Comments on: Italy, not biofuels hold back EU energy deal

Biofuel deadlock put to rest, but other issues prevent the EU from sealing the green energy deal.

[Hunnter2k3]

I'm glad they blocked it, i don't want to see this nonsense propagate much further than it already has.

These biofuels are just as bad, if not worse than oils, gases and the like.

More research should be done with hydrogen power, there is plenty of water out there, enough to improve on solar, and maybe even figure out something else entirely.

[ipashchuk]

Since when CO2 is a pollutant? Photosynthesis (i.e. the producer of everything green) doesn't work without it... They should focus on the real pollutants -- do they not know that non-human-produced CO2 acccounts for more than 99.9% of all CO2 produced on Earth?

[Joe Real]

It becomes a pollutant when its concentration far exceeded the concentration of a well balanced global ecosystem that has been in equilibrium with the nromal concentration of CO2 before the industrial revolution. Too much CO2 compared to pre-industrial revolution era were released from the burning of fossil fuels which otherwise would have been trapped forever, and the cascading global temperature increases which triggers the release of methane and other carbon trapped in the peat bogs of the tundra's permafrost. The higher concentration increased the acidity of the world's ocean as it absorbs carbon dioxide forming carbonic acid, which wreaked havoc on many marine ecosystems. The devastations of the coral reefs the world over, the expansion of the dead zone or the oxygen depleted zones of the vast areas of oceans, how can you not call these pollutions?

Likewise, we are currently experiencing massive extinction of the species and diversity of flora and fauna. The timberlines have expanded upwards, many species have grown higher in elevations due to global climatic changes that was triggered by too much carbon participating in the active carbon circulation.

Yes, indeed carbon dioxide is needed for crops to produce fruits and there are some significant increases in carbon dioxide that some of our food crops have yielded better, but many plants are going extinct as well and some weeds went rampant too. Many plant species came and established where they are not supposed to, causing a lot of ecological disturbances. Can we afford all of these and call carbon dioxide a non-pollutant?

Yes, earth has experienced the global increase of carbon dioxide in eons past, that was accompanied by massive extinctions eliminating more than 90% of the previous species. Earth has no problem resurrecting back from those troubled times. Earth will equilibriate later when let alone, but I hope it doesn't eliminate mankind in the process.

[Hunnter2k3]

@ Joe
I wouldn't say Earth is in a balanced system, it is balanced enough to the extent where it isn't "hell". (not the fire and brimstone hell, hell in the real sense)
Plus, what exactly is balanced in this context anyway?
Quite a few of the parameters change on a daily basis. In fact, gravity is pretty much the only real constant, even the sun is in ever changing moods.

But personally, i don't think humans will be wiped out if it comes to the next ice age, humans are smarter than most species that have come before.
We can go to planets, we can build buildings as high as you can see, reach almost any corner of the Earth.
I'm sure we could protect ourselves if it came to it.
"Cold war" bunkers actually require more to survive than an ice-age bunker ever would, which kind of puts it into perspective.
As long as we can generate energy in these underground complexes, we will survive.
They just have to be smart about designing them to prevent disease outbreaks and the like.

Hopefully, when the time comes, we will have enough DNA from all life on Earth so that nothing is lost forever, that would be saddening. (There are several of those projects as well, private from what i know)
The sea is the most worrying, since we have barely scratched the surface with sea life.

[Joe Real]

@Hunnter2k3: I agree that I have to clarify the context of balance. Balanced can be conceptualized as a steady state and changes are incremental, when new speciation and extinction tend to balance each other out, where the global variations in climate and other disturbances tend to average each other out in the short geological time and space scale. Our accelerated use of fossil fuels and the subsequent loading of the atmosphere with anthropogenic chemicals is one ecological perturbation of cataclysmic global proportion that has happened and whose chain reaction effects we are witnessing now.

Yes I still have faith that humans won't be wiped out if only fossil fuels were to be the sole culprit of our demise. We will survive the carbon pollution and able to fix it, with our ingenuity and intellect (pending nanite invasions, overwhelming asteroid impacts and perhaps development of super germs that are then stolen by extremists to wipe us all out as the more likely cause).

[dbargen]

And more power to them. If and when these green 'investments' fail, there should be an escape from legislation locking business into a path that throws money down the drain. As socialistic as many of the EU nations tend to be, it's good to see some pragmatism somewhere on this particular front.

If these measures had any real possibility of succeeding in the market right now, there wouldn't need to be some misguided government fiat forcing their use.

Let's just count how many times central planning has succeeded and failed...

[LeezKoo]

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[zhogfan]

Sorghum cane will be a big part of ethanol, grows on any kind of ground, requires very little pesticides, herbicides, and less water and fertilizer than corn.