Of course you and your friend are correct. You are, as the Mac commercial said, "Having a sad realization." Agrofuels are not about ending the dependency on oil, they are about _maintaining_ it by persuading people that no real change is needed and that they can keep buying those cars, building those lanes, etc. GM's Bob Lutz -- who says climate change is "a crock of shit" -- wants to keep making Detroit Iron while relying on phony "flex fuel" credit to meet the 35 mpg CAFE standard that we're supposed to be rapturous. The oil companies are thrilled to have your tax money subsidizing agrofuels so that people don't get off the stick and build electric rail systems and transit networks that work. The coal companies are salivating, waiting their turn, knowing that as long as we squander all our money on agrofuel fantasies, their turn will come and we'll be making fuel the Nazi way. I prefer a more human-scale metric that Les Brown (founder of World Watch Institute) uses: the corn it takes to fill a full-sized SUV gas tank once feeds a person for a year.

the corn it takes to fill a full-sized SUV gas tank once feeds a person for a year. That is indeed a good example. Thanks, George. Here's a question I have that you may well know the answer to: How much of our gas needs can be filled by fueling with used cooking oil, in the Portland area? Suppose all the restaurants in town sent all their fryer grease to the recycling plants, what kind of percentage or vehicle-miles-per-year would that satisfy?

This website here gives the figure in PDX as a gallon a year per person, and that is about the volumes I have heard discussed elsewhere. That's just 1/42nd of a barrel, in other words. (You might want to note sometime how often agrofuel stories use gallons as the measure, rather than barrels as when oil is discussed. That's because throwing around big numbers in gallons makes it seem like agrofuels are impressive, rather than trivial.) Also, that 1 gal/person/year is before refinement (to use used vegetable oil, you have to filter out the floaties and saponify it (remove the glycerin, which also has many uses), so you don't even get a gallon you can put in your car. The bottom line, however, is that the grease was already being used, significantly for animal feeds. So using it for biodiesel is just another path by which we can divert food away from living things and hand it over to cars. [I should elaborate on the scale issue -- the US uses about 21 million BARRELS of petroleum oil a day, approaching 8 Billion barrels a year in a world cruising past 31 Billion Barrels a year. So a 5 million GALLON per year biodiesel plant is only producing about 325 BARRELS a day. So you can see why trying to replace any significant fraction of our oil habit with agrofuels means serious starvation for poor people across the globe. Because liquid fuels and food are both global commodities, price increases anywhere are felt everywhere. We've already priced many poorer countries out of oil -- thus the unrest in places like Kenya -- and we're working on pricing them out of food too, as land is converted away from edible crops and into fuel crops.)

I changed the web address in your comment to a link, George, in the hope more readers would click on it. Very interesting, thank you.

Great, thanks. Say, you're plugged in -- any chance of getting Portland to repeal the stupid agrofuels mandate? I notice that all the pro-agrofuel types are laying low, not saying a word about the many studies showing what a bad idea they are. Apparently they are hoping to get through the special session with no attention paid to the states new $5-$7 million boondoggle (a real sign of our values -- we're rationing access to health insurance by lottery, but it's step right up for all comers who want subsidies for their SUV fuel).

Well, at least it's helping keep gas pri ... um, well, it's helping the clima ... oh, well, then, um, well, Big Oil is Evil! Evil!! Evil!!! THE US will drastically reduce emergency food aid to some of the poorest countries this year due to soaring food prices, The Washington Post reports today. Citing unnamed officials, the newspaper said the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was drafting plans to cut down the number of recipient nations and the amount of food provided to them. A 41 per cent surge in prices of wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months has generated a $US120 million ($126.5 million) budget shortfall that will force the USAID to reduce emergency operations, the report said. That deficit is projected to rise to $US200 million ($211 million) by the end of the year. The USAID is reviewing all of the agency's emergency programs, which target countries like Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, Honduras and Sudan's Darfur region. "We're in the process now of going country by country and analyzing the commodity price increase on each country,'' The Post quotes Jeff Borns, director of USAID's Food for Peace program as saying. "Then we're going to have to prioritise.''

The UK's top science adviser to the prime minister says that agrofuels will cause starvation on a global scale. Ho, hum. Meanwhile, Portland is getting ready to mandate more agrofuel use cuz it's just too cool. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3500954.ece