>Maybe an interesting article, but what does it have to do with the core >subject of this newsgroup, the production of biofuels? > >There are really too many items like this diluting the core subject >material. There are already plenty of other forums to discuss >this kind of subject- let us leave this area for true, biofuel >discussion. > > >Jon Woolf >Otaki, New Zealand.
What does it have to do with biofuels... What would you say to the idea of making all biofuels in major urban centres only, after trucking in the feedstock from outlying rural areas, and then trucking the product out again to those same rural areas so the farmers can use it in their tractors to grow the feedstock? Better than localized production? What if the centralized production model used biofuels for all this trucking instead of fossil fuels? Better or worse? - or a sheer waste of good biofuels? - or a sheer waste either way? Do you somehow imagine that energy sustainability via biofuels and sustainable food production are different subjects with nothing in common? Maybe you're a bit blind to it, but to anybody actually working with these issues they're so interwoven in so many different ways and at so many levels that they're almost inseparable. People ask: "Can we grow *enough* biofuels?" Then they find that they can't, or so they think (wrongly), so they write it off in their search for a single simplistic "solution" to a most complex problem. What we've established very thoroughly here is that mere substitution of fossil fuels with biofuels doesn't even begin to address the problem: what it also needs is greatly improved energy efficiency, great reductions in energy use, AND, possibly the most important, decentralization of energy supply - localization. The obvious and necessary comparison is with industrialized food production, just as unsustainable and damaging, just as much in need of localization, and very dependent on overuse and waste of fossil fuel resources. So the Food Miles issue is quite often discussed here and at the Biofuel list - no, not just by me. This message continues that discussion and provides further information. More broadly, even without the close comparisons between the two issues, ANY waste of energy is relevant to biofuels issues and worthy of discussion here. You haven't been here very long, a month, but I'd've thought that'd be long enough to have learnt better than to start laying down the law about what's on-topic and what's not, what's "true biofuel discussion" and what's not. There are members here from many different cultures and many different countries, all over the world, and views of what constitutes "true biofuel discussion" vary rather widely. Why do you want everyone else to accord with your own narrow view? Nobody's forcing you to read anything you don't want to read. Messages have subject headings, if you're not interested don't read them. Bandwidth can hardly be an issue, and if you're going to complain about getting your inbox all cluttered up, first, this isn't a high-volume list, second, learn how to use mailbox filters - you can't do mailing lists without them, high-volume or not. This might help: http://archive.nnytech.net/index.php?view=21700&list=BIOFUEL Anyway, there's a suitably broad interpretation of biofuels issues here, and the majority of members agree with that and appreciate it. A minority disagrees and wants it restricted to their view. That would deprive the majority, whereas keeping it open deprives nobody. And that's all there is to it. There aren't many rules here, but one of them is "No topic-cops". These are mature people who know how to behave, they don't need to be nannied. Discussion does stray truly off-topic sometimes, as with any real-world discussion, but it seldom goes too far, and on the other hand it quite often brings up very much on-topic material that wouldn't otherwise have arisen. So, another rule: Don't call for the discussion to be restricted. Keith Addison List moderator ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions. http://us.click.yahoo.com/Lj3uPC/Me7FAA/uetFAA/9bTolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuels at Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel at WebConX http://webconx.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm List messages are archived at the Info-Archive at NNYTech: http://archive.nnytech.net/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
