It is the source of the carbon that is at issue.
When you burn a gallon of crude oil, you’re liberating carbon that had previously been sequestered in the ground.
When you burn a gallon of ethanol or biodiesel, you’re liberating carbon from plant material, that is then re-sequestered in next year’s crop, and then re-liberated, etc, etc.
The point of bio-fuels is that the act of growing the bio-fuel feedstock takes CO2 out of the air and puts it into carbon in the plant matter, only some of which is then harvested and re-released back into the atmosphere.
With oil/natural gas/coal — the carbon is released, never to be completely re-captured.
Yeah, thats the tale they tell, the problem is it isn’t true, since it’s only part of the story. There was an article that laid out all the particulars and proved that ethanol was a big loser when it comes to total carbon. They took into account that to handle corrosive alcohols you needed to make things like stainless gas tanks, stainless storage tanks, trucking fuel instead of pipelines, and different materials for hoses, fuel injectors, gas tanks, all adding to the carbon costs.
The land use issues were also considered and proved to be not very positive when you consider the massive amounts of land surface area required by an energy intensive growing process. Imagine the forests which need to be cut down for fields of grain. Net loss of carbon sink.
By the time you added it all up, it was a net negative for ethanol.
The most promising new fuel, as if we need one when we actually need new leadership in Washington to quell the hot air and globull warming BS, was in SITU RF processing of oil shales, and even old wells. The U.S. Green River Formations are said to contain about 800 billion barrels of oil that is recoverable from the oil shale. Using nuclear power for processing the oil shale is the way to go. Reprocessing old oil wells with the RF process is looking good — Makes more oil flow from the rocks.
The funny thing is no one wants to talk about the current “modern maximum” where the sun’s output seems to be nearing a 1000 year high — Especially in the last 50 years. I wonder why that is? Must not fit the socialists template.
We are going to need the CO2 when the next ice age shows up.