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.

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

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