Biofuels: Boon or Bane?

This entry is the same ashttp://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/89/8907cover.html though this entry is once removed

a little more attention to detail would be nice

My understanding is -

as long as anything was burnt using oxygen from air (no other substitute found so far) and temperature went high - nitrogen from air also combines with oxygen and forms Nitrous oxide which is a pollutant.

Anything incompletely burnt results in carbon emmissions..If completely burnt - releases carbon Di-oxide. Do we have so much vegetation left to reconvert carbon Di-oxide naturally and release oxygen? Man has been burdening the environment faster than the rate at which nature can sustainable replenish itself.!!

Kindly note I have not referred to petrol or diesel or, bio-fuel etc. The process of burning and extracting power in the form of explosion in a chamber is the same with all fuels.

Hence I tend to agree with the Professor / author. The world is going in the wrong direction without a solution for reducing pollution.

I think he glossed over the notion that if corn becomes more scarce and subsequently more expensive because of being diverted to biofuel production, people will flock more to rice and wheat, driving up the prices of those items. I wonder how much that already factors into the approximate 50% rise in grain prices over the last several years.

TcmTech gives a good explanation of the situation Here

So you believe this concept of demand driving commodity pricing is unique to grains? It is requisite to all commodity pricing, including fuel and its basic ingredients. This issue is not about food, it is about relative fuel availability (security) and relative expense (economics). If you can buy oil today for less than you can produce and alternative fuel, this guy says you are a fool. I say, if you refuse to think about tomorrow, you are a fool.

So how come the people who produce the corn don't seem to be complaining about the price going up due to a higher paying demand for it than ever before?

Farmers are just as much apart of our world economy as everyone else and they spend money just like everyone else too!

I haven't notice any huge increase in food prices at the retail level.

I wonder if that has anything to do with all the middle men between the farmers and the end users not making the huge profits like they used too?

Much of the costs behind our products does not come directly from the cost relating to the source. A good example of that is simple sunflower based bird feed. At the stores a 20 pound bag costs about $20 now. If you go to a local grain elevator you can buy the exact same sunflowers for around $28 a ton!

Don't you have to ask yourself at what point does $28 a ton seeds become worth $2000 a ton on the shelf when all it does it get metered into cheap plastic bags with pretty little bird pictures on them at some point?

The capital and risk embodied in delivering 20 pounds of birdseed to individuals requires very high margins, many orders above the same capital required to bring tons to a grain elevator to be resold at wholesale. ( if you were simplistic enough to try to build an equivalent per seed price)