This entry is intended to serve as an index to the three papers I’ve written on the topic of biofuels, and in particular how to derive a payback period for a biofuel crop. Such a consideration inevitably suggests that growing biofuels on a given plot of land is a bad idea. It’s just a question of how long there’s going to more global warming for if you grow biofuels than if you don’t – centuries in many cases.
A few months ago I outlined the argument in a systematic step-by-step manner in Biofuel Payback Periods (pdf) (5 sides plus footnotes).
My somewhat longer initial essay treatment a year ago, Biofuels Are Not the Answer (pdf) (6 sides plus footnotes), takes a slightly broader view.
I also last year produced a slightly more elaborate critique of the idea that biofuels displace fossil fuel use – The Displacement Fallacy (pdf) (just 1 side).
PS (26/6/08): Updated Biofuels Are Not the Answer after noticing some broken links in the footnotes. Version 1.1.1, rather than version 1.1, is now referenced.
