I would add to this discussion the amount of human labor that's
going to be involved just in feeding ourselves without fossil fuels
is going to be staggering. I've been attempting to grow a good
portion of my own food for several years now using manual bio-
intensive methods, and it's not easy! The idea that we're going to
be growing crops to make ethanol during the energy decline is really
preposterous. Maybe if the wealthy want to keep their cars they
will have human slaves to plow and harvest their energy crops for
them, like in the plantation days.

Tom

--- In AlasBabylon@yahoogroups.com, "davidsmi1" <davidsmi1@...>
wrote:
>
> Switchgrass appears to have become the darling of the ethanol
> cornucopians because the evidence against corn just became to big
to
> counter. They have sought to allay the problem of hydrocarbon based
> fertilizer input by imagining that they have found a crop that
doesn't
> need fertilizer. This is based on a fundamental misconception about
> prairie grasses. What made the top soil in our praries so deep and
> rich is hundreds/thousands of years of grasses growing, dieing and
> decaying. The huge amounts of organic input from the dead grasses
made
> it possible for the living grasses to continue. If you come in and
> start cutting down that grass every year and taking it away for
> ethanol production you are preventing it from being reintroduced
from
> the soil. The organic levels in the soil will drop and future
> generations of switchgrass will be smaller and weaker until
eventually
> the soil is so poor that it can no longer support the grass.
>
> Its been said before here. There is no free lunch. And until we
give
> up on that 20th century value that believes there is, we will
continue
> to put our selves in positions where catastrophe is inevitable.
>
> David