Re: Oil prices climb to $101.11 a barrel...

Forest destruction is a one-time event for a given area. Having the land replace petroleum consumption with biomass burning will be replacement of ongoing carbon desequestration with neutral carbon impact.

Where do you get that? A steady-state forest has zero carbon impact both locally and globally - the biomass content in a natural forest is not steadily increasing long term, but constant on a long term. Cropland sequesters carbon locally and if the crop is eaten, burned, decomposed or any combination of these, has zero carbon impact globally.

That is a separate problem, to be solved by growing sustainable crops or growing crops where they can be sustained.

The USA has a fair amount of farmland that could not be sustained until crop rotation including legumes was implemented.

What about the schemes that produce more energy than consumed? They do exist and are used!

Impact on food prices is a remaining argument to consider. Meanwhile, corn is now $5.21-$5.28 a bushel, 9.3 to 9.4 cents per pound.

With petroleum costing about 30 cents per pound and having much more energy per unit weight than corn probably by a factor of more than 3.2 or so, I would go along with arguments against government mandates to get corn to get used that way unless there is a benefit, such a likelihood that biofuel ethanol will be cheaper (even per unit energy) than petroleum in the foreseeable future.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

People who live in cities will benefit. But why have a car in the first place if you live in a major city? Why not use mass transit? I can tell you most of my driving is not constant stop and go, and I still live in the most densely populated state.

Yeah, which is why the government went hellbent on mandating ULSD so cheaper systems could be implemented.

It keeps the money in the country and benefits farmers, the negative side is it increases some crop prices. I don't see how planting more crops for biodiesel spells a loss, I think if anything it would create a new industry in the US. The country has plenty of farmland, it might even be able to export if it can build the facilities.

True about that, I forgot it myself :P

"Joe Kappus" skrev i en meddelelse news:B8GdnYzTpdo5q1fanZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...

No mistake here ;-0

Exactly - Governments are not about change, but about preventing any! Governments are society's parasites adopted perfectly to the prevailing system so change is very risky to them because it creates a window of opportunity for a *different* set of leeches.

I.O.W: Any energy scheme that reduces government income will not be supported in any way whatsoever and even sabotaged whenever possible. This applies in Denmark too!

In many places, it is quicker to walk than take transit. If you need to carry packages etc, transit may not be an option at all.

The sulfur is its own problem. That rotten egg smell isn't just umpleasant.

Maybe not. If there is a free market in such things some countries nearer the tropics will have an advantage. Farmers rarely benefit from such things anyway. Folk like ADM get most of the benefit.

If it takes more energy to product the biodiesel than you can get out of it, you certainly have a loss. Short of that you can end up forcing crops into land that is less suited to its growth and where more inputs are needed to produce the same food. The result can be more total energy.

If you look at the really good farm land vs just the farm land, you will see that the US doesn't really have a huge amount. A lot of the farm land in the US requires significant inputs to produce a crop.