Biofuels are being vilified by the Oil-industry manufactured "food crisis"

The whole biofuels-are-starving-us thing is a crock.

First off, farmers around the world were ENCOURAGED by their governments by ways of grants and tax credits to grow corn for biofuel. What happened next was inevitable: so many farmers started growing biofuel crops that there were food grain shortages.

Ask yourself, however, who stands to profit most from the vilification of biofuels? The same people who have been writing US energy policy for the last decade: Big Oil.

Big Oil has pulled the wool over everyone's eyes, by encouraging--through lobbyists--the governments of the world to subsidize the overproduction of biofuel crops at the expense of food crops. Now, the backlash against biofuel is so widespread that the alternative fuel source will be abandoned by and large.

Biofuel is much cheaper to produce than petroleum distillates. This means that Big Oil could not make the switch to biofuel without massive losses. This means that the best way to continue making obscene profits is to ensure people do not look for cheap alternative fuels.

Big Oil engineered the current worldwide food shortage in order to sabotage biofuels.

Big Oil, like so many other corporate special interests has been dictating American policy--as well as policy for much of the West--for far too long.

Land doesn't have to be diverted from food production to biofuel production; the land we farm the fuel supply on doesn't have to be "clean"; there's a lot of contaminated land that could be used. Likewise, adapting the procedures Israel used to create the "Kibbutz" farms in the desert, the whole of the Southwest could be used to grow fuel crops.

Likewise, if its a question of climate control because the crops cannot grow except in specific conditions, why not create greenhouses to do that? Again, the crops don't have to look pretty or taste good, all they have to do is be able to be converted into ethanol or biodiesel. Are you going to tell me, with all the GE crops Montsanto and others are turning out that they couldn't engineer a crop that would produce fuel when processed? Again, the crops could be highly toxic to humans, (and don't give me the whole M. Night Shaymalan "The Event" spiel) and still be viable for fuel. Oil workers are exposed to poisonous chemicals every day of their working lives; I have no moral qualms about exposing biofuel workers to similar risks for similar rewards.

All this to say that in the case of biofuels, it is the flesh that is willing and the spirit is weak; the Big Oil concerns have too much to lose.