Another in a continuing explanation, trying to get the concept across that turning biomass into fuel and burning it in a car is not carbon neutral.  I've tried this hundreds of times and I've yet to see someone actually understand it.  Here it goes again.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/17/12447/1102#8

No it's not
"It's one carbon cycle."

To grow that biomass for the fuel that you think provides a clean carbon cycle, plant matter that would normally die and return to the soil is instead burned.  The natural carbon cycle is interrupted.

And there goes your fuel's carbon neutrality.

The dead wood or grass that poses a fire hazard in these times of GHG drought and firestorm emergency could be put into biodigestors.  No more fire hazard.  Similarly with weed and algae overgrowth in water ways, the biogas could be turned into clean kwh to back up a renewable power grid.

With fertilizer and manure run off acting on dead plant matter from weed overgrowth, methane is released, a 23 times worse GHG than CO2.  If the weeds are instead digested and used for clean energy and to produce organic fertilizer, GHG is saved several ways.

Chemical fertilizer releases huge amounts of GHG from fossil fuels in the manufacture, transport, and application.  It is also destroying farm economics, leading to financial failure of family farms.

Organic ag and energy policy can go together to make farm waste biogas, solar, and wind farms a whole new source of farm income and inexpensive GHG free energy for consumers.

Gas guzzling agrichem crops that destroy the carbon sink activity of the living soil will never lower gas prices with fuel farming.  And produce twice the GHG of oil with  corn based ethanol, and one and a half times the GHG for cellulosic ethanol.

By going to organic farming, using the byproduct fertilizer from biodigestion, the living soil ecosystem is bolstered and plant growth is vastly accelerated.  Healthier soil yeilds healthier plants that in turn capture more CO2 converting it to plant biomass that is then treturned to the soil.

Prairie soil was 20 feet thick, storing millenia of carbon extracted from the atmosphere when sodbusters started plowing it.  Now it is gone, chemical farming has released those millenia of stored carbon with harsh chemical fertilizer burning it out of the soil.  And no more is stored.