biodiesel - fej.org

Although bio-diesel in a complete and comprehensive plan may play a role, right now, it is just being used as a brainwash.

The rule is store carbon, don't burn it. It makes no difference if it's fossil diesel or bio-diesel. They both give of CO2 when burned (carbon positive event), and I've seen a website that indicates bio-diesel actually produces a bit more.

The brainwash is that making bio-diesel is a "carbon negative event" (in my terms), and that offsets the burning carbon positive event. But the global warming/climate change question is that the sum output of mankind's activities is very carbon positive. Because there is so much, everyone needs to desperately switch to being as small carbon positive or hopefully carbon negative as possible, until the atmosphere has been stablized. So every stored carbon, fossil fuel or bio-diesel, wood, or whatever has to be not burned, until we have brought green house gasses down to an acceptable level, and then to ration carbon positive events (burning fuel) to maintain that level.

At that point bio-diesel makes sense because then producing it is a carbon negative event, and is calculated into the sum result of man's activities.

But... We are not considering the total effect here, such as the transportation and production environmental costs of the fuels, and also the effects of the vehicles, etc. The project is about accurately assessing total effects of all alternatives, and building a complete big picture.

The biggest problem with the bio-diesel brainwash, is that it creates this illusion that somehow we have (/can have) so much bio-diesel fuel that we can all drive cars, etc... The reality is that producing bio-diesel takes space, that really should be reverted to natural, but would probably otherwise be used for food production or housing. That is to say, there's just not enough available unused space to even begin to produce part of the fuel needs of today. And already the small amount being produced is causing food crop costs to rise, and bio-diesel is hardly being used at all.

Prices of bio-diesel are high, and will remain high due to space costs and production costs compared to fossil fuels (until that starts to run out of course), so without a serious plan, there is no incentive to cause people to switch from gasoline to bio-diesel or even from fossil diesel to anything.

Again, bio-diesel might be part of a well planned future, but right now, it's still a problem to burn it instead of storing it until later (when the green house gas levels have dropped). So store it don't burn it is still the rule. If someone can clarify how it's not a problem to burn bio-diesel or fossil fuels, I really hope you share that with me! I really could benefit from being able to burn fuels, but as it stands, I've been avoiding that, trying to do my part.

One more comment : this "solution" very much reminds me of some time ago when "ethanol" was talked about as being a solution... If I recall correctly, it never solved anything, mainly because it was more expensive, and required land to grow the "bio" part.