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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (93988)	5/3/2008 8:33:54 AM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Respond to of 110194

Seems that Bio Fuels including from "Agricultural Waste" are the wrong path to save on CO2 emissions which brings back the nuclear solution Agricultural "Waste" - Environmentalists warn that the use of any plant matter, including forest deadwood and agriculture and garden residues, entails considerable ecological costs. "As farmers and agronomists know, 'biomass waste' does not exist; it is the organic matter that you have to put back after harvest in order to maintain the soil's fertility," advises GRAIN. "If you don't, you mine the soil and contribute to its destruction. And that is precisely what will happen if the world's topsoil has to compete with the bio-distillers." If so-called "agricultural waste" is not used to fertilize fields, it will have to be replaced by synthetic fertilizers, which are industrial agriculture's biggest contributor to global warming. Once applied to fields, the nitrogen in fertilizer combines with oxygen to form nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. According to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a 700- page document commissioned by the British government, agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions will increase 30% by 2020. Half of this will be due to increased fertilizer use. In the same period, the Third World is expected to double its fertilizer use and much of this increase will be for agrofuels. A 2005 joint report by the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture notes that the use of wood, grasses, and "plant waste" for the production of cellulosic ethanol would require 1.3 billion tons of dry biomass a year. Obtaining this amount of biomass would be possible only by removing most of the country's agricultural residues, planting 55 million hectares under perennial crops like switchgrass, and putting all U.S. farmland under "no-till" agriculture, say the report's authors. "The removal of organic residues from fields will require greater use of nitrate fertilizers, thus increasing nitrous oxide emissions, nitrate overloading, and its very serious impacts on the biodiversity on land, freshwater, and oceans," according to a 2007 report authored by 11 civil society organizations, including Argentina's Grupo de Reflexión Rural, Watch Indonesia, EcoNexus, Corporate Europe Observatory, and Friends of the Earth Denmark. americas.irc-online.org