One interesting option that is currently being used in Asia is dendro power– typically fast-growing trees grown on the site of a small generator, which converts the wood to methanol and uses that as a fuel to generate power. The fast-growing trees create a self-sustaining system, but it’s still somewhat costly (so far). However, one article says a Sri Lankan sugar company has applied to make 25 MW of electricity out of sugar cane waste.

Famine is just a total political failure!!!!!!!!!

Fanie Brink
Managing Director
Biofuels Industry Development (Pty) Ltd.
South Africa.
+27 82 573 5661

The world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, but it does not do so in the right places. Feeding people requires transportation as well as agriculture. Relying on cropland for all our energy needs as well as food will certainly exeed its capacity.

What it comes down to, really, is that there are not enough resources on the planet to support the human population in what we would consider a reasonable state. And to raise them up to a standard of living we would find acceptable in the U.S…. well, it’s impossible using the energy available now, much less in an economy of shrinking energy resources. (What we consider poverty here in the United States looks an awful lot like middle class in some other parts of the world.) Ultimately the answer is that we need fewer people. And, though Malthus’s math was wrong, his principle was correct: if humanity does not regulate itself, Nature will do it for us– and odds are we won’t like her solution very much.

I’m reminded of something Mohandas Gandhi said, when a reporter asked him if he expected to bring India’s population up tio the living standard of the U.K. He replied that Britain had achieved its standard of living by using the resources of half the world. For India to reach that standard, it would need several planets like this one.