Comment Re:Bloody hell! (Score 1) 468
Hear hear!
Although, I was just thinking, wouldn't it be possible for the carbon to come from a source other than the atmosphere? Not CO2, but some carbon locked up in the soil or somesuch? Combined with oxygen and some chemical shenanigans you'll get brand new CO2 that hasn't been in the atmosphere for a while.
Though I don't think that's very likely.
Barring that, which probably would not make up much of a plant's overall carbon intake, burning an entire field of corn or rape (canola) can't release any more CO2 than it absorbed originally. If you don't produce any more bio-fuel than you consume (or vice versa) the net CO2 impact is negligible.
Of course, there's still the problem of distribution. The place the emissions occur (cities) is usually far from the place the fuel is grown (farms). This means that farms will have a much lower level of ground level CO2 than cities. Not that that's particularly different from how it is now...