Growing human populations and changing dietary consumption patterns create additional demands and stresses on the existing agricultural land base. Concurrently, biofuel production is emerging as a serious competitor for agricultural land and water use. The climate change implications of these alternative land-use strategies are complex. This presentation will explore the climate trade-offs associated with using land and water for food or biofuel. Some suggest ethanol produced from corn grain and cellulosic biomass, like grasses, could replace much of the oil used in U.S. Consider when 20% of the U.S. corn crop was converted into 6 billion gal of ethanol, but this ethanol replaced only 1% of U.S. oil consumption. If the entire corn crop had been used, it would replace a mere 7% of current oil consumption! Currently ethanol production, which depends on 23 fossil energy inputs, requires 143% more fossil energy than is produced in the corn ethanol. Because significantly more energy is utilized in producing corn ethanol, this ethanol system is contributing significantly to the global climate change problem. Cellulosic biomass is the new promise for ethanol. To do this, cellulosis biomass would require 2 to 5 times more biomass and hence more land than corn grain to produce ethanol. Further, more than 170% more energy (oil and gas) is required to produce ethanol from cellulosic biomass than is in the ethanol produced. To secure sufficient cellulosic biomass some suggest harvesting all crop residues plus 80% of all other biomass in crops, grasslands, and forests to produce cellulosic ethanol. This would be the equivalent of mowing and harvesting all U.S. vegetation produced each year just for ethanol. The environmental impacts of all ethanol production are serious and diverse. The water required for each gallon of ethanol are1,700 gallons of water (mostly to grow the corn) and releases into the environment 12 gallons of noxious sewage effluent from the fermentation process. Of major significance is that producing biofuels is significantly increasing global climate change. Using food crops, such as corn grain, to produce ethanol raises diverse nutritional and ethical concerns. Growing crops for fuel squanders the very land, water, and energy resources vital for the production of food for people. The President of the World Bank reports that biofuels have increased world food prices 75%. Jacques Diouf, Director General of the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization reports that using food crops for biofuels is increasing world human starvation. Nearly 60% of humans in the world now are currently malnourished, so the need for grains and other basic foods is critical. Energy specialists project that peak oil have already been reached and there are only about 50 to 60 years of oil remaining. Slowly oil supplies will decline until the oil exhausted. This will curtail food production because the human food supply currently depends primarily on oil to maintain a highly productive agriculture.