Are biofuels really worse than Canadian oil sands?
I borrowed this title from a post by John Guerrerio over on Examiner.com. When several scientific studies began publishing reports that supported the common sense contention that food-based biofuels usurp farmland the Renewable Fuels Association (which just spent almost a quarter of a million dollars last quarter on lobbying) had to cobble together some kind of defense. Bob Dinneen, head of the RFA, has been using the Huffington Post blog to disseminate this false dilemma, see here and here. I’d debate John on the Examiner blog in the comments but they only allow a thousand words characters and no active links to verify claims. So I have to take him to task here. In some ways biofuels are worse, and in some ways they are not, depending on what metric you are measuring and what biofuel you are talking about. For example, tar sands do not have nearly the impact on food prices, biodiversity, or the Rhode Island sized Gulf of Mexico Dead zone as corn ethanol, but corn ethanol produces less
