Reply #5: Sorry, but no.

[GliderGuider]

I take a hard line on biofuels as a class. Beyond the competition with food for land, water, fertilizer and human production/distribution effort, what about the deforestation that is routine for making currently unused lands suitable for biofuel production, as in the Malaysia and Indonesian palm oil plantations? What about the biodiversity loss that results from planting "previously unproductive land" to monoculture fuel crops? There is no way to introduce a dirt-grown high yield fuel crop "without major impacts on wildlife and ecosystems", period full stop.

Algae is not ready for prime time yet, and is unlikely to be ready within the next two decades. There are serious problems with productivity in closed reactors and contamination by wild species in open ones. The theoretical yields look nice, but nobody has demonstrated a practical process yet, let alone a commercial one.

In my considered opinion, biofuels, in anything but very small niche applications, are one of the worst "solutions" we've come up with so far, mainly because people are either unable or unwilling to see the whole biosphere - including humans - as a complex, interactive, interdependent system.