Are biofuels better than fossil fuels – or do they do more harm than good?

Question

Are the costs to cultivate and convert biofuels too great? Is it worth all the additional energy, transportation and time?
What’s more important, fuel or food?

Answer 1

There is one type of biofuel that is particularly destructive, and that is Palm Oil that is used in place of diesel fuel..

The plant that produces Palm oil is grown in the tropics.

Millions of acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed every year to create land suitable to grow the plants to produce Palm oil.

Answer 2

The obvious benefit of biofuels is that they reduce our reliance on oil, which is a limited resource located primarily in politically unstable regions and a major contributor to global warming.

The obvious downside is that the more agricultural land we use for growing biofuels, the less we have for growing food crops. We don't have sufficient land to supply all of our transportation fuel needs with biofuels, let alone both our fuel and food needs. The more land we use for biofuels, the higher the price of food crops.

So there's a fine balance that needs to be struck. We certainly can't expect a large portion of our transportation fuel needs to be met by biofuels, but there's certainly a place for some biofuels. Cellulosic ethanol is a promising prospect, as well. Corn is not a good crop to use for ethanol production. Crops like switch grass would be much more efficient.

Answer 3

Biofuels are probably less polluting than oil based fuels. But they still give off Carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately instead of using methanol, that you can make from any sort of organic waste, the world has decided to use corn and oilseeds to make ethanol. This is causing food prices to rise and food supplies dropping.

Answer 4

Bio fuels will be better when the fossil fuels run out. So I say we better figure out ways to make bio fuels at lower cost and with less energy use BEFORE the fossil fuels run out. And they WILL run out some day, the only question is when.

Answer 5

The most popular biofuel, ethanol, doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.

Answer 6

any fuel that burn is bad news to the earth