there would be nothing natural about it if you’re cutting it all down and fertilizing it on a cycle, that’s just agriculture.
yes, it would probably be less impactful than corn, but at the scale you’re talking about, were shifting all the ethanol corn + all that land times 10 from whatever it’s doing over to industrial scale farm land. that means making it flat, building machines, securing water sources (yet another resource we don’t exactly have an overabundance of), scaling out the logistics of shipping and processing by 10X for a distributed fuel making infrastructure.
There’s only ~ 2 billion acres of area in the U.S. and you want to use 10% of it for making fuel, and that’s just for people who drive cars, not Trucking, not Trains, not Planes, not anything that runs on diesel. That’s about a third of what we use for cattle, and cattle use land that’s not good for growing anything at agricultural scale.
That much land could produce 2560 terrawatts from solar alone, and we can spread that out over existing land, like roofs, deserts, parking lots and roads, which would account for half the power the U.S. uses annually. So using less land we could increase U.S. power production by 50% (and doing that only with solar would probably be the least efficient way to do it).
Cheap, clean, distributed power is far more useful than expensive distributed not clean fuel.
Biomass as a fuel can’t scale. It does ZERO to help with our carbon problem, and it perpetuates current infrastructure that is actively killing everyone.
There’s probably a case for replacing gas power plants with biomass powerplants that grow and process locally, cutting out all the transport logistics to increase efficiency while reducing overall carbon footprint, but in general burning things is a bad plan. Using small inefficient engines to burn things on demand everywhere is an even worse plan.
@nxdefiant@dragontamer clearing forest land for agriculture to feed ever increasing population does seems the baseline solution but then the argument pops up … isn’t knowledge of agriculture by we humans responsible for climate change and all the misery the human race is in?
Pretty much. We have scientists looking into high density, multi level automated hydroponic crop production in order to stop relying on having enough sky and land for food. Using more land for biomass to produce fuel feels willfully evil at this point.
All the more reason we should convert land back to native Switchgrass. A native plant that grew from Nevada to Maine that the pioneers / pilgrims saw 500+ years ago. Converting our harmful farmlands back into more natural-looking grasslands is going to improve our environment and ecology.
That’s what makes this entire discussion so hilarious. I’m advocating for native plant species of this continent, and yall environmentalists are shitting on the idea. Because modern environmentalists are braindead and don’t even think about the natural state of our country, its plantlife or other effects.
That’s fine. So I’m just pointing out: switchgrass is an incredibly eco-friendly way forward. Even if we don’t use it for biofuel, its already being used to restore marshlands and other areas. Switchgrass also has a carbon-capture profile similar to trees (!!!), outperforming many other plants in terms of CO2 capture. One way or the other, the people who know better are planting switchgrass and improving our ecology, even if yall can’t get behind the idea.
there would be nothing natural about it if you’re cutting it all down and fertilizing it on a cycle, that’s just agriculture.
yes, it would probably be less impactful than corn, but at the scale you’re talking about, were shifting all the ethanol corn + all that land times 10 from whatever it’s doing over to industrial scale farm land. that means making it flat, building machines, securing water sources (yet another resource we don’t exactly have an overabundance of), scaling out the logistics of shipping and processing by 10X for a distributed fuel making infrastructure.
There’s only ~ 2 billion acres of area in the U.S. and you want to use 10% of it for making fuel, and that’s just for people who drive cars, not Trucking, not Trains, not Planes, not anything that runs on diesel. That’s about a third of what we use for cattle, and cattle use land that’s not good for growing anything at agricultural scale.
That much land could produce 2560 terrawatts from solar alone, and we can spread that out over existing land, like roofs, deserts, parking lots and roads, which would account for half the power the U.S. uses annually. So using less land we could increase U.S. power production by 50% (and doing that only with solar would probably be the least efficient way to do it). Cheap, clean, distributed power is far more useful than expensive distributed not clean fuel.
Biomass as a fuel can’t scale. It does ZERO to help with our carbon problem, and it perpetuates current infrastructure that is actively killing everyone.
There’s probably a case for replacing gas power plants with biomass powerplants that grow and process locally, cutting out all the transport logistics to increase efficiency while reducing overall carbon footprint, but in general burning things is a bad plan. Using small inefficient engines to burn things on demand everywhere is an even worse plan.
@nxdefiant @dragontamer clearing forest land for agriculture to feed ever increasing population does seems the baseline solution but then the argument pops up … isn’t knowledge of agriculture by we humans responsible for climate change and all the misery the human race is in?
Pretty much. We have scientists looking into high density, multi level automated hydroponic crop production in order to stop relying on having enough sky and land for food. Using more land for biomass to produce fuel feels willfully evil at this point.
All the more reason we should convert land back to native Switchgrass. A native plant that grew from Nevada to Maine that the pioneers / pilgrims saw 500+ years ago. Converting our harmful farmlands back into more natural-looking grasslands is going to improve our environment and ecology.
That’s what makes this entire discussion so hilarious. I’m advocating for native plant species of this continent, and yall environmentalists are shitting on the idea. Because modern environmentalists are braindead and don’t even think about the natural state of our country, its plantlife or other effects.
That’s fine. So I’m just pointing out: switchgrass is an incredibly eco-friendly way forward. Even if we don’t use it for biofuel, its already being used to restore marshlands and other areas. Switchgrass also has a carbon-capture profile similar to trees (!!!), outperforming many other plants in terms of CO2 capture. One way or the other, the people who know better are planting switchgrass and improving our ecology, even if yall can’t get behind the idea.