Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumNobel Prize-winning biochemist says ALL biofuels are “nonsense."
[div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;"]"Hartmut Michel won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on photosynthesis. So, it is fair to say that he knows a thing or two about energy transport and storage in plants. Today he is director of the Molecular Membrane Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics.
He recently penned an editorial in Angewandte Chemie International Edition in which he hammered the use of biofuels for alternative energy. Note that Angewandte Chemie International Edition has the worlds highest impact factor of all chemistry journals. His simple but pointed criticism condemns all varieties of biofuels and supports my previous posts on this subject.1, 2
The problem is the inherent inefficiency of photosynthesis. He points out
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http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/nobel-prize-winning-biochemist-says-all-biofuels-are-nonsense/
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1988 was awarded jointly to Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel for the determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction center.
dlwickham
(3,316 posts)not sure what you're getting at here
Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)The fact is, there may not be ANY way to sustain our rate of energy usage. No law of physics guarantees the survival of industrial civilization. And there are probably a dozen good reasons contained within the laws of physics why industrial civilization cannot survive.
NickB79
(19,273 posts)Those aren't our only options, you realize. There are far more options than just those at our disposal.
Politicalboi
(15,189 posts)NickB79
(19,273 posts)Completely innocuous, that Brazilian biofuel
NoOneMan
(4,795 posts)However, indirect land-use changes, especially those pushing the rangeland frontier into the Amazonian forests, could offset the carbon savings from biofuels. Sugarcane ethanol and soybean biodiesel each contribute to nearly half of the projected indirect deforestation of 121,970 km2 by 2020, creating a carbon debt that would take about 250 years to be repaid using these biofuels instead of fossil fuels.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/02/0907318107.abstract
See, after 250 years its all savings!
wtmusic
(39,166 posts)so I'm not sure what their point is.
Ultimately, don't have millions of years and we don't have 250 years.
joshcryer
(62,276 posts)They scorch and burn, raise cattle, then leave behind large swaths of land for "ethanol" crops. It's disgusting to be sure.
The EU, supposedly the most progressive states against climate change.
wtmusic
(39,166 posts)The reason this is misleading can be understood using analogy.
Evaporative coolers are a sort of air conditioning "on the cheap" used primarily in arid desert environments, and cool the air by using its thermal energy to break the hydrogen bonds between water molecules. Water vapor, however, is a more significant contributor to global warming than CO2. So while sugarcane field may create a microclimate of cool air, the water vapor they thrust into the atmosphere is soaking up the heat energy from sunlight even faster and providing a positive feedback that's worse than no sugarcane at all.
Sugarcane is used in biofuel that powers about a quarter of the motor vehicles in Brazil, and in that way, it helps to keep some of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which affects global climate.
The question is: how does sugarcane farming add carbon dioxide to the air? Dr. Michel addresses that directly: