Virgin Flies Biofueled Jet

Virgin Atlantic's 747 takes off at London's Heathrow Airport headed for Amsterdam for the first Bio-fuel flight by an airline from Britain, Sunday Feb. 24, 2008 (AP Photo/PA, Steve Parsons)

(AP) -- Virgin Atlantic carried out the world's first flight of a commercial aircraft powered with biofuel on Sunday in an effort to show it can produce less carbon dioxide than normal jet fuels.

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3.4/5 after 14 votes

• roomend - Feb 24, 2008
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  Anyone questioning the environmental benefits of biofuels should have their scientific degree revoked. The carbon emissions from biofuels are taken out of the atmosphere by the next generation of plants, creating a cycle. Burning fossil fuels just puts old CO2 back in the atmosphere with no compensating effect. The reason why life as we know it exists is becuase that CO2 was locked away in the carboniferous era.
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• Buck21 - Feb 24, 2008
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  Roomend, Your logic only works if you are stuffing plants directly into the fuel tanks. You have to harvest the plants, transport them to a processing facility, refine them into fuel, transport the fuel, re-till the soil, and then sew new plants. All of this takes energy, energy from another source. Combine this with the fact that biofuels are less efficient per volume than fossil fuels, and your equation of "carbon out equals carbon in" just doesn't hold up. Then of course you have the land clearing issues, what does it do to the carbon balance if you have to clear cut South American rainforest to make more farming land for the sugar cane used to make biofuel? Should this be studied before we implement it on mass? Or should we still all have our science degrees revoked?
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• mikiwud - Feb 25, 2008
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  Right-on Buck21.
  also take into account the food crops not grown because bio-fuel corn and sugar crops are more profitable.This is forcing prices of animal and human food up,perhaps roomend had noticed but not realised why.
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• roomend - Feb 26, 2008
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  Why not power the harvesters from biofuel? why not transport the plants to the processing units using bio fueled cars? Use bio fuel to power the farming equipment and processing plant. There is more than enough land to plant without cutting down forests if we use hardier plants like hemp, instead of corn or sugar cane. Hemp can grow in nearly any environment, such as the baren hills of morocco, and be planted over and over again on the same land year after year. Henry ford made a car completely out of hemp and it was fueled by hemp oil. If we put the last 50 years into developing his idea instead of digging up old oil than who knows what the possibilities would have been.
  
  Who cares about profits when you can't breath? Who cares about profits when the whole globe is iced over?
  
  And yes, still revoke their degrees.
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