Alternative Fuels, Shmalternative Fools

Gas crunch: Jatropha, kudzu, algae and magic to rescue
American ingenuity and exceptionalism transforms weeds into, er, pork

So what about Jatropha, a pest tree that produces seed pods, as an oil source for biodiesel? Literally hundreds of stories have been written about it, all generally the equivalent of counting chickens before hatching. All of these stories must contain a line like "The plants require an occasional watering and virtually no fertilizing." This is to plant the idea that one is getting a lot of something for virtually nothing.

But problems of scale aren't mentioned, nor the complication of separating oil from seeds and converting it to usable diesel at some reasonable return on energy input. It does no good to mention that all of, let's say Florida, Texas or a couple other states, would need to be turned over to it. Theoretically, of course. Any reasonable discussion of processing cost is also off the table.

Both the jatropha and kudzu hypes are partially, hmmm, fueled by Brazil's reliance on sugar cane-to-ethanol for automobiles running on blends of fuel. Sugar cane won't grow in most of the US, ergo the casting about for a cheap equivalent from the plant world, one that needs little water. This almost seems reasonable until one compares the scale of Brazil's vehicular use to that of the United States. In terms of miles-per-vehicle-per-capita, in a country to country comparison, Brazil isn't even on the chart of the US Department of Transportation. If it suddenly acquired the auto-load and driving habits of, for example, southern Californians, Brazil's energy strategy would collapse under the weight.

So, are we willing to take the land of 2-3 states to grow the weeds to fuel our affluent lifestyles? I don't know, if we had to devote more land to farming we may have to squeeze into cities like dem Yurupeans do. That's so not America - we're all about spreading out, and independence, and baseball and apple-pies and barbecues and such. Cars are part of that - they give us freedom that trains and planes just can't compete with. And you can pry my air conditioner(s) from my cold, dead hands.

And, of course, this ignores that we're still burning fossil fuels, all we've really done is made our energy source renewable. The article linked to some charts, and what I found the most amazing was that 76% of workers drove to work alone. Mebbe we should try and fix that instead of all these alternative fuels & car batteries & all that stuff. Just that one thing.