Back in July, I reviewed a documentary film called Fields of Fuel directed by Josh Tickell. That film recently returned to Seattle after being reedited and renamed, Fuel.
I actually think this new iteration is worth seeing with the caveat that you take the conspiracy theories and convoluted defenses of food-based biodiesel with a grain of salt.
The billing at Seattle's Varsity Theater website was: "Fuel exposes shocking connections between the auto industry, the oil industry, and the government, while exploring alternative energies such as solar, wind, electricity, and non-food-based biofuels. Director Josh Tickell and his Veggie Van take us on the road to discover the pros and cons of biofuels." Note the emphasis on "non-food based biofuels." My concern is that the emphasis on food may have been special for Seattle and may disappear from the billing in other cities.
Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) was there to answer questions after the film and was very careful to always use the term "non-food based" in front of the word biofuel. It is entirely possibly that he had been warned that an obscure blogger might be in the audience trying to take notes in the dark. He even muttered at one point "... we have to get away from corn ethanol." Inslee also plugged his book, Apollo's Fire, which was a decent read except for the parts where he lambasted politicians who opposed biofuel mandates and subsidies.
Reviewing a movie is no fun:
- I have not figured out how to take notes in the dark.
- When I do try to take notes I miss what's going on in the movie.
- Exposed to the light of day, the notes I took look like the scratching of a crack-crazed chicken.
I was skeptical that much had changed. The theme of the original movie was a road trip in a biodiesel-powered Winnebago to document other people driving biodiesel cars and trucks all across America. It seemed unlikely to me that Tickell would have enough spare footage laying around to fill in for all of the food-based biodiesel promotion he would have to cut. Apparently, he had a lot laying around because he did manage to pare it down quite a bit. He only tastes biodiesel one time, and that oil was made from algae -- although it wasn't clear if it was just algae oil or actual biodiesel.
The film tries to create a new bandwagon to jump on, now that crop-based biofuels are in the public opinion crapper, and that bandwagon is called algae. The problem, as with cellulosic, is that there is no algae-based biodiesel commercially available at affordable prices and may well be perpetually just "five-years away" for the next 30 years. About 95 percent of biodiesel in America is grown on arable cropland, and about 4.99 percent comes from recycled grease. Essentially the film insinuates that it's OK to burn food-based biodiesel (but not, strangely enough, corn based ethanol) until something better comes along.
The film still has a German race car driver literally hugging rapeseed in a field. And it also has a clip of Tickell on a boat in front of a sign that says "Powered by Soy Biodiesel," and a close-up of Neil Young and Willie Nelson putting food-based biodiesel in Willie's giant recreational vehicle (while trying to suppress what appears to be a case of the giggles). Willie resigned as Director of Earth Biodiesels back in 2006 after the company lost $63 million. However he still owns the BioWillie brand name and, according to his website, plans to reopen Willie's Place in 2008. He better hurry, 'cause there are less than 30 days left.
As with a Star Trek episode where you have to suspend reality to enjoy a show where all lifeforms in the galaxy speak English and are descended from Australopithecus afarensis, you must also suspend it for parts of this documentary. Instead of a warp drive powered by dilithium crystals, we have algae based biodiesel. Did you know that prohibition was actually a giant conspiracy promoted by big oil to crush corn ethanol? Rudolph Diesel, who wanted people to burn vegetable oil in his engines, was found dead, floating in the ocean ... dun, dun, dunnn.
Tickell continues to downplay biofuels' role in food pricing, biodiversity loss, and carbon-sink destruction, as this article in the Huffington Post titled, "Where's My Orangutan? Why Biofuels Don't Kill Apes" attests. You might think he has changed his mind. However, at one part in the film he stands in front of giant letters spelling out "Food vs Fuel" and tells the audience that oil is what made food prices to go up, not biofuels. Which must be true because he has a clip of Vinod Khosla saying the exact same thing! The average prices per year since 2005 (the year the Renewable Fuels Standard was instituted) of a bushel of corn and a gallon of retail gasoline suggests a different story:
So, if your family depends on ground maize as a major source of sustenance (as hundreds of millions do) the cost of your main staple since 2005 has gone up 135 percent while the average cost of gas for us poor Americans has gone up 50 percent.
