All burning is not bad and spewing toxins into the air. Gasification which is burning, burns at such a high temperature that it creates new chemical bonds and doesn’t qualify for your sweeping statement that all burning is bad.

What genetically altered plants are you talking about? We have been eating altered plants for a few decades now but biofuels can be made from already existing plants like algae which is like 50% oil and not altered. The rest can be gasified.

Check out gasification. There is a great article about it on Treehugger or go check out wood gasification on Youtube. (Don’t be mistaken, it might say wood but anything can be gasified like yard waste, human waste, and any type of biomass).

We’ve exhausted our hydro unless you are referring to wave motion off the coasts. That technology is so uncertain it’s not worth mentioning in the same sentence as wind and solar. Wind and solar are here and now. Either one can handle all our energy needs. Combined they are overkill. Sure it takes energy to make solar panels and turbines. However the energy they produce is much much greater than the energy used to produce them. NPR has covered this several times on Science Friday.

I am negative about biofuel. And I’m negative on nuclear. And coal. These three are dead ends. Literally. These technologies would not exist if not for the constant propaganda paid for by special interest groups whom only care about their own profits and not the planet.

To say you are a negative person is an understatement. We need to diversify our energy sources and bio-fuel will help us to succeed in doing so. Solar, wind and hydro power are great ways to capture natural renewable energy and bio-fuel may not meet the same gold standards but you have to ask yourself “how are the solar panels made? How are they transported?” ect. Nothing is truly green there will always be some kind of environmental impact!

I am positive. Crops, mustard or anything else, do require on going care. Try to harvest the same crop for a few years and see what happens!

There are economical solutions to this very simple energy problem. Clean solutions do exist. Solutions we can use today. No need to make a new huge mess with bio fuels.

Here’s a clue. Your solar panels will pay for themselves in 7 years if you share with the grid. Since many PV panels are warrantied for 25 years you could think of it as free energy for two decades. Now imagine you use an electric vehicle and power it with a few more PV panels. How about putting up a few 400 watt small windmills on your property and using it to make hydrogen for a hybrid hydrogen/electric car?

I’m glad you want to be positive. Don’t let big energy confuse you with their “we want to explore diverse alternatives”. There’s no need for this confusion. We’ve moved on. The real confusion lies in getting consumers to just say no to companies wanting to put PV in for “free”. They gurantee you locked electric bills for the next 25 years. The idea is to allow you to be “green” and isolate you from the rising electric costs year after year. Some 75% or more of all new PV is now being done using contracts like this. You’ve got to just say no to this too, take out a loan if needed, and put them in yourselves so that you make a huge profit instead of just locking in prices as they are now. The “Energy Crisis” has been solved cleanly and economically already…

Currently the biofuel market is driven by the huge subsidies to given to the farmers by us American tax payers. Landowners in Brazil and other places in the world see how much they can make by selling biofuels to us and salivate. Next thing they are doing it burning their forests to make way for biofuel crops. Not good for the world and not good for us taxpayers.

The second big problem is that biofuels burn. Burning is bad. Whether it is fossil fuel or biofuels burning leaves all sorts of toxins in the air. We need alternative energy that is really clean. Not biofuel which is merely marketed as green.

A third problem is the biofuel market can not sustain itself. As soon as the economy goes completely south the subsidies will dry up. The farmers will be left with loans too large to pay off with standard crops. Their land will be bought up from under them by foreigners hoping to make money on their investments on the next up cycle.

Finally biofuel is bad because it will be introducing genetically altered plants in such vast scales that when the first unforseen problem arises we’ll have already released the equivalent of AIDs into the plant kingdom. It will be too costly to fix and result in a whole new world economy.

Thanks however to stupid articles like this one we continue to go down this dangerous path.