corporate biofuel mostly sucks,cutting down rainforests for palm etc, but used vegoil& hemp, plus oil from trees like chinese tallow,coconut & olives can offer hope,especially as with trees you dont have to cut them down to yield crop. Fuel from Microalgae which has 7 to 30 times more oil than top land crop Tallow, some companies are starting to use it which is good, even better for people & planet if they were in cooperative hands but its a start.
Biochar is a great "neutral" biofuel,originated in Brazil & recently promoted by transition town Nottingham.

Question is do biofuels cause as much air pollution as fossil?especially airplanes in upper atmosphere, Virgin & now Boeing investing in Biofuel.

Our movement did a lot to promote biofuels, if we arent careful many people will just view us as moaning whingers

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algaculture

Here's for a truelly revolutionary WSF without dictators!

surely biofuels from purpose-built plantations are infinitely better than illegal and immoral oil wars?

"corporate biofuel mostly sucks,cutting down rainforests for palm etc, but used vegoil& hemp, plus oil from trees like chinese tallow,coconut & olives can offer hope,especially as with trees you dont have to cut them down to yield crop."

yes, i agree that cutting down rainforests for palm is out of the question. is that what is happening? i don't believe it. surely biofuels are the solution we need, but to get those fuels from a sustainable source such as those you suggest.

yes, please, don't make yourselves out to be whingers.

There is a world of difference between taking a concentrated resource you already have e.g. waste vegetable oil, papermill black liquor waste, food waste, manure, tallow, and turning it into energy and turning large areas of land over to produce liquid fuels.

As I understand it, algae only achieve those high yields if CO2 is pumped through e.g. from a power station, cement works; Simgae (google this, system now co-owned by Shell) claims to work with a CO2 tank and cheap polytube components, although it could turn out an unsightly land-use as with polytunnels and greenhouses.

Big problem with agrofuels (transport fuels from large scale crops excluding algae) or veg-oils used for large-scale power generation is that world's land is very limited and these are extremely inefficient ways to use land for CO2 mitigation, so biofuel obligations cause all sorts of impacts - food prices, hunger, human displacement, rainforest destruction - for very little return. Another perspective is they are a very expensive way to mitigate, so adding to the recession for very little return. They achieve far less mitigation than reafforestation of the same land or growing solid fuel to replace coal, though again limited scope for those things now with our food shock.

The future is electric, see recent post on APPGOGO. We should not set out to replace one set of problems (blood oil, oil emissions) with whole new sets of problems (agrofuels, coal-to-liquids, emissions-heavy tar sands/shales extraction, ANWR)

In Indonesia huge areas of forest are cleared with bulldozers for oil palms, this is well-documented, shown on BBC docus in the last year, also noted by Reuters with an aerial news picture still and various other still photos online. Where grown on deep peatland, the drained peat emits 30x more CO2 than oil palms can save producing biodiesel. Another major crop grown on peatland is acacias, producing paper that again undercuts paper from elsewhere e.g. northern forestry but the peat still emits far more CO2 than the acacias sequester. See Monbiot.com articles on biofuels.

With land now at a premium, it isn't clear if any new agrofuel development will help against climate change at all considering the deforestation or ploughing of grassland likely to be caused somewhere else in the world and the consequential CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions from disturbing these carbon stocks. Amazon deforestation has again surged thanks to high commodity prices.