Turning food into biofuel pits the car owners of the world against the two billion poor who struggle to get enough to eat says Lester Brown of the World Policy Institute.
Who do you think is going to win?
“This will be seen as one of the great tragedies in history,” says Brown.
See previously published articles on biofuels/energy:
Ethanol: The Great Big Green Fraud — Government subsidies amount to $15 billion in 2007
Greenest Ethanol Still Unproven – Cellulosic ethanol is long way off and may not be a solution
Biofuels and Carbon Credits Behind Global Deforestation
ENERGY REVOLUTION NEEDED NOW – Efficiency improvement is fastest, cheapest and easiest
Stephen Leahy, International Environmental Journalist 
[…] on January 15, 2008. America’s Biofuel Gladiators Turning food into biofuel pits the car owners of the world against the two billion poor who […]
IMO, biofuel as an energy source is a dead end. In the future, biofuels will be an important feedstock to the chemical industry, but it makes little sense to burn them for energy.
Mass production of biofuels for energy generation is going have a serious effect on the earth’s food supply. And, at best, the energy gained is only carbon neutral.
Will be worse than neutral, actually. For maximum yields, crops for biofuels will be produced with massive amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. If the crops are not intended for human consumption producers and regulators will have no reason to use any restraints at all. (I can forsee a disaster where a trainload of corn intended for the oil refinery accidentally ends up in the human food chain. Yikes.)
Weather its for human consumption or biofule makes little differance. If the government cared more about the people of the world and less about the billionairs that own the chemical plants that make the fertilizers, they would pass laws that restrict the types of chemicals that we can scatter across the ground to ultimately get washed into our drinking suplys. Unfortunatly it would cost the big wigs of those companies too much money and since they make the campain contributions the president is obligated to give them free rain. They give him millions of dollars for his campain and line the pockets of congress and the sennate. They like that money and know it would come to a stop if they made it harder on the billionairs. Fact is it dosn’t matter what we do the government and the world are just too corupt and as long as money and power are more important than the well being of the masses, we will all be screwed. We might as well set the whole world on fire and burn it all to the ground. The only people that care about this rock are the people that dont make millions by destroying it.