the immediate benefit of burning biofuels

[click images]

Perennial grasses can be grown all over the planet with no fertilization, and no irrigation, can be mowed down to nubs like in a lawn and grow right back, with the nitrogen fixing properties of their root systems increasing with age. Burning the grasses for power releases as much carbon as the regrowth will absorb, creating an ongoing carbon-neutral energy source.

Burning fossil fuels, oil and coal, is putting carbon that was already sequestered, taken out of circulation in our atmosphere, back into the atmosphere. Not only does that have to stop, but tons and tons of it that we have already put back into the atmosphere needs to be disposed of somehow, and people are working on ways to pump it back into the ground that won't use more fuel emissions than are being sequestered. We're close. We actually have a means, but we are unsure of whether it can be kept underground long enough before it turns into something that definitely will stay underground. We're close.

People are working on ways to efficiently break down these grasses without burning them, creating micro-organisms that will do this work, so that it could then be burned like fuel oil or natural gas, which obviously would be cleaner than simply lighting a match to huge grass furnaces to provide our power. But even so, huge grass furnaces, burning grass pellets, might be a good thing in the short term until cost-efficient ways to turn it into liquid form are found, because the particulate matter in going into the atmosphere from smoke has an overall cooling effect. And flipping from increasing the carbon load each time we burn coal or oil to zero increase seriously rocks.

Wonderfully zippy, completely all-American, electric cars have already been designed and manufactured, just taken off the road because they were such a success it threatened the oil barons. These could be put back into production immediately. If we were all driving electric cars, these grasses right now could be farmed on a scale to produce the electricity to power them all, plus all our heating and cooling and cooking and lighting and washing and computing... all our energy needs... with the exception of airplanes and jets... but the synthesis of the grasses into liquid fuels will probably bring them into the fold soon.

Just the other day they announced they'd come up with a way to store solar energy, which just wiped out the one problem with using patches of desert for solar panel farms to produce our energy. I'm thinking the same is true for wind energy fluctuations.

My point is: right this very now we have the technology to do without fossil fuels for almost every human energy use, and that means we can do without oil barons and all the industrial complexes grown up around looking after their interests. Right now. No conservation. No driving more slowly. Inside a year everything but airplanes could be running on grass.