setting the savings in CO2 maybe? Depends how you drive probably.
I'm not a big fan of bio-fuels, especially from food products, and think we are making a serious mistake here in knee jerk reactions to "do something"... with the agriculture lobby helping drive it. I think it has a place, but is not the answer for gasoline and should be seriously re-evaluated. Some use of it from grasses that exist, or perhaps sugarcane from places that it wouldn't hurt etc. would be fine I think. We need to be smart about it, or we are causing other, perhaps worse problems in my mind.
Thanks for your article and thoughts, take care, and I'll get off my soap-box, ha ha.

John, I appreciate your feedback and additional information. I agree with your sentiment, and with most of the details of what you say. I'm pretty enthusiastic about biofuels from waste vegetable oil (which I used to be dismissive of until I learned more): these don't compete with food and are truly waste, yet contain good biodiesel potential.

Nevertheless, you are spot on about the knee-jerk reactions. We are getting "played" by big business (and politics), under the pretense of environmental concern, in many cases. Corn ethanol, which is a cornerstone of the President's biofuels policy and of many state programs, is now widely reported, believed and regulated as an environmentally-unfriendly fuel. Furthermore, the buring of tax dollars to subsidize corn ethanol is doing just what you say: raising food prices, increasing the fertilizer burden on our fresh water (and eventually the Gulf of Mexico, etc.), and using up a ton of fresh water. Also, farmers have stopped crop rotation in many cases because they don't want to miss a growing season of tax credits for corn ethanol.

I don't blame the farmers. I do blame the poorly thought-out government programs.

The Economist and Reuters, very respected sources, go over all the food price/oil price/gas price/tax credit issues in articles I blogged a while back.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments and for reading the post!

Yes, waste turned into bio-fuel may/should have a place in limited use, and no doubt from some other sources. It is just that mandating a 10% mixture, or whatever, across the board by State or Federal governments in our gasoline is unsustainable and will cause the serious problems we both mentioned above.
Thanks again.

Yes, absolutely. It is not a well-thought out government policy (I'm not sure it was thought out at all).

These are good points to consider. As for our own government, there appears to be no danger of embracing things that are seemingly green merely to be green. :o/

What does Kermit say? It's not easy being green.

There are large amounts of agricultural and forestry wastes that can be used for biofuel. I don't see any reason (other than special interest) to use food crops for this. A couple of examples from Hawken, et. al., Natural Capitalism

"A typical Nebraska harvest season results in an accumulation of distressed grain—damp or otherwise below-grade. This waste could make enough ethanol to run a sixth of the state's cars for an entire year, if those vehicles were efficient enough to get 90 mpg, probably less than a first-generation Hypercar. With equally efficient cars, the straw burned in the fields of France or Denmark would run those countries' entire car fleets year-round. Similar waste exists in the form of nutshells in California, peach pits in Georgia, cotton-gin trash in Texas—that latter of a quantity adequate in the early 1980s to fuel with alcohol every vehicle in Texas." (pp. 201-2)

G T., Thanks for the comment! Yes, our US Federal "environmental policies" are a mix of socialism for big business and poor environmental ideas. Some States are doing a good job, as are some cities.

Steve: Yes! This is absolutely the case. The waste already exists and is being wasted! Ethanol is not problem free, but ethanol from waste biomass has a lot going for it. It is much more energy- and environmentally-efficient than corn- or other food-to-ethanol processes, and doesn't put food in competition with fuel. Thanks for the link!

Steve: just to be clear, in some of my references to waste, I was speaking about waste vegetable oil for biodiesel. It isn't a huge volume process, as John indicated, but it still makes sense.

The "other" sort of waste, which is cellulosic biomass (also containing significant amounts of lignins, if from wood) is one of the best possible sources of fuel. I still am getting mixed messages from what I read about how fully-developed this is as a commercial process, but I know it would be better off if the corn-ethanol subsidies were going to "biomass/ag waste to fuel" conversion R&D.

