At 02:25 PM 03/03/2006, Hayes Elkins wrote:
Except....you do not need soybeans to make biodiesel! Pretty much any vegetable oil can be used at this point although the refining has been optimized (thus far) for soy. Imagine all the subs paid to farmers to NOT GROW A THING when these farmers could now be biodiesel sources.
But I'm betting that biodiesel doesn't compare to oil for the amount of energy per pound. According to one of those articles: "the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter 'containing 44 x 1018 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet's current biota'" - if that's true, then even if all the nongrowing farmers grow for biodiesel (a good idea, I think) we still aren't going to keep up with our wild demands. Perhaps a shift to better mass transport and smaller, more efficient vehicles (all using biodiesel) would make the difference, but I don't see that happening, unfortunately - not while we have an oilman in the Whitehouse and a Bushophile from Alberta running things up here.
T
