[wizardofdos]

3) you contribute to loss of biodiversity through increased land use for intensive farming (monoculture, high chemical use)

4) co2 balance of those 'biofuels' is way worse than fuels refined from extracted fossil fuels

5) additional supply of these fuels lowers fuel prices thereby slowing shift to renewable energy sources (i.e. renewable electricity)

6) simply paying farmers for fallow fields is a much simpler solution to the problem

[ajsnigrutin]

I agree with the first points, but if you pay farmers not to farm, you'll get farmers who don't farm, you'll get farmers with more fields that they can use (because they'll have fields for 100% of what they can produce + extra ones for governments money), and you'll get speculative investors investing in empty fields to collect money.

So, when shit hits the fan, you have farmers who can't increase production, because they don't have the resources, and you get speculative investors who jump ship, plus a lot of empty fields and hungry citizens, revolution, guillotines, etc.

If those areas are now producing crops, you have a guarantee, that the farmer can actually handle those fields, that the equipment is in working order, you know how much they can produce, and all it takes is just to switch the corn for eg. ethanol to corn fit for humans to eat.

[Dylan16807]

> co2 balance of those 'biofuels' is way worse than fuels refined from extracted fossil fuels

By what metric? You get out much more energy than you put in. And when we're talking about keeping farms active, that land wasn't going to be doing something significantly better wrt carbon if the subsidy didn't exist.

[wikfwikf]

4 & 5 are simply nonsense.

3 does not really apply in France. There are extensive swathes of country which are hugely monocultured already with food crops. At the same time small farming, economically uncompetitive types of farming, and other forms of land stewardship are extensively supported by the state in various ways. The question of monoculture is much more complicated than to think that growing rape for biodiesel is going to remove biodiversity.