In article , Martin Brown wrote:
In message , Don Klipstein
writes
In ,
James Arthur wrote:

on food price inflation

You can thank the biofuel craze for that. Planting for burning drives
up food from supply *and* demand sides, plus all the downstream
products--and in other countries--too.

Unintended consequences:

1. Al Gore sounds alarm
2. biofuel craze
3. farmers grow feedstock for cars instead of people

Results:
4. Human misery increased
a. inflation, locally
b. food becomes unaffordable in Mexico and Haiti
c. people starve

5. Environment not improved
a. replacement food grown, appallingly inefficiently
b. net CO2 emissions increase

I don't see 5b being true. The food plants is are replaced from carbon
already in the environment. If this achieves any reduction in consumption
in fossil fuels, then it achieves a decrease in transfer of carbon from
the lithosphere to the atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere.

Only if you don't slash and burn pristine rain forest to grow your new
fuel and food which is what is happening in many places at present.

Forest destruction is a one-time event for a given area. Having the
land replace petroleum consumption with biomass burning will be replacement
of ongoing carbon desequestration with neutral carbon impact.

You lose on both sides of the equation, burning the forest and no
longer having it there to do photosynthesis. By comparison the crops
don't fix as much CO2

Where do you get that? A steady-state forest has zero carbon impact
both locally and globally - the biomass content in a natural forest is not
steadily increasing long term, but constant on a long term. Cropland
sequesters carbon locally and if the crop is eaten, burned, decomposed or
any combination of these, has zero carbon impact globally.

and the poor soil quickly degrades without the forest canopy.

That is a separate problem, to be solved by growing sustainable crops or
growing crops where they can be sustained.

The USA has a fair amount of farmland that could not be sustained until
crop rotation including legumes was implemented.

The economics of biofuel are questionable at best - some schemes
actually use more energy from fossil fuel to cultivate and process the
crop it than is yielded by the final product. You might as well not
bother.

What about the schemes that produce more energy than consumed? They do
exist and are used!

When we can turn straw and wood waste into alcohol for fuel then we will
have something useful, but turning grain into fuel is certifiable.

Impact on food prices is a remaining argument to consider. Meanwhile,
corn is now $5.21-$5.28 a bushel, 9.3 to 9.4 cents per pound.

With petroleum costing about 30 cents per pound and having much more
energy per unit weight than corn probably by a factor of more than 3.2 or
so, I would go along with arguments against government mandates to get
corn to get used that way unless there is a benefit, such a likelihood
that biofuel ethanol will be cheaper (even per unit energy) than petroleum
in the foreseeable future.

- Don Klipstein )