Discussion on:

The Morning Briefing: Renewable energy

Unfortunately, understanding alternative energy isn't simple. Lots of distinctions need to be made and unfortunately, the general public, the media and the gov. don't seem to be up to those distinctions - or have other agendas driving them. Biofuels are my favorite example. They aren't renewable or sustainable and will compete with food crops. Four major mass balance studies all concluded for biofuels (including algae biofuels) will require substantial amounts of NPK fertilizers (same as foods) to produce even minimal amounts of energy. NPK production is dependent on petroleum and no one seems to get that. Or, they say we can develop biofuels on wastes, but the studies that looked at using wastes for biofuels say that wastes could provide a maximum of about 3% of our energy needs with biofuels, or looking at differently only offset about 1.5% of the peak phosphates in that we currently use for food crops. Other experts are saying that a global biofuel industry would quadruple our NPK use and this in a time when both petroleum and phosphates are considered peak commodities. It gets worse - according to the 2011 USDA Fertilizer Import Summary the US imports over half of it's fertilizers - with 15% of our phosphates coming from Morocco. Now consider the demand that biofuels would put on our NPK consumption, not only will we have dramatically increases in food costs, but we will then not only be dependent on foreign sources for our energy - but our foods as well. How's that for a military and political strategy to reduce foreign resource dependence? Alternative energies need to be sustainable. Biofuels aren't - wind, solar, and tidal are and they don't compete with our foods supply or dramatically change our economic paradigms regarding our food economics.

I see it's just another episode of the Obama administration flushing more taxpayer money away down the drain. If these schemes were any good, then private cash would have already flooded in to fulfill them, and don't give me any more guff about "kickstarting" something, it's not a motorcycle, or "economies of scale" either. Wind turbines have already reached their optimum size and they still don't provide the answer. Cellulosic ethanol sounded slightly promising until I realised that still nobody knows how to do it! Algae - fine, as long as you can afford to cover many square miles with expensive machinery, oh silly me, I forgot, it's only taxpayer money, so naturally there'll be no problem with that! Pity it'll still need to be attached to a coal burning power station to access the CO2 needed for the process though.

If we are going to go into alternative energy, why on Earth don't we at least start with something that MIGHT eventually work, like thorium reactors, instead of just leaving them to the Indians and South Koreans? At the moment we are just chasing a Will o' the Wisp, and a very expensive wasteful one at that Let's get real and start by deporting all these dopey, pie in the sky eco-nuts who only know how to waste other peoples money on their idiotic fantasies, or at least find them real jobs so that they start to understand the value of money and the need to use it efficiently. A course in basic mathematics would be great for them to start with!

Did you complain about the trillion dollar war of choice in Iraq, do ever callout the people who spend 20% of budget on the war machine. We spend more than the next 17 countries combined on toys for war. We have no idea how much has been spent on Black Projects that we never even heard about that did not work. The dollars spent on alternatives is nothing compared to that waste.

How bout you?

The Sierra Club report focuses on lobbying. The fossil fuel industry also spends money on shaping public opinion.

Renewable energy project for the Philippines is bringing more hope for small business entrepreneurs especially in the pig industry. Hopefully this campaign will become successful.