Mr. Green's July 1, 2006, Mailbag

Mr. Green loves hearing from his readers, whether they think he's a green guru or an eco-idiot. Periodically, he'll post some of his favorite exchanges online. To join an ongoing debate--or start a new one--e-mail mr.green@sierraclub.org.

Biodiesel Brouhaha

Hey Mr. Green, Your cynical response to Seth's query about the merits of running a Jeep Liberty on biodiesel was not encouraging. You sound more enthusiastic about hybrid SUVs, but what's so great about their 31 miles per gallon? You say that biodiesel is not "a nationwide solution." Duh! Do you believe that hybrids are? I propose that hybrids are overhyped, and you are one of the culprits. Biodiesel fits into a diverse approach, yet you dismiss it as a "pie-in-the-sky distraction," while citing conservation as a "realistic energy alternative." Indeed! Check it out: We get 45 mpg with our biodiesel Jetta (no conversion necessary). Conservation - fossil fuels = renewable resource + no war. More than 100 years ago, Mr. Diesel designed cars to run on peanut oil, which they did, until the "realists" came along. You calculate how many acres of soybeans would be required to "fall short of" our present gasoline consumption--a stupid equation. (And not thinking out of the box; hemp would be the ideal fuel source and good for so many other uses.) If you tout any SUV, you are promoting a non-conservationist lifestyle choice. I don't care if you agree with this, or even print it, but I challenge you to support driving diesel vehicles run on biofuel, at least as an important transitional choice that is greener than using gasoline. The fuel-saving vehicles you think we should encourage automakers to build already exist. --Morgantec in Santa Cruz, California

Hey Morgantec,
Actually, I think we agree on most points. I did tout biodiesel and concur that it's a fine fuel as long as the engines running on it are state-of-the art and don't emit lung-damaging microparticulates. What worries me, however, is that pinning unrealistic hopes on biodiesel and other alluring technical "fixes" (like hydrogen) causes people to ignore far more effective solutions to our criminal levels of energy consumption.

The danger of the widespread overselling of biodiesel was painfully apparent on a recent 60 Minutes broadcast about Democratic Montana governor Brian Schweitzer's proposal to convert his state's coal into synthetic liquid fuels. One of his opponents countered, "We've got all that land there that can be used to produce biofuels. There's a better way, that's what I'm saying." Schweitzer responded by noting, correctly, that if Montana "replaced all the acres of wheat, corn, and soybeans that we export across America, it would only replace 15 percent of the diesel demands in this country. Do the math. It's not enough." (Especially since diesel demands make up a mere fraction of our total fuel consumption.) That good ol' oil boy Dick Cheney might have had a laugh if he watched because it showed how unrealistic thinking about energy can backfire.

Although we Americans are infatuated with new technological fixes, commonsense conservation and efficiency measures are the quickest, cheapest ways to cut energy consumption. Efficient mass transit would substantially reduce the number of cars on the road and the amount of fuel burned in all engines--as would strict yet realistic fuel-economy regulations, such as doubling the miles-per-gallon requirement. Billions more gallons could be saved by the universal implementation of some relatively simple lifestyle changes, including increasing the use of fluorescent lamps, flash water heaters, push lawnmowers, bicycles, and clotheslines; optimally weatherizing all buildings; heating and cooling our homes to less extreme degrees; and mandating the recycling of beverage containers. (We waste almost an entire day's worth of oil each year just making aluminum cans from scratch.) A serious commitment to developing solar, wind, and tidal power would further reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Regarding SUVs, if I had my druthers, they'd only be sold to people who really need them, like ranchers navigating back roads through snowdrifts as high as the top of a Hummer. But since we seem to be stuck with folks buying SUVs for all kinds of less compelling (and often even strange and silly) reasons, they should at least be encouraged to buy efficient ones. Making that point is very different from touting the damn things.

