.jpg)
Feature
Grow Your Own: The Biofuels Revolution - A Conversation with Josh Tickell
by Elyssa Paige
Fasten your seat belts and get ready for change. Your fossil fuel enslavement is about to become a notion of the past.
Ironically, the concept of growing your own fuel is over 100 years old. Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine to run on vegetable oil grown by farmers. No foreign oil required.
One of the foremost experts on biodiesel, Josh Tickell is author of Biodiesel America and director of Fuel, a mind-blowing documentary that reveals the severity of our addiction to fossil fuels while offering sustainable solutions to break the habit. For 11 years, he traveled in his Veggie Van, powered by used cooking oil, on a quest to tell the world that the alternatives are out there. Now he’s compiled his footage with raw facts, tossing in appearances by green celebrities like Robert Kennedy, Jr, Woody Harrelson, Neil Young, Julia Roberts, and many others, to create a film that is poised to change the face of America.
In a recent interview, Tickell discussed his experiences, the controversial aspects of growing fuel, and the solutions that just might save us all.
Vision Magazine: How did your journey into biofuels begin?
Josh Tickell: I grew up in what’s called the Cancer Alley of Louisiana. It’s an area that makes the majority of the nation’s gasoline. When you pump gas in your car, you might not think about where it’s refined, but it’s probably in one of 150 petrochemical facilities that stretch from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Some of these facilities are largely unchecked in terms of pollution. There are over 5000 chemical compounds that leech into the air, the water, and the soil, which then goes into the food supply. That area of Louisiana has one of the highest incidences of cancer in the nation. I grew up watching members of my family get sick and some of them died. My mom had a rare form of lupus and nine miscarriages. It was very obvious to the residents what was going on there. So as a very young kid, I wanted to find a way to make energy so that people didn’t have to get sick.
VM: How did you discover biofuels?
JT: My central desire was really to find a sustainable way to live. I was working on farms all over the world and learning about different methods of sustainable farming. One of the farms in East Germany was growing huge fields of yellow flowers, which was rapeseed, or canola. We were pressing the rapeseed by hand, very sustainably. But we had all this liquid and I didn’t quite make the connection until one day when I was driving to market with the farmers. I mentioned that it’s great that we do everything sustainably, but here you have this car and this tractor. You can’t get away from the fact that you’re using petroleum, which is inevitably coming from the Middle East. And they said, “Actually, no, this is fueled by biodiesel, which we made ourselves. That’s what we’ve been growing: the biodiesel plants.” It didn’t all gel for me in that second, but when I got it, I really got it. These people made 100 percent of their own food and fuel and they had a tremendous excess that they were selling.
From that model, it was obviously possible to extrapolate to a community, a town, or even a city, that growing your own energy and food didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. From that moment onward, I became a very strong advocate for whole systems of energy. And for whatever reason, the part that interested people at that moment was biodiesel. It was something that hadn’t really been talked about in the Unites States. I began experimenting with biodiesel, learned how to make it specifically from used cooking oil, and began traveling around on it in an old Winnebago.
VM: Can you talk a bit about the controversial aspects of biofuels?
JT: Murmurs about the biofuels controversy started around 2006 or 2007. But it wasn’t a full-on media-fueled controversy. It was just rumblings in the environmental community that you couldn’t necessarily make food and fuel from the same piece of land. It seems that they’re exclusive and you’re starving people in the third world to put fuel into your tank in the first world.
You have to go back to the information, which is largely skewed by emotion. The fact is that the majority of biofuels made in the United States is ethanol, which is made from corn. So people had a natural reaction to that; corn-based ethanol is inefficient and a pathetic example of how to trade one form of oil energy for another. You put as much oil into the process as the energy you get out in ethanol. It’s a transfer of wealth to farming states. Nobody was really looking at ethanol as a viable alternative, but people were looking at biodiesel as a viable alternative. Greenpeace was using biodiesel in all of their vehicles. It wasn’t as if the environmental community had shunned biodiesel—quite the opposite; they’d embraced it.
