Biofuel blather

Having dissed George Will, a conservative darling of the ostensibly liberal media, I want to balance the scales by dissing George Monbiot who's truly on the left. In general, I enjoy reading Monbiot. He's no Ida Tarbell but, with time, he might turn into Izzy Stone.

But in today's blog post (published by The Guardian (UK)), Monbiot misses his mark by a wide margin. Rehashing a number of well-known disadvantages of today's generation of biofuels, he effectively dismisses the use of any cfuture crop production as a fuel feedstock. A number of commenters try to point this out but without making much of an impression.

Monbiot is correct in saying that today's biofuels offer few real advantages, several major disadvantages, and no logical reason (political reasons only) for being legally required in the UK or the USA. That's the substance of the bathwater, but no reason to toss the kid as well. Not only are we in the very early stages of production (in truth, not ready for prime time), so that future cost/benefit ratios can be expected to improve, but we're trying to produce ecologically sustainable fuels by means of an economic process which doesn't value ecological sustainability. When all you measure is price, you get whatever biofuels can be produced at the lowest financial (as opposed to total) cost. The technologies being used to produce biofuels are the same technologies which, used to produce everything else we buy, got us into this mess in the first place. We keep doing what we've been doing, so we keep getting what we've been getting. No surprise there.

The truth of the matter is that any human society worthy of the name is going to require some sort of energy-dense readily portable fuel. Some of our energy needs can be met with sustainably generated electricity, but by no means all. We can heat our houses electrically because they don't move. We can power our cars with batteries (so long as the distances driven are limited). We can ride electrically powered trains, and buses, and subways, because they stick to fixed routes. But electrical airplanes are a little hard to imagine (batteries being heavy, and catenaries-at-thirty-thousand-feet impractical). And the military is always going to require virtually unlimited mobility (as much as I'd like to believe the military might eventually die out, that's not the way to bet). So high-density liquid fuels aren't likely to disappear soon. Carbon-based liquids are energy-dense. We'll need to develop liquids whose carbon content is from the current cycle, not millions of years old.

Since all forms of energy can be expressed in calories, the crops and techniques we've developed for food production are the obvious (calorie-rich) places to start the search for liquid fuels. This would likely be true even in the absence of lawmakers from Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill. Food crops are attractive because they've already been selected to produce high caloric output at relatively low financial input. But the long-term objective is to identify feedstocks (types of vegetable matter) which aren't food, don't require land that used to be rainforest, and don't need nitrogen fertilizers to produce acceptable yields.

Penn State, U of Illinois, UMinn, UW-LaCrosse, Georgia Tech, Tennessee, Hopkins, Duke, you name it ... a lot of universities are working on techniques for producing cellulosic ethanol. Cellulose (plant fiber) comes in many forms, grows in many locations, and has traditionally been put to many uses (paper production, beef production, etc.) which may themselves need to be rethought. And directly produced alcohols/oils from fungi and seaweeds also look promising.

The way we're currently doing it isn't the only way it can be done, it's just the way that fits into our established preconceptions most easily. Equating "current biofuels" with "biofuels" is evidence of a mindset more conservative than radical. And while not every radical suggestion will help us achieve sustainability, we won't achieve sustainability without implementing some suggestions that now seem radical.

I would have expected Monbiot to know that.