Taking down my vegoil page

[andygates]

I have removed my (absurdly popular) vegoil as fuel page for a short time.

Biofuel isn't turning out to be quite as glorious as we'd hoped. It's great fuel, but it's also a valuable cash crop. Valuable enough for some farmers to screw up their environment for a quick buck.

It would be tragic if biofuel, instead of being a great green hope, turned out to be this year's strip-cleared rainforest eco-crime. Until I've run the numbers, I am therefore removing these instructions.

Comments

[andygates.livejournal.com]

It makes me sad too. I do think that there is room for a source-certification programme: I'd happily burn virgin EU veg, which isn't starving out anyone nor draining any mangrove swamps.

Of the contacts I was getting for vegoil fuel, only about one in twenty was in it for the greenness; the rest were in it to save money or stick it to the Man. That's something pretty telling which I *have* learned over the last couple of years.

Money talks. The only way to make mainstream green policies work is to make them financially attractive. Only the rich and extremists are prepared to pay over the odds; for the general public, price is the principal driver.

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

I really wish folks would get on the stick with using algae as a source. I checked the production bit of the Wikipedia article, and while actual tests with algae didn't have nearly the yield that were predicted (they were off by nearly a factor of 6, it appears), it still kicks ass on every other source on the gallons/acre scale -- the only other sources that are even in the same league are Chinese tallow and oil palm.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Palm is the big eco naughty, it's being cultivated in a very short-termist way.

A good algae reactor really should just be an industrial facility like any other - just like a refinery. I wonder if there's a glitch in the scaling, or if they're just not getting funded?

Space lasers. It's the only way.