February 09, 2008

Petro firms applaud new study damning biofuels



Critics of the rush to put land into biofuel production got 450 new allies this morning: the member companies of the U.S. National Petrochemical and Refiners' Association (NPRA).


Just in case you were wondering who stands to benefit from the results of this study.

“We’ve consistently called attention to the unintended consequences of building up a mandatory reliance on biofuels,” Drevna said.


That is because the intended consequences of reducing petroleum consumption is bad for his organization.

Full Article

The one thing that strikes me from all this is that so many embraced this study without question. Nobody has stopped to ask the one simple question that is the most important question of all in regards to climate change. Nobody has stopped to ask the question of where did the carbon come from.

When you burn down a forest, you release a lot of carbon into the air in the form of carbon dioxide. But that carbon was absorbed by the plants over their lifetime from the air. So no new carbon is being introduced into the atmosphere.

Burning gasoline on the other hand is releasing carbon that has been locked away underground for a long time. So it is putting new carbon into the air.

Both processes put carbon into the air and no I am not in any way suggesting that burning down forests is a good thing. But the fact remains that you can only burn a forest down once. But over time you can put many times the equivalent of the carbon in a forest into the air by burning fossil fuels.

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