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Small world syndrome: the owners of the restaurant where I spent three nights last week just bought an old Mercedes diesel for $1500 and outfitted it to run on vegetable oil (for $800 more). They’ll get free fryer fat from neighboring restaurants. The point is, being “part of the solution” in this case does not represent a huge investment, as might, for example, buying a new hybrid. (While I think hybrids are an improvement over traditional internal-combustion-only vehicles, they still burn refined fossil fuels, and thus are inferior to, not to mention more expensive than, biodiesels.)
British correspondent Ade Rixon wrote in to describe a roadblock to the greasecar movement in the UK: the government taxes fuel, and considers it a serious crime for citizens to burn any fuel that has not been taxed: Sniffing out unusually fragrant exhaust fumes, highway patrols have already collared several dozen offenders, who save more than 40p a litre by diverting oil from the kitchen cupboard to under the bonnet. So you can burn cooking oil, but you risk spending seven years in prison if you do.
I know of no such laws here in the US, although I would not be surprised to learn that it’s buried in the so-called Patriot Act, which among other surveillance measures gives federal agents access to customer data from bookstores and libraries, as if domestic terrorists could be identified by their reading lists.
Anyway, bitter sarcasm aside, I had a depressing email exchange with someone last week on the topic of alternative energy sources. It started with that message that’s been bouncing around about boycotting oil companies that buy from Iraq. I responded that I’d rather they drill in the middle east than offshore California (e.g. 15 minutes from my house) or in an Alaskan wildlife preserve — and that the best solution, in my opinion, is to reduce consumption because then we need not worry so much where the oil comes from. She wrote back to accuse me of being a nimbyist (“not in my back yard”) which is true enough, but still an easy condemnation for her considering she doesn’t live anywhere near a proposed drilling site.
She continued, “But the fact of the matter is that gas/oil is a necessity. I wish that it were not, but it is. I hope there will come a day when we don’t rely on it for our transportation or to heat our homes. However, that day will probably not come in my lifetime.”
That’s just so wrong. Certainly the easy solution for her is to drive a gas-powered car and use oil-based heating, but by no means is that a “necessity.” I suggested a number of alternatives, e.g. electric heat, solar power, wind power, motorcycles, diesels, hybrids, electric cars, Segways… and she wrote back, “You must be living in a different world than I do.”
Well, I guess maybe I do. At least I’m looking for answers rather than trying to convince others, in the face of the evidence, that no answers exist.
What scares me about this is her blindness to facts, her closed-mindedness to the death spiral we’re in due to dependence on (foreign) oil, the damage to the environment we do every day with these “easy” answers, and of course the fact that she votes.
