April 20, 2011 A Move to Water? In my last post, I described
some of the recent literature that analyzes the land intensity
of various forms of energy production. Renewable energy sources
often are criticized as land-intensive, and several studies have
attempted to quantify this claim. One study not mentioned in my
last post seems to suggest, for example, that all of the earth's
"land area" would be consumed by soy if we used soy diesel to
meet one-hundred percent of 2010 energy demand. (Note that this
data purportedly comes from a study by Professor Clinton J.
Andrews et al., but Andrews does not list the study under his
publications--nor does the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,
which hosted a conference at which cnet claims Andrews presented
an early version of the study. Even if the study does not in
fact suggest that the earth would be covered in soy if we relied
on soy biodiesel for all of our energy, it's an interesting
scenario to imagine.) The Nature Conservancy also has estimated
that renewable tec