Does anyone know the inpact of bio fuel?

Question

I'm confused? Biofuel still create emissions and after the ethanol has been made the brake down of the byproduct will still emit methane. So how much cleaner is it? Or is it just a (feel good) substitute.

Answer 1

Bio fuel is running us into the grain shortage to top WW11.

Currently Government is subsidizing 51% of every gallon of ethanol - so every farmer wants to sell their corn for that government subsidy. So they don't plant the wheat, the soy, the barley, hops and other crops that we need to sustain us.

Beef prices are actually going down, because farmers cannot afford to buy the corn to feed their cattle, so they are selling mass quantities of beef so they don't have to feed them.

It is a big mistake - and one that if kept up, will hurt the USA in the end.

Answer 2

To answer your first question, no, no one knows the full impact of biofuels.   Some of the impacts are positive for some (like buying votes at the cost of billions of $$ to the general public) and some are negative for all like the degradation of farmland for fuel.

Answer 3

It does, and even in greater amounts than other fuels. It also is driving up the cost of food crops. The said part is that a gallon of bio fuel produces less energy than a gallon of gas, thus you need to produce more of it.

Answer 4

I'm sorry to say that it's less than a feel-good item; it's actually a pretty bad idea, at least in its incarnation in America.  

When you compute the carbon emissions of bio-fuel made from corn, you find there's no net reduction...some say there's a negative effect, that is, more carbon emissions.  

Fertilizer is put on corn and that comes from carbon-emitting processes and is transported using fossil fuel.  Fossil-fueled farm equipment harvests and transports the corn; conversion to ethanol produces carbon and burning the ethanol produces carbon.  And it's such a small percentage of the fuel used in America, that there's virtually no effect of reducing global warming.  

Large agriculture business profit from the high corn prices while poor people can't afford products made from corn.  The cost of beef goes up because ranchers buy corn to feed their cows.  Other countries such as Brazil make ethanol from sugar cane, which produces much more energy than corn-produced ethanol per acre of land.  But the U.S. blocks imports of ethanol from Brasil to protect the profits of U.S. agribusiness.  

And there's a downside to sugar cane ethanol, too:  tropical forests are cut down to make more room for sugar cane.  Switch grass might be a better source of bio-fuel because it's not food; but the government doesn't promote its use because it's not politically popular.  Special interests still control America's energy supplies to the detriment of our own people.  

There are many other factors to consider; one is that fuel still costs much more in Europe and parts of Asia than it does here and that's one reason why Toyota, which produces many models of more fuel-efficient cars, has become the car company that sells the most cars in the world.  Yet, American car companies have succeeded in lobbying government officials into maintain high emission standards in America so that U.S. car manufacturers don't have to spend lots of money to re-tool their manufacturing facilities to produce more fuel efficient cars.

Answer 5

Turning food into gasoline seems like stupidest idea anyone has come up with like maybe we could turn half our water into shoe polish for those days when we walk to work. Nuclear seems the only alternative to slow poisoning but its a political pariah and basically a dead issue until people start dying in staggering numbers. We saw predictions of millions of delayed agonizing deaths caused by Chernobyl. The actual number was about 20. We are mice and will poison ourselves if the media tells us to. And they think you ought to pay the obscene subsidies to prop up this very expensive alternative, subsidies that will not bring down oil prices, subsidies to the same oil companies that put us here to begin with.

You are not confused. You are simply looking at pros and cons. I wish so-called environmental experts would do this sometimes. But they never have.

And they have never been confused since they only see one side.

Answer 6

F**K THE ENVIRONMENT! HAVE A GOOD DAY!