Green Dilemma: Food or Fuel?

---by Micheal

Another example of not getting to have our cake and eat it too, is the problem of biofuels and food. Yes, converting from non-renewable crude oil to bio-fuels has merits, but as we're discovering, to simply divert a big chunk of agricultural resources to fuel means a decrease in food for an already hungry world.

A quick look at basic statistics shows the problem. There are 6.6 billion people in the world. There are about 7.7 billion arable acres in the world. That's only a little over an acre of farm land per person. In pre-industrial times, it took around 4 acres to grow food to sustain one person. Industrial farming has dramatically improved that ratio, but it can only be pushed so far. Factor in how yields vary from year to year and not all land remains equally productive, and you can see how we're already living on the edge.

To take a chunk of that 1 acre per person out to raise bio-fuels pushes things to the brink. Biofuels are not a simple answer.

Another example of the food vs fuel conundrum shows up in Spiess's first green counterinutitive: Live in large cities. Living in very dense clusters (on the order of Manhattan) will free up once-sprawled land, but it only adds to the problem of bringing food to all those millions living in the concrete canyons. Their food must by hauled in to them. That takes more fuel. You gain some land, but increase fuel requirements. Dense urbanization helps one problem, but generates another.

There are no simple easy answers. Beware who say there are. They're either naive, or after your wallet.