BioFuels HURT the Environment
February 8, 2008
First things first: I don’t believe in mad made global warming. The amount of C02 humans put into the atmosphere each year is minuscule compared to that put out by rotting plant matter and oceans. When lefties and the uneducated claim that human output of C02 is somehow driving climate change, I feel like slapping my forehead. If you’ve done any sort of research into the issue of climate change, it’s fairly obvious that humans have little to no effect on climate change. For those who don’t believe me, check out junk science, or buy a copy of The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Simply put, the underlying reason for using ethanol is flawed. I’m all for ending American dependence on foreign oil. The sooner we cut off the mullahs and Kings/Princes the better, but its tough to watch lefty politicians talk about about how corn based ethanol is going to help us become energy independent. It just doesn’t add up. Plus it’s driving beer prices higher. The costs of corn based ethanol outweigh the benefits and it seems that the press is starting to wake up and smell the diesel. Scientific American has more. I’ve got snippets up from the article, but be sure to read the whole thing.
Biofuels Are Bad for Feeding People and Combating Climate Change
By displacing agriculture for food—and causing more land clearing—biofuels are bad for hungry people and the environmentConverting corn to ethanol in Iowa not only leads to clearing more of the Amazonian rainforest, researchers report in a pair of new studies in Science, but also would do little to slow global warming—and often make it worse.
“Prior analyses made an accounting error,” says one study’s lead author, Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University. “There is a huge imbalance between the carbon lost by plowing up a hectare [2.47 acres] of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels.”
Growing plants store carbon in their roots, shoots and leaves. As a result, the world’s plants and the soil in which they grow contain nearly three times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere. “I know when I look at a tree that half the dry weight of it is carbon,” says ecologist David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, coauthor of the other study which examined the “carbon debt” embedded in any biofuel. “That’s going to end up as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when you cut it down.”
Remember this next time a liberal spouts off about the burgeoning corn based ethanol industry and how great it is for the environment.
Scientific American: Biofuels Are Bad for Feeding People and Combating Climate Change
