An inconvenient truth about biofuels

In 2005, the US consumed about 140,407,470,000 gallons of gasoline. On average, that’s around 1.25 gallons of gasoline per day, for each man, woman, and child in the country. We use it without realizing it: the oranges we buy in February traveled a very long distance; all of those cheap clothes are only inexpensive because they were produced somewhere far enough away to have a tiny cost of labor; and of course we love to drive ourselves to work, dash to the supermarket to grab this, then later to the hardware store for that, all the while complaining about traffic and gas prices.
W has laudably suggested reducing gasoline consumption by 20% by 2017. Business interests are encouraging people to "Go Yellow". And Chevrolet is greenwashing a fleet of gas-guzzlers under the pretense that buying a flex-fuel car is in and of itself good for the environment.
Unfortunately, domestic corn-based ethanol and soybean or WVO biodiesel do not now offer, nor are they likely to offer in the foreseeable future, a tenable solution to the problem of transportation fuels. While it's true that production of biofuels has accelerated rapidly in recent years, there simply isn't enough feedstock to replace a meaningful fraction of petrofuels. Replacing the rough equivalent of 2% of the gasoline we use currently requires about 20% of our corn crop. If we stopped eating corn and feeding it to livestock- mildly absurd hypothetical actions- we'd still only cover about 10% of our current gasoline demand. Cellulosic ethanol fuel does nothing for us now, and there's no telling how long it will be until economically feasible methods of production are available. Moreover, there are a host of concerns over the cultivation of large amounts of switchgrass and genetically-modified fast-growing trees.
Research remains important; horizon technologies have a way of becoming household words in the blink of an eye. Likewise, incrementally greater production of biofuels does achieve some benefit, although it would make more sense to exploit some of the other benefits of biofuels. Rather than spreading a very thin mix of blended fuels around a large region, we should use high biofuel blends for special applications: biofuels for school buses to reduce the exposure of children to particulate pollution; biofuels for government fleet-vehicles and buses in Clean Air Act nonattainment areas; biofuels for watercraft to minimize sulfur, particulate, and synthetic-volatile pollution in waterways.
Given the finite lifespan of oil and the lack of a meaningful or reliable supply of a direct replacement, we have to consider conservation in a new way. We need to rethink communities, values, and lifeways. We need to act on this new thinking.
It grows dim in our national memory, but a little over six decades ago, a generation of Americans fought and won a massive war, and in so doing reinvented their economy and that of the world. Why can't ending a myopic addiction to oil and creating a sustainable economy be this generation's legacy?

Where the heart is

When friends and family visit for the first time, the words "cute", "cozy", and "darling" are bandied about. They ultimately recall that the townhouse my wife and I sold in November had one more half-bathroom and a little more floor space. This creates a logical paradox and begs the question, "So why did you move?"
It's a blow against living to consume. I've watched friends and coworkers move further and further away from where they spend most of their time, because "Out there, you can afford more house." I find this equation faulty, as its only parameters are dollars and square feet. Moreover, this calculus is predicated on the conclusion that a bigger house is always a better house.
I first began to dissect the equation long before moving, using that management-student logic that so often gets lodged in my head. In developing cost estimates, time=money. Though, absent from the $/sq foot equation for choosing where to live were the hours spent in rush hour traffic. For my friends who didn't mind an hour and a half each way stuck in a slow-moving car, I stepped through some simplified arithmetic: 3 hrs/day * 5 days/week * 50 weeks/year * 1 day/24 hours = 31.25 days/year. Commuters who enjoy half that daily ride- not at all a bad commute in the DC area- spend two full weeks in their cars every year. I understand that gas is fairly expensive, too. Mrs. and I resigned ourselves to our fairly average DC-area commutes, but resolved that we couldn't move further away.
This back-of-the-envelope finance led me to think about opportunity costs: what do we pass-up with all of this A-to-B? This begged the question of efficiency: If the commuting is wasting certain resources (i.e., my life), is it possible that it is inherently wasteful? Are there other aspects of my life that are wasteful? Some of these questions emerged before the move, some after.
The dominoes fell down in lovely little rows and started to yield answers: If I live close enough to the train to walk to it each day, I won't need to waste time, money, and fuel driving to it, nor driving to the gym to run in place. If I live near the town center, I can walk there, too- there is poetic logic in walking to and from the places where I dine. If I replace my vintage windows with high-efficiency windows and insulate my hot-water pipes and ducts, I won’t have to spend so much to heat and cool my house and heat my water. If I replace some of my lawn with a vegetable garden, I won't have to mow it, and I'll save money on produce in the summer. If I use a rotary mower, I'll never have to buy gas or change oil. If I install a rain-barrel on my downspout, I won't spend as much money to water my garden, and I'll be a better neighbor by reducing my impact on storm water. It became clear that I needed to stop working against myself and my surroundings.
My little house also started to give me answers to questions I hadn't known to ask. For instance, the wisdom of building a little Cape Cod and planting a couple of maple trees in front of it has become apparent. The maples, like the house are more than half a century old now, and regulate both water and insolation. I haven't paid to heat or cool my home since April.
The collective lesson for me has been (and continues to be) learning to understand what I really want, and how to get it without wasting resources on things I don't. Finding a little house that has space to suit my current and anticipated needs without extraneous space for extraneous things has made a huge difference.

Thanks to Charise for getting me thinking about this again.

