My only issue with this and other articles criticizing biofuels is that it is a generic statement encompassing all types of biofuels. I agree on the points being made about Corn Ethanol and cutting down rainforests in Brazil to put more land under cultivation of sugar cane ethanol.

However, switchgrass and be grown on marginal crop land, it is a perennial native prairie grass that is drought, insect and disease resistant. It does not require row plants or multiple passes on the crop land at the same level as corn. Corn requires subsoiling, tilling, fertilizing, row planting, insecticide spraying, harvesting, tilling crop wastes under, and rotating crop fields as the soil is spent. Then the harvest needs to be trucked to ethanol plants. Corn is a multi step process at the plant whereas switchgrass comes to the plant like baled hay. Switchgrass puts down deep roots and improves top soil structure. It grows to 8ft tall, yeilds the highest tonnage per acre for ethanol and because it is perrential it provides wildlife habitate.

The new breakthrough is biofuel generated by algae. The pilot program in Arizona has an algae "greenhouse" attached to a traditional power plant. The Plant air emission CO2 is pumped into the greenhouses. Algae uses CO2 and emits clean emmisions. In the process, there are daily harvests of biofuel. This is NOT in an of itself a fossil fuel intensive process.

In contrast, Corn ethanol is basically corporate welfare. If it didn't get government subsidies, it would not be cost competitive. The change from MTBE fuel additive to ethanol and the subsidies are making billionaire AgriCorps even richer as they have put land the equivalent size of California under corn ethanol production.