biofuel is complicated

I’ve started reading a bunch of articles on biomass that Dr. Webber sent me and I’ve suddenly realized I don’t know anything. I’ve read a ton of general articles on alternative fuels in the Times, the Economist, etc., but you don’t really get from them how hard the problem is to solve.  What I’m reading now is the “Billion Ton Vision.” Our government, or at least some people in it with money for funding research “envisioned a 30 percent replacement of the current U.S. petroleum consumption with biofuels by 2030.” and the report assesses the ability of the United States to do that. When I started reading it, I thought I’d be learning about technology, but the report just assesses whether the US has enough arable land to produce the estimated one billion tons of biomass necessary to reach the envisoned goal without adversely affecting food supplies or creating new environmental problems. A lot of people, myself included at least before I started reading about this, don’t even really consider this part of the problem. To save you the effort of reading the report, the writers (a group of researchers from the USDA and some National Labs and Universities) think the billion tons is totally doable. It’s a well-written and informative report though, if you’re interested…