if you judge by past performance, *war* will be the solution to our imminent energy crisis. We will fight a war of all against all for what's left of the energy...and if we do not sterilize the planet in nuclear fire, we will, in the end, kill enough people that a shortage of energy will no longer be a concern.

Check history. This is how humans have always addressed this problem. What exactly is it that makes anyone think we're going to do it differently this time?

Andrew, if you have a different scenario that is actually plausible, I'm all ears. Otherwise? Seize the day, folks, because our past performance is not encouraging.

www.dieoff.org

The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems.

There's enormous amounts of energy coming into the earth via the sun. How does planetary energy usage compare to energy received via insolation?

It just happens that we don't have very efficient means of converting solar energy into usable energy -- be it solar cells, biodeisel, or 500,000,000 year old solar energy trapped in fossil fuels.

Yes, possibly. The other possiblity is that eventually globalization and the Internet will raise the global level of education and information to the point where progress is made in the areas of conservation and self-imposed population control.

The gamble here is that this will happen before the apocalypse, or that some super-virus won't take care of overpopulation for us. As AL and the professor seem to agree, technological improvements will only slow these inevitabilities- it can never eliminate them.

The second law of thermodynamics is also a favorite IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERCOME PROBLEM (tm) when discussing evolution with intelligent designer types and their ilk. Makes it appear like there is more to their argument than hot air. "Look, I'm using science terms and appealing to natural law! How can you challenge that?!" Add to that a quote from an esteemed and long dead astrophysicist who was not speaking about biological systems and it seems even more like a snow job.

OK, I usually try to avoid personal attacks, but something about this post really ticked me off. I don't dispute Dr. Patzek's general message that biofuels are not going to replace fossil fuels. But I'm not sure that anyone, especially Andrew, is suggesting that they will. They are one piece of a puzzle that could help us deal with some serious and looming problems. By acting as a legitimizer for industries that seek to undermine biofuels, Patzek seems to mostly be hurting our chances of solving these problems.

Well I always said that Sci-Fi fans are the world's biggest conservatives. I mean the future always sucks, doesn't it?

Anyway everyone knows the next wars will be fought over clean water and access to medicines for infectious diseases. Just look at Africa. There are countries there where 70% of the Army is HIV+. How do you think that will work out when the sickest segment of the population is also heavily armed and has nothing to lose? Now THAT'S a bleak picture. But it won't be about energy. Energy is a BIG with a capital B problem. The next wars will be about small problems.

I have heard that the reason we are using ethanol instead of methanol because of the farm lobby. Is it true that methanol is a smarter choice?

Rooftops. Solar panels, right? But they're expensive and require maintenance, unreliable!

Not anymore. What if the solar companies acted more like utility companies? What if you could just switch from coal-fired energy to solar energy while staying connected to your utility and actually pouring excess energy back into the grid, and without paying thousands of dollars to set it all up? Little mini power plants on people's rooftops!

Look around you as you see more and more solar panels popping up in neighborhoods all over the country. It is now as easy as just "switching over" to solar power without any financial investment in advance. More at www.jointhesolution.com/joinsolar .

For the past 20 years, so-called scientists funded by the petroleum industry (like Prof. Patzek - check his website) have been telling us that there is no climate change. Apparently, the petroleum industry has given up on this message somewhat, and is now pushing the fallacy that biofuels have a negative energy balance.

The Second Law is not news to all of the other scientists that study energy balance of biofuels. Among all of these other scientists, a consensus has developed over the past decade that biofuels (even marginal ones like corn ethanol) have a positive energy balance. How can this possibly be? Are all of these other scientists ignoramuses? Is Prof. Patzek the sole voice of sanity within the scientific community? He is the sole voice with this view, with dozens of others in agreement with each other and in disagreement with him. Science is not a democracy, but extraordinary claims do demand extraordinary evidence. The studies that Prof. Patzek has been involved in have been refuted by the scientific community a long time ago, and he's come up with nothing new to justify dredging this up again now. Well, apparently the Second Law argument is a new angle. It will only work on non-scientists however, because the Second Law is not something any scientist is going to overlook. Ever. For a journalist, it would be like forgetting about subject-verb agreement.

The earth receives from the sun an average of 100 watts of power per square foot. There is no chance we will ever recover more than a tiny fraction of that, but a tiny fraction is all that we need. Plants store a tiny fraction of this energy from the sun in the form of oil, starch and sugar. They've been perfecting this for the past 3.5 billion years. The energy they store does not come from petroleum - it comes from the sun. We're orders of magnitude from violating the Second Law. Prof. Patzek is using a rhetorical trick by telling us how important the Second Law is (it is), even though it has nothing to do with the energy balance of biofuels.

I must say, that just like climate change, where the scientific debate ended many years ago, the debate continued to rage on in the media, and only in the media. There is no longer scientific debate about the energy balance of biofuels, just like there is no scientific debate about climate change. Its grossly irresponsible to convey a sense of debate when there is none in order to make the story more interesting, or whatever it is that compels journalists to continually misrepresent and distort reality - about politics, climate change and now biofuels.

Give it a rest - you're not helping.