How Big Agriculture Misled the Public About the Benefits of Biofuels

3 comments

1. By now everyone knows bio-fuels are a major farm subsidy, and with their low EROI it would make more sense just to use the fuel to power your car directly.

   What people I dont think realise is the scale of the excess food grown – something like 50% of corn grown goes into bio-fuels – we would need to turn less than 5% of that land into solar farms to generate the same amount of energy.

   It also means we have a massive abundance of food – even brazil is diverting soya to bio-fuel, not to mention sugar cane, while India is diverting rice to ethanol.

   The fact is we have a massive massive over-production of food, because we have become amazingly good at increasing yields every year – we grow so much food we have to dump half in bio-fuels and throw the other half away.

   We should be returning that land to forests, which would go a long way to fighting climate change – certainly we dont have to fear famine at all – we could cut our crops by 75% and still have more than enough calories.

2. And the food price tracks the price of RINs – it’s food versus fuel and food loses.

3. biofuels med to be retired. waste of money 

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