Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain Awesome
I don't have to search this site to know that in south America where they already don't have enough farmland to feed themselves they are cutting down rainforests to grow grain crops to sell to the lucrative ethanol distilleries.
These are the same rainforests that are taking the carbon we make now out of the atmosphere.
These are the same rainforests that the environmentalists have been trying to protect all these years.
These are the same rainforests that they have to BURN to make room for the ethanol crops (reducing them to carbon and putting it into the air).
Oh, and by the way... the soil down there is so poor that they can only grow grains on it for a couple of years before it's useless and they have to move on to ANOTHER rainforest to grow ethanol on.
And don't forget that the rainforest plants are actually many times better at taking carbon out of the atmosphere than the crops that are grown for ethanol.
So what does ethanol contribute to?
1) Starving People
2) Extinct Plants and Animals
3) Large carbon emissions
4) Less efficiant carbon consumption
It's a lose-lose scenario.
Research is currently being done now to create bacteria that creates ethanol from waste, which can eliminate the above problems, and this is possibly the only saving grace for this dangerous fuel.
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wow.... can i get a reference to where you are getting your info?
brazil's cane fields account for just 5.7 million hectares in a country of 850 million hectares. There are already 100 million hectares of old agricultural land or pasture land in the centre-south available for the industry to expand into. Expansion into at least some of those millions of hectares would probably be more or less carbon-neutral. For degraded pastures, which are slowly losing carbon, it is not such a bad change. And almost 70% of the Cerrado (Latin America's savanna, of which Brazil has some 200 million hectares) has already been cleared.
Because it needs a dry season, sugar cane would not be a good crop to move into cleared rainforest areas, even if that was what anyone wanted. In this respect, cane is more environmentally friendly than palm oil, the most energy-intensive source of biodiesel. Palm-oil plantations for biofuel are having serious effects on the primary forests of Indonesia, but are not as yet big business in Brazil.