Randall launches an anti-biofuel rant that sounds some of the points made here in Snake Oil as well as a few others.

. . . the push for biomass energy from Brazil and other equatorial countries is leading to huge CO2 emissions as forests get ripped down and burned. A lot of this is happening to feed a growing population of humans. Also, Asian industrialization is increasing the amount of spending money people have for food and so Chinese, Indians, and others are spending more on types of foods (e.g. meats) that require more land usage to produce. This increases food imports by these countries and forest destruction by food exporters.

Making a bad trend even worse, some Westerners who pose as environmentalists are promoting biomass energy usage. Well, because of the CO2 released by rainforest clearing equatorial region biomass production expansion causes a net boost in CO2 emissions. So people who worry about global warming and therefore advocate biodiesel are not just wiping out species (and I'm not trying to belittle the importance of this problem). They are increasing atmospheric concentrations of a gas whose rise they view as a big problem. . .

The oil production plateau and decline are going to increase the destruction of rainforests for a few reasons:

• The demand for biomass energy will rise as the price of oil rises. Huge areas of land will get shifted into sugar cane and other biomass energy crops.
• Yield per acre will stagnate and decline as the cost of fertilizer (made from fossil fuels) rises. So more acres will be put into production to compensate.
• Rising costs of pumping water will reduce the amount of water available for irrigation and therefore reduce yield per acre and therefore increase land usage for farming. Increased demand for water for hydroelectric power might exert a similar effect.

His main gripe was about the clearing of Indonesian rain forest and peat lands for palm oil plantations.

They contain an estimated 14.6bn tonnes of carbon and their destruction would release the equivalent of total global greenhouse gas emissions for a year.

Greenpeace claims the burning of Indonesia's peatlands and forests releases 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gases annually - equal to four per cent of the global total - even though it occupies 0.1 per cent of the land on Earth.

A cheap and effective way to reduce GHGs would be to simply pay Indonesia to stop producing palm oil. That's an extreme example, but other biofuel systems are also bad for the environment.

Still, there are some misconceptions in Randall's rant of the same sort that have resulted in the biofuel dilemma. Environmentalist myths exploited by governments and entrepreneurs are harmful to the environment.

One of those myths is that yield per acre will stagnate or even decline due to lack of fertilizer because it is made from fossil fuels. This is so misleading that it is false. One of the sixteen primary and secondary nutrients needed for plant growth, mineral nitrogen, can be made from fossil methane - natural gas - but that isn't the first or only way to do this. It has been done that way for several decades because methane is a cheap feedstock used as a source of hydrogen for ammonia synthesis. Ammonia is NH3 and methane is CH4. However, plants need nitrate, NO3, or ammonium NH4. Soil bacteria can finish the job of conversion, but there are nitrogen losses in the process. That's OK when it is cheap, but less so as prices rise.

But nitrates can be synthesized using water, H2O, as the hydrogen source. The nitrogen comes from the air which is mostly nitrogen gas, N2. It was done that way, using the Birkland-Eyde process, before the Haber-Bosch process using methane was invented. With cheap methane Haber-Bosch out competed Birkland-Eyde. Even Norsk Hydro, the company that Birkland and Eyde founded to make nitrates, licensed the Haber-Bosch process and used it to make their nitrogen fertilizer.

The real issue is energy. Birkland-Eyde used hydro-electric power from remote Norwegian hydro facilities. They had plenty of electricity but no grid to get the power to population centers. Using it on site to make industrial chemicals which could be more easily shipped to town was smart. We have other such situations. Geothermal energy in Iceland is an example. They can make plenty of electricity but can't ship it to customers. They also have plenty of water and air so they could make nitrates if the price is right. In short, the energy issue and the nitrate issue are linked, as environmentalists claim in their muddled way, but fossil fuels are irrelevant except in an economic sense. A dearth of cheap and abundant fossil methane will not result in a decline in agricultural production, it will result in yet another change in industrial technologies for nitrate production.

A similar confusion exists about the production and consumption of meats as population rises and development proceeds. As with nitrates it all depends on how the product is produced. Not all meats are equal. The claim is that meat "require[s] more land usage to produce" than equivalent calories from vegetation. This is only meaningful if you assume that all vegetation is equal. It's not. People can't eat grass and weeds but ruminants can and do. Chickens and pigs can't live on grasses either. They, like humans, have inefficient digestive systems that require high energy and easily digestible foods such as grain and, ummm, meat. They love bugs for example. Yum.

Lands kept in permanent pasture and grazed in a well managed way by ruminants such as cattle, goats, sheep etc. are better for the environment than field and row crops. And, it can be done on lands ill suited to cropping in any case, though it's a benign alternative to cropping on all land. The well managed bit is important since it can result in high production and environmental benefits such as biodiversity and carbon sequestration.

When we couple these known methods of managing agricultural systems for efficiency and environmental benefits with those expected to develop in near future, such as improved plant varieties, the grim equations penned by various environmental scolds are just wrong. It isn't that we don't have energy and land issues, it's that they have answers. The task is to get cracking at implementing them rather than wringing our hands and wailing about doom. When we solve the energy issue, which we must do for any number of reasons, we also solve the agriculture issue. Even fresh water can be produced in abundance if we have abundant energy. Our planet is blessed with surpluses of every ingredient for life. All we have to do is make relatively simple refinements, such as purifying water or synthesizing nitrates from air and water.

The issue is energy and the skill to use it effectively. In a way that means that the ultimate issue is knowledge, which is growing at an ever faster rate. We are rich and getting richer at an increasing rate as more and better educated people come online. The population bomb is also a knowledge explosion. You do the math.