Biodiesel: War Still Required
I used to get upset about political things.
I used to get upset about Bush. Before that, I used to get upset about Newt. Before that I got upset about abortion clinic bombers.
None of that upsets me now that I found out about peak oil. Part of the reason is that I’ve come to see humans in a different light. I used to buy into all of our Enlightment notions about freedom and individual choice, but one famous peak oil and energy writer has taught me to look at things from a different perspective.
Jay Hansen ran dieoff.com in the late 90’s, and handed the site off in 2003. You can get a sense of Jay’s perspective from his farewell address, or you can read through the early messages from the yahoo group he ran afterwards, called the_dieoff_QA. These messages from the QA in particular helped me to understand humans in a very new way. I began to understand what attracted people to different ideologies and why it didn’t matter how the rationalizations we use in public are internally inconsistent: rationalizations aren’t about truth, they are about politics.
So, I stopped getting upset about Bush and Judeo-Christian Nazis and Newt Gingrich. I began to understand that they were just playing out their role they way they needed to, and that I am doing the same thing using my own strategies.
In fact, in recent years, I’ve become much more sympathetic to Bush and Cheney. Let’s face it: Iraq and Afghanistan absolutely are a Machiavellian enterprise to gain control over energy resources and keep our Pax Americana situation in good health, to whatever extent that is possible. But it doesn’t bother me so much anymore. Hell, I realize now that I’ve been a recipient of a lot of goodness in life as a direct result of this project.
I used to like the democrats much more for approaching (but never quite facing up to) the truths in life. But the fact is they don’t have a plan for how we’ll live without oil. Jay Inslee, my rep from when I lived in Shoreline, seems to think we can create more jobs and economic activity while using less energy. Sounds like denial to me. You have but to do the math to see that this is pure folly. At least Bush has a plan for continued prosperity that isn’t wholesale illusion [delusion?].
This is not to say I am pro-war-for-oil. It is just to say that at very least I can see that Bush and Cheney are responding in ways that tell me they truly appreciate and understand what we face. The American left is largely still busy with gay marriage and other such pursuits because they think burning food in our cars is enough to solve the oil problem, and if not, the guys at apple will figure something out for us, like a new electric car. When the e-pod comes out, nobody on the left will ask how much extra coal will be required to power them, they’ll just cheer and throw parties. At least Bush and Cheney are serious about the issues.
So, what has all this got to do with what I used to get upset about? There is one thing that still upsets me, and I just walked by it a block away from my house. It was just a guy working on a new garage expansion, and right there in the driveway, on the back of his Jetta, there it is … a bright green bumpersticker proclaiming “BIODIESEL, No War Required“.
You can get these everywhere now. It has really caught on as a slogan. Check google to see what I mean.
It upsets me so much because it pretends to have special insight, but it is actually the deepest, darkest corner of American denial that I am aware of. The idea that we could stop burning oil in our cars, but all burn FOOD instead, and then NOT have wars over food — how is this not unthinkable to people?
So I’m here to say, once and for all, that:
Unfortunately, war is still required. It’s not the form of your BTU consumption, it’s the volume, folks.
Democrats, get this into your head PERMANENTLY:
OBAMA CAN’T CHANGE ANYTHING IF YOU DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING!
Biodiesel just substitues food wars for oil wars. Given the choice, I’d prefer the oil wars, if you don’t mind.
If you really want to avoid supporting energy wars, you need to reduce your energy consumption. Buy a bicycle instead of a Jetta.
-Robert
August 5th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
It really grinds my crackers when I see cars driving around with those bumper stickers especially since I know the majority of those using biodiesel are not running on waste vegetable oil but on “new” biodiesel. The issue that is often overlooked is that there is a tremendous amount of petroleum input that goes into the production of biodiesel. Many would argue (correctly) that less petroleum gets used if you just burn it directly rather than re-routing it through plant-based fuel.
From fertilizers (petroleum-based) to farm equipment (diesel powered) to distribution and transportation (diesel again), there is indeed a war required to get the biodiesel to you to fill your tank. And it’s definitely not inconsequential.
Get yourself a plug-in electric car charged from a renewable resource and then maybe, just maybe, you can sport a bumper sticker with that claim. (Although, of course, it could be argued that the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines uses a ton of petroleum as well, so you might want to stick to hydro
August 7th, 2008 at 12:54 am
It’s true, the inputs are what matters, but also the volume.
Even with hydro, the issue is that replacing oil with hydroelectric energy means there’s not enough to live the way we do and drive around incessantly: either everyone would have to cut back their use by like 90%, or we’d have to hold contests to see who gets to have the enrgy they need for the 25 mile daily commute.
In the end, therefore, the hydro faces the same issues: if one doesn’t change their habits, then one would have to replace oil wars with water wars once everyone tries to do make the switch to hydro, and consume as much as before with a different fuel source.
There is no escape from the conclusion that we’re just consuming at an unsustainable rate, and that’s going to be a meaningful problem in the near future instead of one we just give a lot of lip-service to.
-Robert
August 7th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Robert - Of course, I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek about hydro energy. There are two pieces to the puzzle I didn’t include: increases in efficiency and conservation.
September 1st, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Well, I’ve thought for a month how to respond, and here’s what I came up with.
Ultimately, this post was all about conservation. What I see in biodiesel is every attempt to AVOID conservation.
As for efficiency, it means trying to make a gallon of gas equivalent of 200 energy slaves instead of one hundred energy slaves. In that sense, higher efficiencies make us willing to pay ever greater amounts of money to keep those virtual slaves. In effect, efficiency disincentivises conservation because the value we get from energy use is so great and the cost already so cheap. More efficiency just makes this problem worse. This is what Jevons Paradox is all about, and I think everyone reading should google it right now if you don’t get that.
So,
a) efficiency makes conservation less attractive to people (and thus less likely), and
b) conservation — well, I wrote this post because conservation ain’t happening, and the some of the worst offenders are green washing their cars with biodiesel bumper stickers even as they refuse to actually shrink their own energy footprint.
Yet they prattle on about ‘no war for oil’ as if their own activities have no relationship with the energy supplies our wars revolve around.
The troubling part of it is that the people with these stickers on their cars represent some of the BEST informed parts of our society when it comes to energy issues.
That’s sad, troubling, and quite scary when it comes to your somewhat rosy view of how well we’ll get through the peaks in oil & gas production.
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:18 pm
There’s an archdruid blogpost here that discusses Jevon’s paradox in relation to Peak Oil. Good stuff.