Fueling the Revolution?

Our friends over at Grist have been doing an admirable job examining the myths and realities of biofuels with their 'two-week crash course' on the subject. If you haven't had a look yet, you should, because like it or not, ethanol is all the rage in Washington, with boosters ranging far beyond the corn lobby. Even President Bush saw fit to drop mentions of switchgrass and cellulosic biofuels into last year's State of the Union address. (Remember? The one where he said we're addicted to oil?)

At first glance, there's a lot to like about biofuels. You mean I can run my surf van on recycled fryer grease? Dude! As cool as it may seem, however, biofuels come with some (depending on who you ask) intractable problems. For starters, there's not enough fryer grease to go around. As for commercial biofuels, some critics (the minority) say you spend more energy growing and refining the stuff than you actually get from burning it. Bummer, dude. Lastly, there's simply not enough land to grow both food and fuel enough to meet all our demands.

Myself, I recently returned from a trip to Brazil, where cane-based ethanol (alcool) is on tap at every gas station in the country. Now the government in Brasilia is moving to add biodiesel to the mix. While I was there, a hard-hatted and newly re-elected President Lula Inacio da Silva was making the rounds, busily inaugurating new biodiesel plants in the hinterlands while touting his nation's energy independence.

For all its success, however, Brazil has been growing its fuel at considerable cost. The Atlantic rainforest is all but a memory, and something like 80 percent of the cerrado (as the vast scrubby savannah is called) has been cleared for cattle grazing and agricultural in the last quarter-century. With industrialized agriculture now encroaching on the Amazon rainforest, one wonders where it will all end.

That said, it seems premature write biofuels off as part (emphasis: part) of the solution to our energy problems. Like most everyone, I stand to be educated on the finer points of the debate, but in some places (namely, close to the feedstock), biofuels would seem to make good sense.

In Brazil, for example, I saw a soy crushing plant being built on a site surrounded by thousands of hectares of soya fields. If all goes according to plan, the crushing plant will be flanked by an industrial-scale chicken operation on one side and a biodiesel plant on the other. Now, here's the beautiful part: The crushing yields two products -- edible oil and soy meal. So, the meal will go one direction -- directly to the chickens -- and the oil will go the other -- to be processed into fuel, which will, in turn, run the farm equipment and the trucks used to grow soy and transport chickens. Putting aside the evils of industrial-scale monoculture, it seems like a pretty efficient way to maximize resources, no?

So, somebody tell me what I'm missing.