OPINION:
Biodiesel is just as much a ruse as ethanol (“Biodiesel tax credit needed to keep the Northeast warm,” Web, Dec. 17). The justification offered for it depends on creative accounting and a bucketful of lies.
Both ethanol and biodiesel come from monocrops. That form of agriculture eviscerates all life on a plot of land, both above and below the ground. The only way it works at all is with a substantial amount of fossil-fuel input via the Haber-Bosch process to provide the nitrogen for fertilizer. Of course, this only lasts so long, and given that nature or practically any ecological system abhors — and eventually destroys — a monocrop, you have to supply the pesticides and fungicides, not to mention constantly re-engineer the plant’s genetic makeup, to prevent it from being wiped out.
Biodiesel, like ethanol, is not renewable. The end result of this can be seen at the mouth of the Mississippi, where there is a dead zone the size of New Jersey. In fact, the biggest U.S. agricultural export is not grain; it is topsoil. What happens when the topsoil, as well as its microbes, is destroyed? Rainwater is not absorbed, and floods result. The land reverts to a desert — no plants, no animals, nothing resembling the ecological systems that preceded it and created and maintained the topsoil in the first place. In the past this meant the decline and eventual end of a civilization.
Biodiesel is not “green.” It is not sustainable. It is purely extractive in a way that is far worse than an ordinary oil well. It is a lie.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston, Va.
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