He goes on to blame American ag policy for allowing American farmers to sell heavily subsidized farm products to third world countries instead of making them grow their own food (which is another way of saying they should be paying more for their food anyway). Our ag policy certainly has problems, as witnessed by the present biofuel debacle among other issues, but raising the price of food for the poor by turning it into fuel is not the way to fix past transgressions. And doesn't this argument undercut the previous one that biofuels have not significantly impacted food prices? Our farmers happily take every subsidy offered and every customer willing to buy, as any sane person would.
He shows us a clip of timber being taken out of a forest instead of a satellite photo showing the thousands of square miles lost to soybeans. More is presently lost to logging and pasture than soybeans for sure, but that's because only a tiny fraction of a percent of our fuel is presently made from biodiesel. Scale that up and watch what would happen. We all know the strawman by now; are biofuels really solely responsible for destabilizing food prices? No, Mr. Biodiesel enthusiast, they represent just one of the factors contributing to it, as every article I have ever seen clearly points out, except for those by biofuel enthusiasts dusting off the aforementioned strawman.
He goes on to blame two articles in Science (which used science to prove what common sense would suggest: biofuel crops grown and stuffed into our SUVs displace food crops and therefore carbon sinks in other parts of the world) for the media backlash against biofuels.
He asks "How can biodiesel possibly be worse than oil?" Here you go. Look at figure 3, "Comparison of aggregated environmental impacts." It lists just about every biofuel under production (and then some) and does not even include the latest findings on crop displacement and nitrous oxide releases.
The guy calling for school boards all across America to demand that biodiesel be burned in school buses (instead of having them retrofitted with modern air pollution devices) showed up twice.
Toward the end, Tickell summed up with a very simple graphic how he thinks we should displace fossil-fuel use. It was a barrel of oil sliced into sections. According to my notes it went something like this: renewable biofuels, biomass, wind, solar, frosting -- no wait, that must be plug-ins, efficiency, and getting out of our cars. Compare that to the graphs you sometimes see here on Gristmill. Tickell seems not to even realize that the second leading cause of global warming is land-use change. Indonesia and Brazil are right behind the United States and China in greenhouse-gas release thanks to deforestation, which didn't make the list, or at least, I could not find that word in my notes.
After the movie one of the promoters gave a little pep talk to the crowd before Representative Inslee appeared. She admonished us to fact check and to not blindly believe what we read in newspapers. Big oil is spreading misinformation about biodiesel, don't you know. Odd that biodiesel enthusiasts were not asking us to fact check the media all those years when it was telling us that biodiesel smelled like popcorn and was carbon neutral. It would be grown locally and end wars fought over resources. It would not affect food prices, limit biodiversity, encroach on conservation reserve land, blah, blah, blah.
During Inslee's chat he mentioned three generations of biofuels: first generation (food-based), cellulosic, and finally algae. I must have blinked when cellulosic came and went and I still don't see any algae. Why anyone would want to be a politician in today's complex world is beyond me. I was mildly tempted to raise my hand and ask him how he planned to implement Washington State's biofuel mandates without using food-based biofuels but thought better of it.
Believe it or not, having said all that, I still recommend seeing this film. I actually enjoyed it and who knows what it will look like six months from now. I think Tickell has great skill as a film director (and editor). I hope this film launches his career. If I had the money I'd hire him for a project or two. There are bigger fish to fry. He needs to turn this talent loose on coal and deforestation.
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Comments
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cchange Posted 9:01 am
07 Dec 2008
http://www.newearth1.net
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Erik Hoffner Posted 9:41 am
07 Dec 2008
So, by combining the title of your post with the bit about Congressman Inslee watching his language because an "obscure blogger might be in the audience trying to take notes in the dark," are you taking credit for the world's awareness that growing crops for fuel is a troubled idea? I believe a former professor of mine has you beat by about 20 years, but rest assured that there won't be a change in the 'non-food based' language attached to this film when it putt putts out of Seattle.
Erik
The Orion Grassroots Network: supporting grassroots groups working for conservation, justice, & more
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:03 pm
07 Dec 2008
...are you taking credit for the world's awareness that growing crops for fuel is a troubled idea?
