An alternative to cropland loss for ethanol production?

[dewline]

Something David Brin pointed out recently(among a great many other news items): here's the Wired article. The recent discussion of competition between fuel needs for vehicles and those of humans and other animals on CBC Radio's The Current had triggered a fair bit of ongoing concern for me. Could this work as a solution to that problem?

Comments

[mariness.livejournal.com]

Another solution that is proving moderately successful at solving both the energy issue and environmental wastes issue: converting pig/chicken manure into energy. There's a couple of companies out in North Carolina and Illinois focusing on this now. I'm encouraged by the article you pointed out since it also focuses on converting trash to energy.

The issue with growing corn (or sugar) for ethanol isn't even so much the destruction of habitat for corn use, but the problem that to grow corn efficiently for fuel, you need to use a significant amount of nitrates, which in the U.S. will leech into rivers, then down into the Mississippi, and then enter the Gulf of Mexico, wrecking environmental havoc there. We need the oceans as a carbon sink, and when we change the chemical balance of the ocean, we also change its ability to act as a carbon sink.

And on this note, I may buy more plants for my porch today ;)

[dewline.livejournal.com]

And now I'm considering what best to replace the two trees no longer in the family yard with...