tricky wrote:
but he's not totally loony about it.
He's not, but he is being a bit simplistic, or short sighted. These kinds of Malthusian debates seem to pop up every few years or so.
There is no doubt that using food as fuel is, in a way, a big revolution. That we'll need to adapt to those new circumstances, and that if we go about it recklessly, some people will suffer.
But that's the case with every single new technology. The "worst case scenario" is
always scary, by definition. It doesn't mean anything, though.
The Castro/Economist side of the debate seems to forget we are at the very beggining of biofuel techonology. Couple that with GM technology, and the fact that biofuel can be made from a wide variety of crops, and it's really not that scary.
Not only that, but compared to the problems that oil causes, the one brought about by biofuel are minuscule.
As for the moral dilemna, it doesn't exist. Using crops to feed cows to make leather belts is arguably much worse than using crops to create fuel to drive our cars.