Mr. Leonard,

You are making the technofix fallacy of believing that technology equals energy. It does not. There is no magical fix out of the laws of entropy. There is no sufficient replacement for crude oil. There are partial replacements -- very partial. I don't have time to educate you, but you can look this stuff up for yourself at www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net and www.peakoil.com If you dare.

Rob Freeman

Connecticut

Replacing a rainforest with a palm plantation to produce biodiesel will, of course, only increase the amount of carbon dioxide that will be subsequently emitted into Earth's atmosphere, and not only from the exhausts of the vehicles in which the biodiesel is burned. Since a substantial percentage of the rainforest biomatter will almost certainly be burned, simply to clear the land, carbon dioxide is added even before the palm oil is burned as biodiesel. Had the rainforest remained, it would have removed more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it would, in and of itself, contribute (largely by sequestering carbon in the form of vegetable matter).

I agree with Andrew that our modern society should never give up seeking for solutions to the post petroleum world which is quickly approaching. But we should not assume that a solution will magically appear either.

Those of us who work in technology understand the concept of the Technology Hockey Stick. That is, every technology arena initially is loaded with opportunities for exploitation through innovation. But eventually barriers appear which are either totally insurmountable or are practically insurmountable from an economic point of view. Increasing amounts of investment yield smaller incremental gains until progress ceases. A highly visibale example is the speed of sound limit on commercial aircraft. The grounding of the Concorde without a replacement was a sad testiment to this fact. Another is massive complexity barriers to inexpensive transfer to and from low earth orbit. 2001 A Space Odessey is so far just a pipe dream. There is the automobile which hasn't improved much in the past 30 years. (I remember reading in Popular Science back in the 60s that cars would cruise under automated highway control at hundreds of miles per hour by the dawn of the 20th century). Instead we get constant gridlock at 20mph. Yet billions are spent annually in improving transportation. I could go on and on.

I am concerned that energy industry has hit similar boundaries with the double problem that oil is a finite resource and other hydrocarbons (coal, tar sands, etc.) have unacceptable environmental costs with global climate change looming over the horizon. Maybe there will be breakthroughs. But they won't happen unless there is serious research into alternative energy production techniques. And there are no guarantees that solutions will be found from this research. Today, the nations of the world are just tinkering. There is no serious attempt to deal with this emerging disaster - one that could bring modern society.

This isn't pessimism, this is reality.

danh

As a follow-on, I thought I would share this recent news item.

(AP) -- Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting demonstrators and searched for the protest organizers, villagers said Friday.

Although security forces often use tear gas and truncheons to disperse demonstrators, it is extremely rare for them to fire into a crowd-- as they did in putting down pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 near Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed.

During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used to construct a wind power plant.

Police started firing into the crowd and killed several people, mostly men, villagers reached by telephone said Friday. The death toll ranged from two to 10, they said, and many remained missing.

Well, I'm an engineer, and I invent new [electronic] things. The pace of growth in my industry has been so fast that mere ideas people wrote about five years ago are now shipping millions of units per year. I can hardly be accused of "anti-science pessimism." But I don't see how the solution to our dwindling energy stocks is just going to appear.

It's not that we've got practical technology that could replace petroleum products, but it's e.g. just a bit too expensive. In reality, we're decades away from any solution, and our economy is going to face the consequences of dwindling oil and gas stocks long before we get there.

There's this blind faith in innovation both from people who understand science and from those who don't. But we're past the point where we can rely exclusively on fossil fuels and yet there are no alternatives. We should be conserving.

Even if I'm wrong, why not conserve? The sheer wastefulness of the 1945-1973 and 1980-now eras burned up our cheap oil and made life much more difficult for each successive generation. [Won't somebody please think of the children!?] Why not try to make things a little easier?

For these countries to destroy rain forests for palm oil plantations, when the future of biodiesel is oil from a very different source - algae.

Certain types of algae produce more oil per unit mass than any other source, and the oil is much easier to extract than it is from other sources. They can be grown in a wide variety of marginal environments (such as sewage treatment ponds, brackish water, etc.) . It also eliminates many of the other concerns about biodiesel - the lack of recycled vegetable oil feedstock, the ethical issues of converting farmland that could be used for food for energy crops, and the fact that if soy-based biodiesel is assumed there is nowhere near the required arable land in the US to replace all diesel consumption.

Unfortunately, the main trade group in the US for biodiesel, the National Biodiesel Board (MBB), is dominated by the soybean lobby. All information from them assumes soy-based biodiesel. However, biodiesel can be produced from a wide variety of feedstocks, and algae is the most promising.

Isn't it be tragic to clear this rainforest when the price of palm oil will, in turn, be undercut by the price of algal oil? But I don't think the biodiesel industry is to blame for this; it is the policy of these countries to clear rainforest for profit that is at fault. Also, in any case it is more likely that this palm oil will fuel homegrown biodiesel production in those countries, rather than being imported to the US.