Wrong Question: Can Biofuels Be Carbon Friendly?

The Science Insider blog last week hosted an interesting debate between Tim Searchinger, Princeton visiting scholar, and John Sheehan, of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, regarding the recent policy proposal in the pages of Science by Searchinger et al. to “fix” the carbon accounting of biomass for bioenergy and biofuels [...]

Weekly Industrial and Environmental Bio Blog Roundup

This week we start off with a little Road Music, From Bluegrass to Switchgrass, from our colleagues at the Biofuels Center of North Carolina. They’ve put together a nice set of bluegrass pieces. To listen visit their web site.

Gas2.0 announces this week that BP could start selling biofuels in 2010, writing that,
“BP [...]

Road Music: From Bluegrass to Switchgrass

To get from here to there sometimes you need a little road music, and that’s just what the Biofuels Center of North Carolina is aiming to do. Earlier this week, according to Science in the Triangle,

a RTI Fellows Symposium,
“was held Monday and Tuesday at the University of North Carolina’s Friday Center [...]

Weekly Biofuels and Climate Change Blog Round Up

This week in the blogosphere in Industrial & Environmental Technology we start off with NASCAR. Yes that’s right NASCAR . Domestic Fuel.com quotes an article in USA Today about NASCAR,
“The concept might seem incongruous in a sport inherently tied to an internal combustion engine that many find synonymous with global warming, but [...]

Industrial and Environmental Biotech in the Blogosphere

This week we start off with a United Nations report that urges caution on biofuels. Green Inc, a New York Times blog writes,

“The study concluded that whether a biofuel is climate-friendly or not depends largely on whether it is based on crops or production residues. Biofuels of the latter category were generally considered beneficial [...]

Compounded Climate Accounting Errors

Timothy Searchinger, visiting scholar at Princeton University, Dan Kammen of the University of California Berkeley, David Tilman of the University of Minnesota and other authors from the Environmental Defense Fund published an interesting new proposal in the Policy Forum section of Science magazine today. The argument put forward is that “Replacing fossil fuels with bioenergy [...]

Weekly Blog Roundup

This week in the blogosphere there’s a lot of chatter about synthetic biology. The Columbia Journalism Review says that synthetic biology is still not a story. They cite a number of articles in a number of publications however they say,
“According to a recent poll, Americans know very little about synthetic biology, which seeks [...]

All Your Eggs in One Basket

Biofuels Digest reported this week that DoE Secretary Chu told attendees of an alternative energy conference, “If it were up to me, I would put every cent into electric cars.”
The following day, Biofuels Digest reported its own lifecycle analysis of E85 from corn and the Tesla electric car. According to the report, “cars running on [...]

Weekly Blog Roundup

This week in the blogosphere, attention students, according to the blog, smartplanet
“Did you know there’s an ongoing federal grant program for U.S. college and university students that are working on so-called “P3″ ideas? P3 stands for “People, Prosperity and the Planet,” which are concerns fundamental to ideas of sustainability.
“The money is given out by [...]

This Week in the Blogosphere

This week industrial biotechnology is a hot topic in the blogosphere. The WWF released a report,

“Industrial biotechnology has the potential to save the planet up to 2.5 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year and support building a sustainable future, a WWF report found.
As the world is debating how to cut dangerous emissions [...]