Growing plants just to use them for energy production is absolutely stupid and incredibly harmful, agreed. But there are types of biomass that are basically waste from food production or forestry. It's not a ton of energy, but it may play a part somewhere.

[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Two problems with that:

Niche energy production methods don't benefit from economies of scale, and may be cost-ineffective.
“Drill, baby, drill” thinking led us to this point with fossil fuels; it can be similarly disastrous with biomass. The availability of profitable biomass energy will likely tempt the rich to overuse it, resulting in an artificial global famine.