As for hemp, well, I'm looking into that very topic with uncommon dedication. Watch future columns for my musings on its possibilities (or lack thereof).

Environmentally,
Mr. Green

Hey Mr. Green, Be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that since we are currently so dependent on one source of energy--fossil fuels--our solution lies in only one alternative. For an individual who needs a heavy-duty work vehicle, biodiesel sounds like a great alternative to me. Beyond that, to paraphrase a very American concept, we should adopt the idea of "out of one, many." I don't think anyone is looking at any one alternative-energy source as a panacea. As with all other things, there is no magic bullet, only lots of resources that can become the right sources of energy for different people in different areas. We have not yet gotten to a point where we can reject, out of hand, any possible answers. --Alison in Charlotte, North Carolina

Hey Alison,
As you can see from my reply to Morgantec, I agree that we need to embrace multiple energy alternatives. However, I fear that too many people are still focused on finding a single solution to all our problems.

Environmentally,
Mr. Green

Hey Mr. Green, Conservation and efficiency are important parts of reducing pollution, greenhouse gases, and oil dependency, but they can't possibly ever eliminate those ills. Conservation is hardly a "realistic" solution in today's world. The reality is that Honda's Insight, a practical car that gets 70 mpg, didn't sell, not even to most environmentalists. Despite high gas prices, small families, long commutes, and plenty of alternatives, Americans still buy SUVs. As long as this is a free country, this is likely to remain true. Americans claim to support the environment, but they are not willing to sacrifice any amount of comfort and convenience. You point out that there is not enough land to produce as much biofuel as we would need. However, if that effort were combined with increasing efficiency (instead of assuming the two are mutually exclusive), we could easily make more than enough. Elsewhere in the same issue, Carl Pope suggests that 100 miles per gallon is a realistic goal for passenger autos. (I believe that to be rather conservative, since Craig Vetter and others got almost 500 mpg at freeway speeds back in the '70s--before CV transmissions or electronic fuel injection--and diesel engines are inherently more efficient.) Our average fuel economy today is less than 25 mpg. A fourfold increase would reduce gasoline demand from 110 billion gallons to 27.4 billion. That amount of fuel would require just 30 percent of U.S. land area to produce. If transitioned gradually, using B20 (20 percent biodiesel) fuel, we'd need only 6 percent of our land area. This may seem large, but consider that cattle grazing uses 41 percent of the Lower 48's acreage, with another 8 percent used to grow crops to feed penned livestock. That means nearly half of the country is devoted to producing meat! Just a small percentage of Americans cutting back on beef could easily free up enough land to enable B20 use nationwide--even without an increase in vehicle efficiency. However, I do strongly support the idea of efficiency, as demonstrated by two modern, real-life examples. General Motors is selling a van in China that gets 43 mpg. It is not a hybrid nor does it have any other special technology. Kawasaki sells a motorcycle in the United States that can get up to 70 mpg, also without any special technology. Both of these vehicles are substantially less expensive than most, at $5,000 for the van and $3,000 for the motorcycle. What makes these vehicles so special? Nothing, really. In fact, what sets them apart is what they don't have. They are small, simple, and light and have engines sized for normal driving. The van's top speed is around 80 miles per hour. The motorcycle's is about 100. Most of our cars can top 120 mph, even though almost nobody ever drives that fast, or even close to it. This is why our average fuel economy today is no better than it was 30 years ago. The 2006 Ford Explorer actually gets slightly worse mileage than the 1906 Ford Model T did. Manufacturers are only partially to blame. Instead of buying one vehicle that fits the whole family and a tiny one for the daily commute, most households buy one to carry everyone (even though 90 percent of car trips have only a driver or one passenger) and an even larger one for those few times a year they have to haul something. It's difficult to find a new car in the United States that doesn't have power steering, air-conditioning, automatic transmission, and a grossly overpowered engine. I bet even the majority of your readers' cars have those things. If we who are supposedly aware can't distinguish necessity from luxury, how can we expect politicians or the general public to do so? In Europe, people drive small cars or scooters. The same is true in Asia. In the United States, everyone buys the largest car they can afford (or rather, put on credit) and then complains about gas prices. Every time one of us buys a Prius, which is nearly van-size, we send a message to the auto industry that we care about efficiency and the environment only if they do not encroach on our luxuries in any way. It's time environmentalists started buying Insights and motorcycles with small-displacement engines. That's the only way we'll ever get the fuel economy technology is capable of producing. --Bakari in San Pablo, California

