Hunka Hunka Burning Love

Photo credit Marv Breece

A few days ago I walked right into a swirling ball of birds too engrossed in their mating rituals to pay any attention to me. They would swoop to within a foot of the sidewalk and looked like some kind of barn swallow with green feathers on their backs. Some were carrying what appeared to be white chicken feathers. We happen to keep chickens and I was just a few hundred feet from my house.



I checked with a birder friend of mine who sent me these pictures and identified these birds as violet-green swallows. I had never heard of them before. The male birds were probably trying to impress the chicks with the chicken feathers. This is what I love about nature and biodiversity. There is no end to what you can discover.

A few weeks ago he also sent me an excerpt from an article in a birder magazine where the author was lamenting the fact that his favorite birding sites were being converted into cornfields to capitalize on the high price of corn caused by ethanol mandates. This had been Conservation Reserve land, which has not only been providing wildlife habitat, but has also been acting as a giant carbon sink for the United States.

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Don't Need No Stinking Biodiesel

Did you know that the carbon intensity (the ratio of carbon dioxide to energy) of natural gas is lower than the average intensity of Brazilian and American soy biodiesel? And that is without counting land displacement impacts (carbon put into the atmosphere by burning a forest to plant soy).

A common argument I hear from biodiesel enthusiasts is that heavy machinery must use diesel engines because of the high torque required. Take a look at that garbage truck above. It is about as heavy as you get and it runs on natural gas. Not only is it producing less GHG than biodiesel, it is producing a tiny fraction of the local air pollution (especially soot, which also contributes to global warming) at the tailpipe. It's also a lot quieter.

Fleets of vehicles with known routes (like buses and garbage trucks) where range is accounted for and where they can all be fueled at their depots are ideally suited for using natural gas. Combine this idea for fleets with today's gasoline hybrid technology for personal transport (that is achieving gas mileage improvements in excess of 100% over average mileage) and one can see how the rush to food-based biofuels is over-hyped.

A recent post by Robert Rapier suggests that America could in theory, replace all gasoline with domestically produced natural gas for roughly the next half-century.

(Photo credit Jeff Youngstrom via the Flickr Creative Commons license).

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Seattle Drops Biodiesel

Here's a King 5 News video clip and here is a short article from the online Seattle PI. The PI article suggests that Seattle quit because of this EPA study, which came out in May (Figure 2 shows soy biodiesel worse than regular diesel). It also suggests that this is a temporary situation when it isn't. Quite a change from a year ago when permission was given to invest ten million dollars of the Seattle Employee's retirement funds in a local biodiesel refinery now sitting idle.

Here is a quote from an article I wrote in the first week of April:

Just last week I met, along with two other people, with a local politician to lobby him to drop his city's use of a 40 percent blend of food-based biodiesel. He finally perked up when someone mentioned that dropping the biodiesel would save the city $350,000 annually. There was potential political gain to be had. As a politician, his next step should be to determine if banning of the biodiesel blend would make more political enemies than it would gain. The mayor of this city is a huge biodiesel proponent and the employee's retirement fund of this city invested ten million dollars last year in the largest biodiesel refinery on the West Coast, which is now on the edge of bankruptcy. All of the congress people in this State are huge proponents of biofuels.

A word of encouragement for this politician, as Washington State's King County Executive, Ron Sims stopped use of biodiesel in King County vehicles last year citing budgetary concerns. That move certainly didn't cost him any political points. He is now deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Maybe taking the moral high ground on this issue will be the politically smart thing to do in the future.

And here is the information presented to that particular politician via email prior to that meeting.

The city of Berkeley also stopped using biodiesel. Seattle is located in King County, which dropped biodiesel earlier in the year. That leaves Washington State, which still has laws on the books mandating ever-increasing blends of biodiesel in all state vehicles.

Higher level politicians appear to be taking a wait and see position. Visit their websites you'll find they are still gushing over how biofuels are going to stimulate the local economy (refinery death watch), fight global warming (not), and make us energy independent (80% of biodiesel was being shipped overseas).

What should have been obvious from the beginning is that growing both food and fuel will take more land. That land has to come from somewhere. It is coming from existing ecosystem carbon sinks. It should also have been obvious that food processors would be competing for the same feedstocks as the fuel processors, thus temporarily driving the price of both up, which in turn is the signal needed by farmers around the world to start torching grasslands, rainforests and peat bogs, which will in turn lower the price of feedstocks again, until the next biofuel mandate causes another round of price signaling and land clearing. There are 3 billion more people on the way.

It was just about four years ago that I first suggested this was a really bad idea. Be sure to read all of the comments from that post from four years ago.

Dead as Latin

Michael Kanellos said the following in his Greentech Innovations Report last week:

"A tour of its portfolio shows it has made some pretty good bets, and also nabbed some major clunkers.

...On the other hand, it also put money into Imperium Renewables, the dead-as-Latin biofuel maker." …

Down in the comment field, the CEO of Imperium lambasted him for telling the truth and then gave us his version of reality:

"…[biodiesel is] a real tangible asset that can help drastically reduce our CO2 output of our vehicles."

According to Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and his crack international team of researchers, Imperium's version of biodiesel is actually about 70% worse for global warming than regular diesel and that is not counting land displacement impacts! Ah screw the science. Global warming isn't real anyway, right? It's energy independence we are after:

"…we are working on real solutions for our energy needs in this country."

I have two problems with the above statement. First, according to this link, Imperium was one of several biodiesel companies slapped with a tariff for exporting their product to Europe where they could undercut other producers thanks to a loophole that allowed them to take the dollar per gallon blending subsidy even if the fuel is not used domestically. The energy independence argument bandied about by biofuel publicists takes a distant second fiddle to profit.

And second, last time I checked, they were not even using American grown crops to produce it. The canola oil came from Canada, got refined into biodiesel, and was shipped off to Europe. God bless America, energy independence here we come.

Oh, and that is not a picture of the Imperium refinery. It's a picture of Gas Works Park in Seattle, just a few blocks from my house. These are the rusting remains of yet another energy technology that pressurized coal and piped the resultant gases throughout the city for heating and lighting, which is the very same technology being proposed by the "Clean Coal" advocates--nothing new under the sun. The pipe from that processing plant still protrudes from my basement wall.

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(photo credit Sea Turtle via the Flickr Creative Commons license).