Our food prices are going up partly due to the drought, partly due to the increased cost of oil used in production and transport but also because grains are being diverted from food to biofuels. If this is a problem to consumers in the affluent countries – just think about the impact on those people who live in the third world! This is MADNESS!
Apparently people are clearing tree covered land to grow grain as well. Actually I have heard of people clearing established ecosystems of native trees to grow TREES – then claiming greenhouse credits for this.I am unsure whether these people are insane, greedy or both.

Waste organic material can and should be used for this instead of being allowed to become a disposal problem. There are some examples below of this being done. I would love to find more.

• Algae grown on sewage waste can be used to make biofuel.
• Methane can be captured from landfill to provide an energy source and also prevented from entering the atmosphere as a serious greenhouse gas.
• I read this week that fish waste, including fish oils can and is being used in fishing vessel boilers around the world or converted to esters for biodiesel. Alaska burns quite a bit of their fish oil and in Nova Scotia , Canada they take the saturate ethyl ester fraction from the production of omega 3 concentrates and burn that. I believe it is being used in the Halifax bus system.

Technorati Tags: biofuels, biofuels make food, drought, cost of oil, grains, established ecosystems, ecosystems, waste organic material, organic material

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 1:21 am and is filed under Global Warming, Climate Change & Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.