“Corned grief: biofuels may increase CO2“. Well here’s something that I agree with Anthony Watts on! The American biofuel industry is to my eye more of an agricultural subsidy for corporations with large biomass resources that a real energy strategy. For me, the best case is partial replacement of hydrocarbon fuels, but at a high production cost. It is however something politicians of both stripes are happy to play along with as they can pass on benefits to their corporate supporters.

Anthony assigns this to the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t department”. So I guess he’s treating this as another bullet-point for the denialist tactic of that didn’t work, so we should stop trying.

If this report in BioScience is true, maize-derived ethanol may produce more CO₂ than simply burning hydrocarbons! This estimate is largely due to land-use changes. There are possible technological breakthroughs that may make this economical, but the real numbers just aren’t there yet.