Biofuels

Faustus and the monkey trap

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What makes the crisis of industrial society so challenging to cope with is the way it unfolds out of the very strategies that worked so well in other contexts. Current attempts to replace oil with ethanol — in effect, pouring our food supply into our gas tanks — point to an urgent need to reconsider some of our most basic assumptions about what exactly the problem is.

Ethanol and biofuels

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Non-partisan Congressional think tank concludes: “…there are limits to the amount of biofuels that can be produced and questions about the net energy and environmental benefits they would provide. Further, rapid expansion of biofuel production may have many unintended and undesirable consequences for agricultural commodity costs, fossil energy use, and environmental degradation.”