Ethics of Biofuels

It seems like you can

And, of course that it isn’t true, for any number of reasons. One is that biofuels aren’t really necessarily a source of energy, in the sense of producing more energy than they consume in production, another is that they have the potential for exacerbating hunger worldwide. On the first point, Cornell researcher David Pimentel has tracked the energy costs of producing ethanol and biodiesel from various agricultural sources, including the energy needed to plant, grow and harvest the corn, the fertilizer and pesticides used on it, the energy costs of transporting, the plant matter and the energy used in production, and found that in virtually every case, there is more energy input than taken out of it (Pimentel and Patzek, www.futurepundit.com/archives/002881.html). Others have found slight net positives energy accruals, but often have done so by leaving out some of these expenditures from their calculations. Even when a net positive energy gain is achieved, often it is so small that it is impossible for the biofuels ever to be significantly cheaper or more available than oil. If something is dependent for 95% of its energy value on the availability of fossil fuels, we can expect both its price and availability to be constrained by fossil fuel costs and constraints.

Energy Bulletin