Currently airing on PBS, the American public broadcaster, is the Ken Burns’ documentary, The Dust Bowl, describing the ecological disaster that swept through the U.S. Midwest in the 1930s, a combination of bad agricultural practices accompanied by a decade-long drought. The bad

Biofuel Isn’t Something New Humanity discovered how to control fire hundreds of thousands of years ago with wood and dung our primary fuel sources. Tens of thousands of years ago our ancestors discovered that wood could be converted to charcoal. Peat fires to this day are still

Humanity has relied on biofuels since first mastering fire. Until the Industrial Revolution peat, wood, charcoal, whale oil, and plant oils represented the biofuels of choice. Fossil fuels began with coal. Fossil fuel crude oil and oil byproducts were a 19th century technical achievem