perfessor multigeek's Journal: Biofuels. wtf?

As I recently wrote here, I've been reading like mad and I've reached a disturbing conclusion. There is going to be a crippling wave of sickness and deaths among folks connected to the development and production of biofuels.

A.) Biodiesel is being made by more and more folks who are seriously sans clue re how to work with flammables. There have been serious explosions already, most notably Pacific Biodiesel. We'll be seeing much bigger ones. After all, even beyond the biodiesel itself, methanol is a key part of the process and must be kept around in dangerous quantities.

B.) A lot of recent developments are with what's known as "biomass", which means stuff like woodchips and straw. Add to this the vastly increased exposure to switchgrass and other plants grown for fuel and then left around to dry out and release their minerals back into the soil and we're looking at mold, mildew, and pest problems on a formidible scale.

C.) Increasingly biofuels are being made through treatment of sewage and other approaches like thermal depolymerization that involve ton upon ton of waste matter. Stuff like the scraps from chicken slaughtering plants and feces from hog farms.
Can you say "hepatitis?" I knew that you could.
Look to see mass outbreaks of various diseases among workers at plants doing this sort of thing. Then watch those outbreaks spread. Somewhere in, say Kerala, an entire town will get hit. The oldest and the children will simply die.

D.) Lots of the "leftovers" from biofuel use, such as wood ash, are acid or otherwise toxic to a degree utterly unsuited to such accelerated rampups.
Look to see toxic waste scandals of all sorts.

Note, btw, that biofuel implementation is now spreading faster and faster from the affluent confines of Northern California and New England to places with far fewer controls and almost no culture of industrial safety measures. Places like, say, Malaysia.

Gonna be a casualty count bigger than that of troops in Iraq while the transition happens and the petroplutocrats are going to have a ton of fun publicizing it. Then we'll see a flurry of new regulations meant to hobble any biofuels at all not utterly under the "benevolent, watchful eye" of agribusiness companies like ConAgra and Archers-Daniel-Midland.

And then we'll see taxes to "pay for enforcement". Taxes that will be conveniently matched to rebates for politically connected processors. This, in turn, will push our biofuels back towards inefficient crops like corn and back to use of virgin source rather than post-consumer biomass.

This will be used to claim that biofuels aren't really all that effective anyway. Biofuels will be presented as a boondoggle, the new shale, and the big "newsmagazines" like Time and Newsweek will fall for it, hook, line, and pork barrel.

Fundamentally, what we're talking about here is more than just a series of unrelated toxicity issues. It's not even as simple as the set of problems that predictably pop up in any swiftly expanding business, let aloe one built around flammables.

What we're going to be seeing is a cognitive rewiring. Because, you see, Western civilization, industrialized civilization is defined in large part by our ways of handling biomass .

Ask the typical Iowa housewife to tell you what makes our "way of life" better than that of a primitive tribesman. She'll talk about flush toilets. She'll talk about refrigeration. Pasteurization. Food packaging. Our whole neat and tidy way of doing things that cleans every trace of dirt off our food before we eat it and swiftly makes it go away to some invisible and undiscussed place when we void it. Oil is pumped out of the ground far away. "Waste" is disposed of somewhere equally far away. No icky smells, no complex thought.

Want a good recent example? Google the term "biosolids". It's the new euphemism for sh*t and piss that have been mixed with other waste, had most of the water drained off, and left out to become less pungent. But if you look, you'll find that in much of the literature it has basically become the new term for "sewage". And biofuel production is all about the conversion of biomass, much of it "icky" or "dirty". We're gonna have some serious trouble dealing with this.

You heard it here first.

-Rustin

Glass half full

[L-Train8]

Okay, I'm just one of those slashdot guys who doesn't know what he's talking about that you are complaining about. But here's my take.

Let me see if I can summarize your points.

Biofuels are currently experimental and relatively unregulated. Potential problems could cause a disaster, especially in a 3rd world country. Entrenched interests will use such a disaster to impose onerous regulation on a fledgling industry, thereby hobbling it and suffocating it in the cradle. Also, Americans don't want waste around,