Since George W. Bush pledged a major US effort to develop
biofuels in his State of the Union address earlier this year, it
seems the whole world has joined the rush to convert corn,
sugar, cassava, sorghum and palm oil - not to mention cooking
fat and farm waste - into the fuels of the future. From China
and Indonesia to India and Cuba, everyone wants to turn crops
into energy. The European Union is even considering a mandatory
10 per cent biofuel content at every pump. The dream is to cut
reliance on fossil fuels while also reducing net greenhouse gas
emissions and even helping hard-pressed farmers. And yet, there
is a downside to all this. With today's biofuel technologies,
filling fuel tanks this way would require a huge amount of land
- enough to transform the world's agriculture (see Fuels gold:
Big risks of the biofuel revolution). ... To continue reading
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