Today in Biofuels Opinion: “As long as there are people starving on this planet, fuel sources that directly compete with food supplies are morally flawed.”

From Smoky Mountain News: “Let’s see, automakers can get CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) credits for making gas guzzlers like Chevy’s suburban that can run on ethanol. That way they can rate one of those gas-guzzlers that gets 13 mpg at 23 mpg. Oh, and say goodbye to roasting ears. If we’re gonna get the congressionally mandated amount of ethanol (36 billion gallons) by 2022, it will take all the corn grown in the U.S. today. And not to be outdone, Indonesia and Central and South American countries are losing around a football field a minute of rainforest to biofuel production.”

Joshua Kagan in Good: “We have two main “solutions” for curbing the unintended consequences of our use of fossil fuels: first generation biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) and electric vehicles. I am unapologetic in my belief that both are very flawed solutions. At best, they make only a marginally positive contribution; at worst, they represent a situation where the patient’s medicine can actually make him sicker. It may seem like heresy for a self-righteous Prius-driving vegetarian environmentalist to claim that electric vehicles and first generation biofuels are almost as evil as oil, but they are. According to the USDA, the United States will produce 12.8 billion bushels of corn in 2009, 4.2 billion of which will be used to produce corn ethanol production. That’s one-third of our corn supply to produce a fuel that will displace only 5 percent of our gasoline?  All the while, according to the United Nations, 1 billion people will go to bed hungry tonight.  As long as there are people starving on this planet, fuel sources that directly compete with food supplies are morally flawed.”

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