Spinning

By now you’ve read about it. In fact, you may well have read about it every year for the better part of a decade. “The Great Gas-Out”, wherein by avoiding purchasing fuel on a single day, you will at once thrash the high price of fuel and end the war for oil and hubris.
Unfortunately, this action is not based on an understanding of finance, economics, or the environment. Given that most versions of the propaganda surrounding this futile exercise simply enjoin the reader to buy before or after this single day, there will be no effect. If consumers purchase the same amount of goods during the same accounting cycle, they accomplish nothing more than an oddity in the books. At the end of the month, the fuel retailers have earned exactly the same amount of money. Moreover, the refiners and extraction companies, insulated by layers of supply chain, never see any difference.
In truth, the equation for spending less on gas is simple. Many would call it painfully simple: to save on fuel, save on fuel. By combining and otherwise minimizing trips, using public transportation when feasible, walking or cycling, favoring locally-produced goods, and driving a fuel-efficient vehicle, anyone can reduce the amount of money they spend on fuel. Moreover, if consumers would adopt these practices en masse, they would actually impact the price of fuel.
To again quote Tolstoy, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” This token protest will accomplish nothing, because it is an empty effort that expects someone else to make the real changes. Changing the world starts with changing oneself.

Isolated

One hundred-five years ago today, Marie and Pierre Curie isolated the element radium. Their Nobel Prize-winning research and that of many others would pave the way for all manner of applications of nuclear science, from weapons, to medicine, to energy.
As we grapple with the accelerating human demand for energy, we must do so with an open mind. Burning things long-buried carries a host of problems. So too do wind, solar, nuclear, biomass, and any other method of generating energy. Each has advantages and disadvantages that may suit it to one application, but make it unacceptable for another. For this reason, environmentalists and industrialists cannot afford to indulge in mindless dogmatism.
Conservation remains a curiously under-used strategy. The consumer can, through simple choices, choose to use less energy without detracting from his or her quality of life. Using compact fluorescent light bulbs, reducing the amount of meat consumed each week, and combining local trips are painless.
The mass-localization of power generation also holds great potential. In many parts of the world, natural conditions support residential electric power generation. In some places this means photovoltaic shingles on the roof, in others this means a few windmills in the back pasture. This puts an important source of capital in the hands of the property-owner, and obviates the need for many long distance power lines, in which large amounts of energy are wasted in transmission.
We must also recognize that there are demands for power that cannot presently be met with the combination of efficient use and mass-localization. Many industrial and transportation power users legitimately need very large amounts of power on an uninterrupted basis. Given increasing concerns over atmospheric carbon and climate, fossil fuels seem a poor solution.
Nuclear energy offers a strong alternative for many applications. Like fossil fuels, like solar power, like wind, like biomass, it is an imperfect solution. For every complex problem, there exists a huge spectrum of solutions, many entirely bad, few (if any) entirely good. The expansion of nuclear energy is, however, worth serious consideration.
Nuclear energy offers a number of compelling advantages. It does not directly produce carbon pollution. Estimates of usable nuclear material suggest that nuclear fuel could last for thousands, if not millions of years. Moreover, the distribution of usable fuels offers the promise of energy independence for many countries.
While efficient use and mass localization remain critically important, we must recognize that there is no magic bullet. Each need for energy is a discrete problem that may require a discrete solution. We must remain creative, open-minded, and we must keep talking.

Steps forward

Earlier this month, BP announced its academic partners in an innovative new research program. The University of California, Berkeley, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will collectively receive $500 million over ten years to implement an Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI). The institute will research new methods and new applications of biological sciences in the energy sector.
EBI will primarily pursue clean new fuels for road transport, using advances in crop sciences. The application of this research will reduce US dependence on foreign oil, reduce carbon emissions, and will expand markets for US agricultural products.
BP has been advancing toward a more sustainable business model for several years. In 2000, as part of the reorganization associated with its 1998 takeover of Amoco, the firm began the highly-visible evolution of its brand identity into “Beyond Petroleum”. This new moniker is emblematic of an important change. The firm has recognized that its core technology, its core function, petroleum extraction and refining, are real problems.
Instead of remaining an ecological neigh-sayer and putting short-term profits ahead of social responsibility, BP is pursuing a sustainable future. Their business model has climbed a rung on the ladder from “oil company” to the much broader “energy company”. In so doing, they have declared their intent to make an honest dollar. BP’s Energy Biosciences Institute is a tangible step in that direction.
While it remains important to use energy efficiently and responsibly, consider supporting BP’s efforts, as a consumer.

Priorities

The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report that raises concerns over US resources for observing and predicting weather and climate. NASA has suffered a loss of some half a billion dollars with respect to its programs that observe the Earth, while NOAA is suffering through cost and schedule overruns on some of its own critical Earth observation programs. These are critically important programs that require adequate funding.
In his State of the Union speech, the President called for Congress to “control spending in Washington”. Given the push to balance the budget without raising taxes, gutting the civilian government would be necessary, since there is apparently no effort to control spending in Baghdad.
It's too late to spend the cost of facilitating civil war on the kinds of science that forewarn of a Katrina or put the climate change debate to bed. Any more words spent on "could've, would've, and should've" are wasted energy.
The President paid lip-service to the development and use of biofuels. The public should applaud him for his about-face on this topic. The implementation of biodiesel, instead of a plan to supplant fossil fuels by funding research into a horizon technology* like fuel cells, is a sound decision. However, the ponderous “diversification” of energy sources to yield a 20% reduction in gasoline use over the next 10 years, as the President suggests, is inadequate. Government is not the solution. Like so many environmental problems, the answer lies with entrepreneurs.
Given the enormity of the US agricultural sector, why is it that biodiesel isn't available from every filling station in the country? New businesses require demand. As long as we accept only what we are offered, businesses have little impetus to change.
Clearly, the government’s values and long-term plans are flawed. We have collectively chosen to spend money fighting a war for oil, rather than investing in energy independence and in our environment. Demand more and be part of the solution.

*It is not the author's intent to disparage fuel cell technology, nor to question its technical feasibility. It is characterized here as a horizon technology because of the difficulty in commercializing it.