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To calculate the true price of biofuels, we must add the direct cost of producing the fuel itself, plus the increased food costs biofuels create, plus loss of pure water used for irrigation, plus increased damage to the environment. Anyway you crunch the numbers, biofuels are a global disaster.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization states that global food prices rose 40% in 2007 alone, in large part because of biofuel production. A lack of scientific and economic understanding by American, European Union, and Chinese politicians has endangered both the environment and the human food supply. At this very moment, Brazilian, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Philippine rain forests are being burned down at an alarming rate in order to clear more land to grow biofuels, because our politicians have inflated the market value of corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and palm oil sky high due to biofuel mandates. This biofuel gold rush is a global warming disaster, as forests are needed as a sponge to soak up excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Farming contributes more to global warming each year than all forms of motorized transportation combined, in part because nitrogen fertilizers react with soil to unleash nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Biofuels cost tremendously more, and destroy the environment much faster than using imported oil, so why use biofuels at all?

Plans for using "second generation" biofuel crops to produce ethanol from lignocellulose, a structural material of plants, are science fiction at this point, because there currently exists no proven economical way to make ethanol form lignocellulose in large commercial quantities. Even if such a system is eventually developed, second generation biofuel crops will still crowd out normal agricultural activity, causing food prices to rise and increased environmental damage. There may be a distant hope for making biodiesel from algae, but that prospect is years away, and politicians should learn to test and prove biofuel schemes before they mandate their use.

Learn more about this author, Christopher Calder.
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