re: #124 Jack Burton, Gunner on Death Star of David

The energy comes from the sun.

I had a horrible feeling you were going to say something like that…

The gallon of gas you put in your car’s tank is energy that came from the sun too. It’s just it was ten million years of sunshine a hundred million years and more ago.

If you wanted to create enough algae-based or other biofuel to replace that gallon of gas, it would take more than a hundred square metres of sunlight on land to grow enough biomaterial in a day to provide the same amount of energy after processing, and that’s for just one gallon of gas. The US burns its way through 337 million gallons of gas each day according to the EIA.

You’re going to need a lot more sunlight and/or land or do without energy if you depend on biofuels, and energy poverty is at the heart of real poverty — food, clean water, housing, they all need energy and the poorest countries and poorest people are energy-poor.