Quote Originally Posted by psychocat
The problem comes down to one thing , land being used for food crops or cash crops , the more crops you grow for fuel the less food crops can be grown. The demand for both isn't going to lessen it's just going to keep growing as is the population , suitable land for farming and homes will become more desirable.
Then you face another problem in that the demand for land will push up the price for farmers and land developers , land will be taken for the building of homes leaving less for crops.

The only realistic answer is LESS PEOPLE !
Yes, you are absolutely correct about this.

The root of all of these scarcity problems is the fact that there are way way too many of us. Everything we consume, food, water, fuel, etc. comes out of the earth, and the earth has only a limited capacity to produce.

Our reliance on fossil fuels has been spending what has been basically "money in the bank" until it is almost all gone at this point. We've used fossil fuels to grow our society beyond what may be sustainable. Those fossil fuels were once living organisms on the surface of the earth. All of their stored energy came from the sun, was turned into organic matter by plants using the energy of sunlight, were deposited under ground through a process of millions of years, where heat and pressure converted it into the oil and coal that we have burning for the last 100 years. Ultimately it all came from the sun and was converted to fuel by natural processes on the earth. Once it is gone, we'll have to wait a few more million years for more to show up, and we'll have to figure out what to do until then.

Now that we have used up almost all the stored energy of the past millions of years, we are turning to biofuels to use that solar energy immediately as it is produced. Sunlight comes from the sun, plants convert it to stored energy in the form of carbohydrates and sugars, and instead of letting the heat and pressure of the earth convert it to oil over millions of years, we ferment it into ethanol or digest it into methane directly in a matter of days.

The question is whether the earth has enough capacity (farmland) to produce all the food we need to eat and all the fuel we need to run our society. Probably not. We are either going to starve or run out of gas --- especially if we try to grow our fuel the same way we grow our food.

That's why I think it is more important to focus on using WASTE biomass to produce fuel, rather than use food crops. We can't grow both, so we should grow food and use the waste from that process to make fuel.

Also, we need to use other forms of energy other than biofuel. Biofuel is mostly attractive because it uses a similar infrastructure to what we already have in place. But using plants to make fuel out of sunlight is not the most efficiant way to harness the power of sunlight. An acre of solar power station produces a lot more energy than an acre of fuel crops. Now that we have used up all of our "money in the bank" we'll ultimately need to go to solar power and come up with a different way to run our transportation off of solar electricity.

Even if we do manage to make that conversion, I'm not sure we haven't already exceeded the earth's carrying capacity with our enormous population. We may still have a collapse of our society and starve ourselves back down to a manageable population...