Then 2008 rolled around and Fields of Fuel, which is the first version of the movie that we showed publicly, won the Sundance Audience Award for Best Documentary. Literally within 48 hours, two articles appeared in Science magazine about the danger of biofuels. Within seven days, those articles had spread to new media stories around the world in about 600 major newspapers. It eventually made it to the covers of Time magazine and National Geographic.
It turned out that oil hit $148 a barrel—more expensive than it had ever been. The food that we eat is basically oil. We transport the seed with oil, put the seed in the ground and fertilize it with oil-based nitrates and phosphates, spray oil-based pesticides all over the food, harvest it and put it on an oil-fired truck to go across the country. There is something like three or four times more oil calories used to get the food to your plate than the food actually contains. If oil goes to $148 per barrel, guess what’s going to happen to food prices? In the United States, they went up about 25 percent. The average consumer in the United States didn’t notice a huge budgetary deficit but overseas, in places like Africa and Central and South America, people literally starved.
As obvious and as grounded in simple logic as it was, the entire phenomenon was blamed on biofuels. If you understand how the world economy works, biofuels are less than one percent of global agricultural trade. It is an insignificant portion.
VM: What about allegations that the cultivation of soy used to make biodiesel is causing deforestation?
JT: The soy frontier is in the center of Brazil—but remember why they’re growing soy. It’s not for human consumption; it’s to feed cattle. Soy oil is a byproduct of processing soybeans—it’s the part they don’t feed to the cattle. The more soy that’s grown for more cattle, the larger the frontier gets. The larger the frontier gets, the farther away they have to push the cattle grazing. Herein lies the vicious cycle.
VM: Your film presents the growing of algae as a potential solution. Can you talk about that?
JT: One of the pieces of information that we left behind was Jimmy Carter’s algae program, which developed a simple way of growing algae to produce fuel. With soybeans, you get about 50 gallons of oil per acre. You might be able to get about 200 gallons of oil per acre out of mustard or camelina, but algae production is somewhere in the range of 1000 to 2000 gallons of oil per acre. And it doesn’t need fertile land; you can use desert land to grow it. The bottom line is that we’ll never grow enough fuel using conventional agricultural methods.
There are only 450 million acres of arable land in the United States. About 390 million acres are already in use, so you’ve got maybe 60 million acres. You’re not going to grow 100 percent of your fuel on 60 million acres, unless there’s a breakthrough in the way we look at growing fuel. That’s what algae is—the breakthrough technology.
VM: What is Sweden doing in terms of replacing fossil fuels with renewables?
JT: Sweden made a commitment to go petroleum-free by 2020. It’s a national mandate supported by corporations, the government, and the energy and auto industries. In the United States, we have something like 40 lobbyists for every one representative of government. Sweden has quite the opposite with a legal limit onthe number of lobbyists. Carbon dioxide is invisible and it’s everywhere, so there’s really no effective way to fight it—unless you create an objective that’s achievable, which is what Sweden did. It’s a very bold objective to stop using petroleum fuels completely, and Sweden has created a clear mandate to get there. Instead of subsidizing fossil fuels and big cars, Sweden is re-engineering their tax laws so that green energy is taxed less and fossil energy (we call that brown or black energy) is taxed more.
VM: What about Europe’s progress with fuel efficient vehicles? Why don’t we see that here on a grand scale?
JT: If you look at the tendency of the American people, there is still a mindset that bigger is better. There was a church, I kid you not, that put an SUV on the altar to pray for the U.S. auto industry. And they’re going to have to do a lot of praying because this is an auto industry that has essentially screwed the American public out of roughly 50 years of auto progress.
Throughout the rest of the world, you can get high performance sports cars that run on locally made fuel. The rest of the world has progressed. All of the advancements in American automobiles have been made in horsepower. If Henry Ford were alive today, he’d still be able to identify every single part of an automobile. In fact, the average fuel efficiency of American cars today is about 24 miles per gallon, which was exactly what the Model T got. That should tell us something.
