David's Comments

The problem with a Carbon Tax is that you wouldn't necessarily know what price level to set the tax at. Or more importantly have the political will to do so.

Now if you had a Cap-and-Trade, but with No Offsets, and Full Auction of Permits, which are both bankable and tradable.

Then you'd have no wiggle room for corruption of the system.

There would of course be corruption on what to do with the money collected, but frankly there needs to be some pork in the bill to buy off enough votes for it to pass in the Senate.

The key part is that the price setting, and collection system are kept intact.

Actually,
If you think about it, Solar Thermal evaporates water.
Both in process water, and in cooling water.

If you could recapture some of that water, you would have clean potable water to sell.

Now if a Solar Thermal plant could find a good way to team up with a local waste water treatment plant. They could create an additional revenue stream, as well as get access to an inexpensive water supply.

In short,
"Food Resource Scarcity"

ALL BioFuels it all comes down to limitations in:
1. Fertilizers (Phosphorous/Potassium, and to a lesser extent Nitrogen)
2. Topsoil / Farmland
3. Fresh water

Just by using those resources we are adding to the scarcity of those resources.

The basic resources by which all food production depends on.

_

Certainly biofuels aren't the primary cause of food resource scarcity.
(The low end argues only 3-10%, high-end 30% of the food price increase.)
However biofuels don't even fuel 1% of the world's transportation yet.

If biofuels are supposed to dramatically alter transportation fuels.
It would be impossible for them not to have a dramatic impact on food resource scarcity.

Even if the results are correct.
We're paying nearly 90 cents per gallon in subsidies.
http://greyfalcon.net/truecostofethanol.png

So I'd hardly call 40 cents a savings.

Clean Water, Topsoil, Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium
Thats what it all comes down to.
And there isn't enough of it.

Especially in a place like China which has 4x the US's population, but 6x less farmland.

Waterless solar thermal? Yes.
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/pdfs/2007/dersch_dry_cooling.pdf

Especially when we are talking about this type.
http://greyfalcon.net/csp

To back up some of the commenters here.
http://greyfalcon.net/hydrogen2.png
http://greyfalcon.net/hydrogen4.png
http://greyfalcon.net/hydrogen3.png
http://greyfalcon.net/hydrogen2
http://greyfalcon.net/hydrogen3
http://www.efcf.com/reports/E11.pdf
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448648,00.html

==The powers to be are replacing batteries in their machines with H.F.C.'s quicker than you can say the word HYDROGEN.==
I call BS.
http://www.posicharge.com/ford.html
http://www.posicharge.com/5-0.html
(Tower Automotive is a posicharge customer, and creates parts for nearly every significant car manufacturer you can think of)
http://www.towerautomotive.com/customers

Well, I'll get back to this thread, however here's for starters.

Searchinger's response to Wang, etc:
http://www.bioenergywiki.net/images/3/31/Searchinger_Response.pdf

Remind me, since when did conventional energy sources, and transportation systems NOT receive gobs of public funding?

http://greyfalcon.net/fossiltaxes.png
http://greyfalcon.net/energyresearch.png

Not suprisingly, Robert Perlack is an author of the study.
http://greyfalcon.net/perlack

Also not suprisingly, they are tiptoing around the point that the US feedstock supply is insufficient.
http://greyfalcon.net/biolimits.png

Good thing that non-grandfathered Nuclear and Coal cost more than Renewables.

http://greyfalcon.net/costlycoal

http://greyfalcon.net/costlycoal2

http://greyfalcon.net/costlynuclear

Frankly, who cares if it's "non-food"?

What the real problem is the scarcity of arable land, water, and non-nitrogen-fertilizers. 

Coskata for instance publically admits to these scarcity limitations, and points out that Coal-to-Liquids and Cellulosic Technologies are absolutely one in the same.  And that there is no scarcity problem with Coal as the feedstock.

I wouldn't say it's prudent to scale up Coal-to-Liquids Infrastructure, with the pretense that it will be run all on scarce biomass resources. (Especially when that's a rather hollow pretense)

Then again, thats yet another layer of externalities which the DOE fails to publically acknowledge.

Here's some of my sources.

http://energybulletin.net/40300.html
http://seekingalpha.com/article/33925-natural-gas-investors-to-benefit-from-global-ethanol-boom
http://greyfalcon.net/biolimits.png
http://greyfalcon.net/coskata
http://stopbp-berkeley.org/CellulosicBiofuels.pdf
http://greyfalcon.net/cellulosics
http://greyfalcon.net/peaksoil

Hah, speak of the devil.

EIA Forecasts Significant Shortfall in Cellulosic Biofuel Production Compared to Target Set by Renewable Fuel Standard

Darn facts getting in the way of policy.

And yet, not really that different in results.
What it all comes down to is various forms of incinerators.
http://greyfalcon.net/cellulosics.png

And not different at all, with their broad interpretation of what counts as "waste".
http://greyfalcon.net/perlack
http://greyfalcon.net/peaksoil