http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ngreene/pimentel_and_philpott_pile_on.html

Fighting the (farm fueled) gas guzzling that men do!  NRDC, evil or merely misguided, you be the judge.  Here the forces from Gristmill take them on, including your own dangerous, agent of chaos, mwhahahahaha..hehey.  It's a gang fight blog style.  Look out!

Ahh, the main problem is that biofuels are not carbon neutral. It's going to be hard to get around that. It's a wrong assumption built into all calculations and arguments for biofuel.

When you remove biomass, convert it to fuel, and butn it, that biomass does not return to the soil and slowly give up some of it's carbon each year. Prairie soil was 20 feet thick with stored carbon.

Humans have burned that stored carbon with chemical fertlizer.

The carbon in food crops can be mainly returned to the soil as digested manure and biomass. But fuel crops don't return anything, all the carbon is released.

Conservation land sequesters all the carbon captured by the biomass. Prairie soil sequesters 1.8 tons per acre per year. When you mow the prairie grass, mainly switchgrass, convert it to fuel, and guzzle it in an internal combustion engine at 14% efficiency. The carbon is not sequestered.

Land is not created out of thin air for your much touted equation of carbon neutrality Nathaniel, it once had living soil and plants that removed CO2 and sequestered it, before chemical ag left it an inert chemical growing media.