Computers didn’t even exist when the car came out. Our iPhone, a mass-produced device, is more powerful than the computers that put the first man on the moon. Something has been manipulated in the marketplace. A natural technological innovation hasn’t happened in America, yet it has occured overseas. Germany is producing standard automobiles that get 80 to 100 miles per gallon. The irony is that these vehicles are made by the same car manufacturers that make our cars here in the United States.
There is a market manipulation to keep the American public from accessing efficient technology and a lot of it has unfortunately come from the unions, who are insisting that this is why steel workers have unions: so that they can continue to work with steel. Cars do not need to be made of steel. It’s wasteful. Cars can be made of carbon fiber, which can be generated from plants.
Chevy’s number one selling vehicle is their SUV. The automakers say that this has nothing to do with them; it’s just what people want. Consumers want what they want because of a combination of marketing and availability. That’s why the Prius has outsold the Hummer. It doesn’t matter if the Prius is green or not; what matters is that it was positioned as a green vehicle and then it got celebrity buy-in.
VM: Do you see us moving away from internal combustion engines all together?
JT: Yes—for personal vehicles, not for transportation. I think we’ll see a generation of hybrids, after which we’ll see electric plug-in hybrids and then straight electrics.
VM: Where will the power for electric vehicles come from? What other forms of energy do you see as a part of creating a sustainable future?
JT: The number one law that inhibits America right now from moving toward green energy is the net metering law. It’s something called parity pricing. The net is what you have left over after you take all the pluses and minuses [together]. For example, if I put solar paneling on my house, and my house produces more electricity than I use, then the net would be a plus. With parity pricing, I would legally be obliged to get paid the same amount of money that the utility sells the electricity for. My meter would essentially spin backwards. The electricity I generate would be as valuable as the electricity that the power company is selling to me.
In fact, in other countries like Germany, the way that net metering works is that you’re paid a premium for generating your own electricity from a green source. Right now, the way the United States is organized, technology is dictated not by progress but by laws. Our laws necessitate that electricity is produced in concentrated large amounts. So in order to enter into the energy world, you’ve got to put a large concentrated power plant online. The most economical way to do that today in the United States is through wind energy. That’s why Texas is putting up so many wind turbines—not oil barracks anymore—and is the fastest growing wind state in America.
VM: Here in California, major solar installations on commercial buildings would make a lot of sense. What do you think?
JT: With net metering, that makes a lot of sense because suddenly you’re able to get paid for the electricity that you’re making. The reality is that wind energy is economical today, but it’s because of the law. If we change the laws and allow net metering, every surface becomes a potential money maker. If you have solar panels on your car and you can plug your car into the grid, you’ll get a check if your car is making more energy than it’s using.
VM: What steps can we all take to decrease our dependence on oil?
JT: Michael Noble is a renewable energy advocate who says that the first thing you do is to change your light bulb and then you change the law. And that’s how it works; it’s individual actions first and political actions second. We all are familiar with the things to do to make a difference in our homes and vehicles and a lot of it is simpler than you think. A lot of it is caulking and taking care of places where air is escaping or entering where it shouldn’t be. It’s increasing the efficiency of the home and it’s the same with vehicles. One of the things that people can do is inflate the tires and change the air filter—those two things can increase the efficiency of your vehicle by 10 percent. That’s one out of every 10 gallons of fuel. I tend to look at ways that people can save money and be greener at the same time.
The average family tends to save about $5000 from the suggestions in the movie and the book, which range from low-flow showerheads to increased use of public transportation, walking, or riding a bike. So if you look at the average family budget, there’s about $5000 a year that people are wasting because of the energy inefficiency in their lives. Eliminating or minimizing wasteful practices could save America billions of dollars every year.
Check out www.thefuelfilm.com for upcoming screenings of Fuel or to purchase Josh Tickell’s book, Biodiesel America. Read about Josh Tickell’s Veggie Van adventures at www.veggievan.org.
Photo 1 - Josh Tickell and The Veggie Van.
Photo 2 - Neil Young and Willie Nelson appear in Fuel.