Robert C. Brown, distinguished professor of mechanical engineering and distinguished professor at the Center for Sustainable Environmental TCH, said biofuels are of growing need in global agriculture today.

Brown discussed the need in a lecture, “Why are we producing biofuels?” Monday night.

“It’s our best chance for achieving national goals, and those national goals include enhanced national security, improving environmental quality, increase markets for agricultural crops, and advances is rural development,” Brown said.

Brown said we need to find ways to use solar energy to provide food and fuel in a sustainable manner.

“In 90 minutes there is more sunlight hitting the planet than is consumed by all of society in a year,” Brown said.

However, he said, the big challenge is finding ways to efficiently harness and use this solar energy.

Brown said the production of biofuels can be looked at two different ways: One that has a negative impact on the world, and the other that has a positive impact.

“There are two views: The first view is that the bioeconomy will hurt the developing world for two reasons: Competition for land will increase food prices and contribute to world hunger, and farmers of the developing world will burn down rain forests to replace loss food import, causing net increases in greenhouse gas emissions,” Brown said.

An example Brown gave forecasted what would happen if farmers in the United States stopped producing corn for food and started producing for ethanol instead.

“If a farmer in the U.S. stops selling grain for food production and sells it for ethanol production, then somewhere else in the world they’re going to have to grow that corn and it’s probably going to be rainforest that gets taken down,” Brown said.

The second view is farming will help the developing countries in the world.

“Farming will become powerful in the developing world because the price of grain will go up,” Brown said.

Brown also offered possible alternative energy sources to biofuels.

One of those included the use of petroleum, but there are things to take into consideration.

“There is a question of whether or not it makes sense for the U.S. to export its wealth to countries that do not have the democratic traditions we have,” Brown said. “The question is ‘Do we really want to depend on imported petroleum for our sources of energy?’”

Also, Brown touched on possibly reducing the use of energy because of the increased gas prices.

“It is possible that gasoline prices will get high enough that we will look at alternatives, and among those alternatives is simply reducing the amount of energy that we use, and I certainly logged it as something that we should be striving to do,” Brown said.

In the end, it is really about finding an appropriate energy carrier that will be beneficial to the entire world.

 “An energy carrier means something that is transportable enough, clean enough, portable enough that we could put it in our automobiles,” he said.