The Biofuel Future

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In think this is the solution to Dan's question: regular fossil fuels also have to be extracted, refined, transported, etc. so carbon is released to get them ready for you to use in your car, just like carbon is released in getting biofuels into a usable form. Neither type is necessarily better here.
The difference is, when the fossil fuels are burned in your car, they're adding extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, because the CO(2) in fossil fuels was previously buried underground, out of the air. With biofuels, the carbon dioxide released during combustion was in the air before the plants (or algae) were grown, and is just being rereleased.
So unless biofuel production took a lot more energy than fossil fuel production, the net carbon released into the atmosphere would be less with biofuels.

Gabriela of IL 12:09AM December 01, 2009

Biofuels take energy to make, meaning carbon is released to make them, and then carbon is released again when they are burned. So, if biofuels release release more carbon than fossile fuel, how does that make them carbon friendly?

Dan of IL 12:11PM September 15, 2009

Human Waste Digester Plants that every city and town has and uses to treat feces by bacterial action also produces thousands or millions of cubic feet of methane as a by-product. We could put a collection cap over the digesters to capture the methane, compress it and use it as a fuel source. Are we doing this? Or are we letting this free energy source dissapate into the atmosphere?

Robert L. Matarainen of NY 10:34PM August 02, 2009

Thanks for injecting some optimism into the debate about biofuels. We are in the beta stage and we can guide the development around important environmental, economic and national security goals. There has been far too much hand-wringing in this debate among those overly practised at critique rather than innovation. Often forgotten in narrow comparisions is the baseline of our oil economy and its vast destructive reach. Oil and its related innovations have made modern life what it is today, but its positive contributions are now coming at too high a cost. The slow transition to a bio-based future is underway and there is no turning back. Disruptions with such a transition are part and parcel of great change. Egos and political purity should not get in the way of necessary long-term change

Harrison Pettit of OR 11:43AM July 29, 2009