James: "I still am getting mixed messages from what I read about how fully-developed this is as a commercial process...."

That's my impression also, and I haven't really kept up with it, to be honest. I would much rather see us by-pass internal combustion altogether. As you know, Sam Carana has written about electric vehicles, and I see that as a far better way to go. I also would rather see hydrogen fuel-cell cars, such as the super-efficient Hypercar, which Rocky Mountain Institute designed.

Some of this may not be too far in the future, since the former CEO of Boeing, under whose watch the 787 "Dreamliner" was developed, recently went to Ford Motor Co. Lovins, who had been a consultant to Boeing's use of ultra-light, yet strong carbon fiber composites in the 787, has also now been named to a "transitional team" at Ford, along with Paul Hawken. We'll see....

I'm afraid that biofuel does more harm than good. This shouldn't come as anything new. Concerns about biofuel were raised the moment the subsidies began, e.g. in this study at Cornell University. Plenty of studies have pointed out that the monocultures that produce biofuel use huge amounts of water, pesticides and fertilizers, while growing biofuel comes at the expense of food and forests. Instead of giving farmers subsidies for growing biofuel, we should have a feebate policy that benefits zero emission vehicles (powered by electricity or hydrogen) and renewable energy (such as solar and wind energy). I also advocate a fee on fertilisers that could fund rebates on agrichar. As described in my article Agrichar, burning biowaste by means of pyrolysis could produce agrichar and hydrogen.

Steve and Sam, thanks for the feedback. I have not read through al of Sam's articles yet, but I will.

The Cornell study Sam points out (thanks for the link) and other reports have described the problems inherent in what I would call "currently-standard biofuel commerce." However, that doesn't mean that the the situation isn't extremely surprising for most people. Environmentally- and economically-harmful biofuels have been widely touted by politicans, corporations and the press as "the answer." I'm not even sure that these people even know what "the question" is. I mean that quite literally.

Making things worse in the US, problems with biofuels have been completely ignored by the highest levels of the US government (which promotes many of the worst "biofuel solutions"), and some of the individual states have followed suit. This has resulted in the issue becoming politicized instead of debated. The result has been to shovel money to certain companies and farms and to deplete money from R&D in other, actually sensible, alternative fuel areas. (And also to deplete the funding from other important areas, like medical research, health care, etc.)

I'm not sure I can support any tax on non-zero-emission vehicles at this stage- it would be terrible for low-income people and would have no effect on gas-guzzling, high-income people (nothing seems to have any effect on them).

I do suspect that there will be a transition period where things like waste vegetable oil-based biodiesel will be reasonable choices. As long as the fuel is coming from waste, most of the environmental problems associated with production of biofuels will disappear. That doesn't mean they will be perfectly clean fuels to burn, though biodiesel is far better than petrodiesel for some inorganic content (sulfur, typically).

I don't know about plans or costs for retrofitting cars to become electric cars, though I'm sure Sam does and can comment on how practical this is (probably you already have and I just haven't read it yet).

Although this will not be news to you (even if you don't agree with it), I will state here that it isn't "green" to junk all current cars. So, it seems to me (not having read Sam's key articles yet) that we need to get good use out of the energy, materials and environmental investment that went into producing our current cars by running as many as possible on waste (not purpose-grown) biodiesel.

While that is happening, I suspect that we can make the transition to electric cars and the conversion of biomass or related materials to hydrogen. With luck. I simply have to get to your articles, Sam, but I've got to work first!

Speaking of avoiding fertilizer, which is only possible if we stop growing so much corn, have you seen this article on crop rotation?

I can't respond as much as I would like now, but will be more available in a few days.

Thanks for all of the feedback! Best wishes, Jim

James: "I'm not sure I can support any tax on non-zero-emission vehicles at this stage- it would be terrible for low-income people and would have no effect on gas-guzzling, high-income people (nothing seems to have any effect on them)."

