ISBN: 9781931498654 Year Added to Catalog: 2004 Book Format: Paperback Book Art: resources, bibliography, index Number of Pages: 6 x 9, 224 pages Book Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Old ISBN: 1931498652 Release Date: December 27, 2004
For a hundred years we’ve powered our lives the easiest possible way—by tapping into those pools of hydrocarbons left by the eons. That energy is highly concentrated, easily portable. It was just waiting there, for us to come along and scoop up, and so we did.
Now we’ve begun to realize that petroleum can’t be what we use to power our next century. Not only is the supply starting to dwindle, and hence get more expensive to extract (both in terms of money and blood), but it’s also become clear just what a high environmental price we’ve paid for the convenience. If nothing else, the news that our planet is likely to warm five degrees this century should be enough to set us looking for new paths.
Biodiesel is one of the most intriguing of those new possibilities. For ancient biology, compressed by the weight of time into petroleum, it substitutes present-day biology: crops of soybeans and rapeseed and maybe even algae, grown by present-day farmers, processed into a diesel fuel substitute that works just fine in modern Volkswagens and Mack trucks and school buses—even in the oil-burning furnace down in the basement. It is potentially a truly sweet solution, offering a new market for hard-pressed local farmers even as it begins to help solve some of our most pressing environmental problems. Greg Pahl’s book, though it is impeccably careful and well-documented, nonetheless brims over with a justified excitement at the possibility of this homegrown energy.
It also manages to raise the right questions (and raise them early enough) so that we can perhaps build a structure for this developing industry that serves local farmers and processors instead of simply corporate agribusiness giants: since this project is largely dependent on public funding for a jumpstart, that is not too much to ask. The proper scale is a key question—clearly, though, it’s somewhere between the guy in his garage brewing old fryer oil into fuel and the Cargills and Archer Daniels Midlands of the world simply adding energy to their portfolio. By tempering his enthusiasm with reality on these questions, Pahl does an enormous service to the future.
He’s also realistic about an important fact: biodiesel is not going to solve our energy and environment woes by itself. It might replace 10 or 20 percent of our current diesel fuel use. That’s good, but it’s not a silver bullet against global warming. There are no silver bullets—every solution, from new lightbulbs to windmills to solar rooftops to higher mileage standards to biodiesel is going to get us a few percentage points of the way to where we need to go. Energy of the future will be far more diffuse, and harder to gather, than the current concentrated pools of oil. It’s crucial that we recognize that fact and its key implication—that every ounce of effort put into new fuel supplies must be matched by an equal attention to conservation, to learning to live elegantly with less. This is completely possible—Europe, whose efforts on biodiesel Pahl chronicles in comprehensive fashion—manages to use about half as much energy per capita overall. And yet Europeans lead lives of civilized dignity.
This book excited me enormously. I can imagine the day when the schoolbuses on the rural rounds in my county run on the oilseed crops that their passengers can see out the window; when the ferries across Lake Champlain give off that slight French-fry whiff as they ply the waters; when the dairy farmers who are going broke raising milk have something else to grow. And when we can hold our heads a little higher, realizing that we’re taking new responsibility for the energy we use. Pahl is a visionary, but a visionary with his feet firmly planted in the soil. May his vision flower, and soon!
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