Re: SC15

http://www.climateark.org/

Difficult Road for Ethanol in Brazil

The tightening of the Brazilian ethanol market for use as a biofuel is real world confirmation of many of the issues I raised in a recent personal essay entitled "Bursting Biofuel's Bubble". Namely, Brazil's experience clearly demonstrates there is no way enough biomass could ever be grown to meet a significant portion of current, much less anticipated, world energy needs without causing great environmental harm. Biofuels "fight for space in the environment, they fight food production and they fight consumption trends. They are not the answer to the energy crisis." Locally produced biofuels may help move local economies towards relocalized sustainability, but on the international agro-industrial scale which they are being proposed they are certain to further degrade land and water ecosystems without an appreciable contribution to solving the energy and climate crises.