Nestle blames biofuels for high food prices

BBC ^ | July 18, 2012 | James Melik

[CutePuppy]

Yes - we can and should be (if we're going to mandate alcohol in fuel) making alcohol from stuff like switchgrass and other such weeds that don't replace food ...

Actually, the bigger issue is the confusion that the problems are due to ethanol being made from foodstuff (such as corn) where the real problem is that most biofuels require huge swaths of horizontal space/land and water resources which are then not available to planting "real" marketable cropa due to subsidized ethanol/biofuels/"renewables" mandates.

As the Nestlé's chairman explained that's the real source of the problem, not any particular "weed" that has potentially higher calorific content (it amounts to a miniscule fraction of true resource hogging for biofuels production).

Hence, that's why there is some interest in water-based algae-to-oil production, but that has been also not very successful so far, and the bigger problem is it's just not as scalable (for similar reasons - horizontal space requirements) as vertical oil/gas production methods (drilling) or the nuclear power which requires little space and generates very little waste - i.e., the "waste" product itself is reconsumable in the later generation nuclear plants, such as thorium or other fast breeder reactors.

[Spktyr]

Hence my comment about using viable alternatives not taking up food-crop growing space.

There are plants we could make biofuels out of that would actually grow poorly on normally arable land, that actually want to grow in a swamp. That is the sort of thing that would be a better idea, as I was trying to convey. You weren’t going to be growing anything else in that swamp, so why not use it to grow something that would actually be useful?

[Sioux-san]

10 years - 172,000 miles - I am happy not to have a car payment