Amory Lovins, Winning the Oil Endgame has a solution for this: 1. a feebate, which taxes gas-guzzlers and rewards efficiency, and 2. a "clunker" buy-back program, that takes gas-guzzling, low-income, polluting cars/trucks off the road, and replaces them with efficient, reliable cars/trucks (p.191 ff.).

James: "...it isn't "green" to junk all current cars."

Good point. I don't have any information re: how cars are "disposed of" these days. Coming home from the gym this morning, I saw two tractor-trailer carrying crushed cars and trucks. Where were they taking them? I don't know. Scrap metal?

Steve: Thanks for the comments, links and information! I'll read the Lovins article- it sounds good.

I imagine that, with those cars, the steel is being recycled (and maybe copper- people are ripping copper pipes out of old, and even new, homes to sell the metal). However, maybe we should be recycling more, if not to re-use it, at least to protect the environment from toxic landfills.

The recent article I blogged on green architecture had a helpful comment on house renovation (also click here, where a green award has been given to a new design that preserves what can be kept and that does not build a high air-volume mansion that is hard to heat and cool. The architects discuss the environmental cost of trashing old houses, sending them to landfill and building McMansions.

I don't have any numbers on cars, but my intuition says that they costs a lot in energy, materials and labor to make, so re-using or recycling should be part of any plan, at least for a while. Diminishing returns will set in at some point. Also, cars contain lots of phthalate plasticizers (unless you get the leather seat and walnut dashboard upgrades!)

On my blog and elsewhere, I get comments every now and then from people who are so politicized about global warming that they are proud to be ignoring the "Al Gore platform" by using gas-guzzlers. I try to make the point that gas guzzlers aren't strategically sound for anyone or any country (or any country of consumers, anyway), let alone the world, regardless of what one thinks of global warming. Unfortunately, the people who make these comments usually change the subject and won't respond to an attempt at discussion or debate. That's what happens with politics- some people just won't see anyone else's point of view and won't listen or take in information that disagrees with their world view.

Thanks again!

Jim: "..it isn't "green" to junk all current cars. So, it seems to me (not having read Sam's key articles yet) that we need to get good use out of the energy, materials and environmental investment that went into producing our current cars by running as many as possible on waste (not purpose-grown) biodiesel."

Read this nice article in Suburban Journals about how Ron Erb's brother-in-law had a Ford Ranger that had just stopped running, but the body was still in good condition. Ron converted the truck into an electric vehicle for $7,700. A rebate program offered by the state of Illinois, called Green Fleets, gives rebates of up to 80 percent of the conversion cost up to $4,000. So it looks like he's got an electric vehicle for about $3,500. Furthermore, he may have tax advantages and he'll make savings on the cost of driving and on maintenance, so he'll practically have a good, clean truck for free.

Of course, not everyone will be able to do such a conversion. But as I wrote in a comment under my article The Distributed Grid, if you cannot do the conversion yourself, Lion EV sell you a new Ford Ranger converted into an electric version, using a battery core that provides a range of up to 200 miles. In this case, such a new electric Ford Ranger will cost you $29,500, almost twice the regular cost. Yes, that's expensive, but again all kinds of rebates may apply as well as federal and state tax benefits. Note also that the site mentions that Bank of America employees receive a $3000 gift from BoA towards the purchase of this vehicle.

Just imagine how low the price could be if Ford would offer an electric version itself. If you look at all the parts of a gasoline car that an electric car doesn't need, then shouldn't an electric version of the Ford Ranger cost less than the gasoline version?

Thanks Sam. I had read The Distributed Grid but my recall wasn't working when I responded, apparently. I appreciate the other links- that is valuable information. Best wishes.

And yes, wouldn't it be nice if we could buy the electric cars and trucks off the shelf! (Hello, Detroit, are you there?)

I guess Detroit isn't there...