Hey Bakari,
Again, we basically agree, except that you outlined a far more dramatic efficiency program than I ever dreamed up. But I believe that pinning too much hope on biodiesel can send the wrong message to automakers as well. They would most assuredly interpret this emphasis by saying, "Oh boy, we hoodwinked 'em again. They think biodiesel exempts 'em from worrying about efficiency, so we can just keep on makin' profitable SUVs and gas-guzzling 300-horsepower sports cars to pander to the macho fantasies of wannabe NASCAR pilots!"

As for your contention that eating less meat could allow us to make significantly more biodiesel, see my response to the following letter.

Environmentally,
Mr. Green

Hey Mr. Green, The amount of land, water, and grain used to feed grazing animals for slaughter far outweighs the amount it would take to grow the crops necessary to supply biofuels for our cars. If you do your research, you will also find that you don't need to convert a diesel to burn biodiesel--it's ready to do so without any changes. --Chris in Santa Cruz, California

Hey Chris,
I'd love to agree with you, but it's just not the case that reducing meat consumption could provide more then enough biodiesel to fuel our cars. The soy oil we now produce is actually a byproduct of livestock-feed production. What the animals are fed is soybean meal, from which most of the soy oil has already been extracted for cooking oil and other food products. And although cattle grazing takes up a lot of acreage, and is often done in a very environmentally unsound manner, it would be equally (if not more) destructive to attempt to grow oilseed crops on much of this grazing land. The reason grazing land is used for grazing in the first place is that it's basically not suitable for crop cultivation, whether because of precipitation, soil quality, climate, or topography. Ploughing and farming such land would often require irrigation and lead to erosion. One reason I have reservations about biodiesel--and ethanol--is that stepped-up production could increase the pressure to cultivate marginal land. The fact that a lot of marginal land has been taken out of cultivation in the past century has been a big plus for the environment, and it would be tragic to reverse that accomplishment simply to enable automobiles to continue guzzling three or four times as much fuel as they need to.

Mathematically, the biodiesel just ain't there, no matter how little meat we eat. There are currently about 940 million acres of farms in the United States. Let's round that up to a billion to make the math easy. A high yield of soybean oil is 50 gallons per acre. That means the most oil we could get from all farmland is 50 billion gallons, or about one-third of the 146 billion gallons of gasoline burned in the country each year. And since the amount of land used for the principal livestock-feed crops is about 215 million acres, the maximum increase in biodiesel supply created by completely eliminating meat production would only be about 11 billion gallons. Since more than 4 billion gallons of that total go toward the cooking oil we already extract and consume each year, total renunciation of meat would only free up 7 billion gallons for biodiesel. (To obtain the full energy benefits of meatlessness, we'd have to sacrifice our prodigious appetite for grease to our prodigious appetite for mobility. Such are the weighty moral choices facing today's consumer.)

Sure, maybe some Prometheus in a his lab, spurred by George W. Bush's dramatic announcement that we are "addicted to [foreign] oil," is toiling round the clock to develop a genetically engineered species that can yield a hundred times more oil than any known crop. But Lord knows what sort of additional chemical inputs we'd need to grow such biological wonders.

Environmentally,
Mr. Green

Views expressed by readers may not reflect those of Mr. Green or Sierra magazine. Reader suggestions have not been researched or tested.

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Mr. Green illustration by Melinda Beck; used with permission.