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Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

And when you convert algae to fuel you're not taking food off the table, as you are with corn. The impact ethanol has on driving up food prices is the almost exclusive reason why I avoid using it.

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Folks are going to flood fields with salt water to wildcat algae for fuel plants. I know I would if I lived near an algae plant and had the land.

The article claims there is no erosion issue - so its better on the environment. I disagree - its entirely possible to grow algae and damage the environment at the same time.

This isn't mentioned anywhere /near/ often enough- no one is going to be repurposing wetlands for this.

I thought I read once scheme was to run a water pipe into the desert and build your algae ponds their? No farmland, lots of sun. Not sure about it though.

Lots of hot desert, salt water and pipeline/shipping infrastructure in the Gulf states. So, once again, the Saudis win? :)

Desert is an ecosystem too, and a fragile one. It can also be destroyed, and would definitely suffer if all that sunlight was "farmed away".

Most of the US corn goes to cattle feed and not food directly, and the only reason that makes sense is because corn is so cheap. (It's actually not a very good food for cows, who are adopted to eating grass.) So maybe you are taking food off the table, but if we cared about cheap food we wouldn't use the corn to grow cattle anyway. Any vegetarian will tell you in a heartbeat that eating beef is kind of like eating oil, because most beef was raised on corn and growing corn is like an inefficient method of transforming oil into food due to the large use of petroleum-based fertilizer.

For an interesting story about this, check out "The Oil We Eat" by Harpers (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915).

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