Comment by motorest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motorest | Hacker News Reader

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> It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields.

The key point is that biofuel replaces fossil fuel. Meaning, instead of having a system that inputs carbon into the environment, you have a system that recycles carbon already in the environment.

It's impossible to argue against this is a significant and unequivocal improvement.

The points you raised were about corn-based biofuel. Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass, and how it would be the primary crop driving biofuels. I feel like framing biofuels as a corn-based crop is a red herring.

> All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, (...)

Yes, including those from fossil fuels.

Please reread tbe comment you replied to and address its points. It has already countered the "but it's replacing fossil fuels!" point.

> Please reread tbe comment you replied to and address its points. It has already countered the "but it's replacing fossil fuels!" point.

It doesn't counter it. At best, it plays on a fallacy that burying the lead only leaves the red herring as argument.

But corn-based biofuel is a red herring. Try to understand it.

Your blend of argument is the same type of strategy used to denigrate electric cars, where complaining that the fact that electricity can be generated from coal is this major gotcha. It isn't. It's one of many ways to generate it. There are others, and the end result is always better for the environment.

I dont have a dog in the fight. I literally have no idea or opinion if biofuel is better environmentally and to what extent. Just wanted to learn from the points.

> Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass

I hadn't heard "switchgrass" since GWB mentioned it in his State of the Union years ago. Did it end up becoming a significant source of biofuel?

No. My company did some work in that area.

It works fine in the lab, but there's a lot of engineering that needs to be done in order to scale it up to industrial levels. Some failures are going to happen along the way, and failures at that scale break companies.

That engineering only gets done is there's money in it - and oil's been cheap bar some temporary upsets. So the pilot plants were shut down or converted to biodiesel, which is much less risky.

Once the economics change again, you'll see movement in that area (assuming EV doesn't completely take over).

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