Biofuel Blog War

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and OECD released their annual Agricultural Outlook yesterday. It makes a strong case for increasing global agricultural production by increasing yield on existing acres – one of many solutions biotech can help provide.

Adverse weather conditions in major grain-producing regions, coupled with low stocks, were enough to trigger the [...]

http://www.wftv.com/video/16367116/index.html
XL Techgroups’s (of Melbourne, FL) company PetroAlgae has been showing their Fellsmere located algae photo-bio-reactor (PBR) system to the media this month. Orlando TV station WFTV does a good job of covering the facility. At production rates of 10,000 - 40,000 gallons per acre the company hopes to “roll out the technology worldwide by 2009″ according to the report.
Some scientists are skeptical of the cost effectiveness of a closed PBR system, and are concentrating on cheaper-per-acre open ponds for algae growth instead. Either way, CO2-eating algae would be a wonderful alternative to exhuming dinosaur juice to fuel our vehicles.

Last week, Roll Call revealed that the Grocery Manufacturers Association paid for a PR campaign aimed at blaming high food prices on biofuels (call it the ‘vast chicken wing conspiracy’). But since the revelation, there’s been very little effort in the press to set the record straight.
The USDA this week held a press conference to [...]

Last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed into law a measure that increases the state’s current 2% biodiesel mandate ten-fold in less than a decade. There could have been no increase in the mandate at all, but what, or who,…

On Monday the USDA held a press briefing. The subject? Food and fuel.
One theory that has been widely discussed in recent weeks is that the nation’s growing demand for biofuels and the crops needed to produce them is the real culprit behind higher food prices, both at home and abroad. Yet the evidence [...]

There’s been a lot of hype lately over biofuels starving the world, and unfortunately there’s not better way to say it than that — hype.
Instead of having the knee-jerk reaction, of panic, we need to think carefully about the problem, for starters, we need to actually identify the problem.
In a recent op-ed in the Minneapolis [...]

Anna Smith of Roll Call today filed a story on how the Grocery Manufacturers Association is “leading an ‘aggressive’ public relations campaign for the past two months in an effort to roll back ethanol mandates that passed in last year’s energy bill.” GMA hired Glover Park Group to run the campaign, Smith writes, based on GMA’s [...]

There has been much in the media lately on biofuels, climate change and the food crisis.
The International Energy Agency, energy policy advisor to 27 member countries (one of which is the United States) formed during the oil crisis of 1973-74 recently released a statement on biofuels,
“The recent shortage in grain stocks and surge in [...]

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality earlier this week held a hearing on implementation of the new Renewable Fuel Standard.
Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-S.D.), Environmental Protection Agency Deputy Assistant Administrator Robert Meyers, Bob Dinneen with the Renewable Fuels Association, Nathanael Greene with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Randy Kremer of KL [...]

Criticizing Congress’s “massive, bloated farm bill” that would support millionaire non-farmers, President Bush’s comments from the Rose Garden Tuesday indicate that he will veto the package if changes aren’t made. Looking to offset the increased spending that would doom the…