Jones Beene writes: >Ah... Consumer Reports ... this is your new authority for >scientific information?
Hey, don't sell them short. They are an excellent, unbiased source of information. And you cannot always trust mainstream establishment sources such as Nature, Scientific American or Robert Park of the APS. In any case this article quotes many well-know experts, and raises iquestions you will not hear from the administration or any of the flacks who have diverted billions of dollars or Our Tax Money into the pockets of agri-businesses. >What about the USDA and DOE ? What about them? They say the same thing Pimentel and everyone else says, when the gag is removed and they are allowed to tell the truth. Look here, don't take my word for it (as if!), or Pimentel's, or anyone else's. Stop talking about experts. Sit down and run numbers yourself. Look at how much productive land there is per person in the U.S., and how much food production it supports. Compare calories of food consumed by a person to calories consumed by automobiles. Look at the annual per capita energy consumption. Start here: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ Work it out from first principles and you quickly see that our machines consume MUCH more energy than we do, and the land we have can support at most 2 or 3 times the U.S. population. Some basic facts: The average U.S. automobile consumes 532 gallons of gasoline per year. That much fuel produces 70,000 MJ of raw heat, or 192 MJ per day. A person is supposed to eat 2,500 kcal of food per day. That's 11 MJ. QED: automobiles alone consume ten times more energy than people do. And that's just automobiles. Your per capita energy consumption includes much more. You use 30 to 50 times more machine energy than caloric energy. Do not assert that we will build gigantic areas with growing trays or irrigated crops; there is not that much fresh water in the U.S., and to desalinate the water would take far more energy than you get out of the biofuel. That kind of scheme simply does not add up. >Look at >Ag-waste, modified ocean algae, tank grown algae and biomass grown >on land unsuitable for food crops. Nowhere near enough, no matter how you cut it. Remember: machines consume TWICE as much as the entire continent produces in biomass. Ag-waste will never work. Again, forget the experts and claims and counter-claims and go back to first principle biology. When people and other animals eat plant matter, they generally eat the seeds, which have by far the most energy. That is how we survive eating so little plant food compared to, say, elephants, or pandas which eat 40 lbs of bamboo a day. My mother-in-law cuts and eats a handful of bamboo shoots in one day, and does not starve because the energy is far more concentrated in the shoots than the adult plant. This is true of all crops grown by people: most of the energy is harvested and eaten. You are not going to get 10 or 20 or 50 times more energy left in the field than on your plate, and if you do not get that much more -- forgot it. - Jed
