Biofuel not the magic bullet

When someone like George W Bush jumps on board, you know biofuels aren’t about anything but oil independence. Only the most rosy-glassed ecologists would believe that the Bush administration actually cares about the environment—more likely, they’re just trying to appease “Big Corn” with subsidies and maybe avoiding a war or two over Middle-Eastern oil.

It’s just another in the long list of alternative fuel sources that are supposed to save us all, but are really just PR campaigns and hand-waving by energy companies, governments, and media outlets who are too scared to tell the public what they don’t want to hear: we’re going to need to reduce consumption. With enough investment in research, there’s still the potential for a solution, but the reality is that we’re still a long way off.
This doesn’t just go for biofuels, either. Alternative energies almost uniformly have problems, whether the peaking issues of solar and wind or locational constraints of geothermal. Each of these, among others, is viable on a small scale in a cheap fuel era, but probably won’t be the quick global fix that we’re all looking for.

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