This really caught my attention. Two of the periodicals I subscribe to, Wired and National Geographic, featured biofuels on their cover this month. National Geographic features an ear of corn on the cover, while Wired shows us a tuft of switchgrass. This seems appropriate to me, since NG tends to focus more on what is already happening, while Wired is much more future-oriented with a heavy emphasis on technological solutions to what appear to be intractable problems.
In my opinion, the NG piece is much more informative and balanced, in that it looks at a lot of the potential sources of biofuels--corn, sugar cane, soy beans, and cellulosic ethanol (which can actually be made from just about any organic matter containing cellulose, including switchgrass) and algae. They talk at some length about the trade-offs inherent in burning crops in our gas tanks, including the displacement of human food production and the subsequent conversion of wildlands into new fields and pastures.
Both articles are good, and although the NG piece mentions the dubious EROEI (energy return on energy invested) of corn, neither one is honest about the impossibility of continuing our profligate use of energy to move ourselves around in 6,000 pound hunks of metal. There just isn't enough arable land in the world to make that happen.
So I think it's good that our society finally seems to be waking up to the impending oil crisis, but there still seems to be a lot of denial about the incontrovertible fact that we are going to have to make a lot of fundamental, transformative changes to our lifestyles, economy, and political institutions. Hopefully that part will be in the next issue. :)
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