No, Eric, but I am taking partial credit for some of the editing in his film. I participated in the protest that met it at the Seattle Film Festival. I'm in this iteration or the movie. Look for me if you go to see it. I'm wearing a bike helmet and holding up one side of a banner.
The film promoters were talking with me outside of the theatre. I took a picture of them taking my picture. They even let me stow my bike in the "Veggie Van" while I reviewed the movie.
If your former professor thought this was a bad idea 20 years ago, why were you fueling your Jetta with this stuff until a year ago? He must not have made much of an impression on you.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 2:53 pm
07 Dec 2008
I would suggest farm biogas. He could even compress it to run an economy plugin hybrid. The biodiesel gas guzzling thing is doomed, algae or not.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:24 pm
07 Dec 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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JMG Posted 5:05 pm
07 Dec 2008
Environmentalists have been turned into accomplices for a great crime, where people on the margins across the world are literally starved so that rich people in the US can continue their energy trance by telling themselves that agrofuels are "green."
This afternoon I watched Oregon's Secretary of State, Bill Bradbury (strongly rumored to be interested in running for the open Governor's chair in 2010) give his slide show (Bradbury was the only elected and was one of the first 50 trainees in Al Gore's efforts to spread the message through others by training them to give essentially the same kind of show portrayed in An Inconvenient Truth).
He finished up by glossing over Pacala and Socolow's wedges, picking a bunch, and by saying that "I look at those and I just don't see anything too hard." That's when he mentioned "biofuels" for the first time, but he did it again later in the Q&A when he talked about how E. Oregon farmers were getting religion on climate change in part because they are getting a bunch of windmill leases and growing biofuels.
He didn't point out that Oregon has added an enormous subsidy ON TOP OF the federal subsidies, or mention the state's huge budget hole, or the fact that the latest result of Big Green's work in Oregon has been to lure a COAL-BURNING ethanol plant to Oregon (Snake River Ethanol, in Nyssa), so that we can ship corn from the midwest to Oregon to turn Wyoming coal into ethanol. He didn't mention that Portland's transit service is paying $6.75 per gallon for biodiesel.
So, consider what it means that, among politicians, people like Inslee and Bradbury are at the top of the heap. It afraid it means that we are SO.SCREWED.
But thanks to you and Steenblik and others for helping get the word out. We may, as Churchill said, eventually do the right thing--once all the other alternatives have been found wanting. The question is whether we'll be blowing through positive-feedback tipping points before we get Big Green and the subsidy ranchers to let go their death grip on the Legislatures and Congress.
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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caniscandida Posted 5:52 pm
07 Dec 2008
A taste-test of algae oil is not something that I would look forward to.
As a fan of Neil Young and (to a lesser extent) Willie Nelson, I do not hold these little enthusiasms of theirs against them.
As a fan of Star Trek, though, I freely admit that the way its writers go about creating stories, involving heroizing the military/industrial complex, is disturbing. And the "universal translator" is at least as challenging a technological innovation as warp drive, demolecularization transport and holodecks, though it receives much less attention. Still, story-telling has required that kind of suspension of disbelief forever, presumably; certainly long before the age when the Greek-speakers Helen and Achilles chatted so effortlessly with Trojan-speakers Paris and Priam (whatever language Trojan might have been).
But it is indeed rather anti-scientific of Star Trek, to assume that all intelligent life forms will have a body structure resembling the highly anomalous and barely functional vertical-vertebrate form of our own lineage. Curiously, interspecial mestizos such as Mr. Spock and B'lana Torres become less problematic, once one allows that evolution throughout the galaxy must necessarily follow one particular chemical/physical path.
"Crack-crazed chicken," by the way, sounds like the name of an interesting new recipe, off limits to vegans and those with scruples about using controlled substances ...
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Erik Hoffner Posted 2:14 am
08 Dec 2008
No worries about the misspelled name. I'm used to it after 37 years.
Erik
The Orion Grassroots Network: supporting grassroots groups working for conservation, justice, & more
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JMG Posted 2:55 am
08 Dec 2008
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:33 pm
08 Dec 2008
$7.21? The Safeway near me is selling a 5% biodiesel blend for $2.71. Not only is Oregon exacerbating global warming, they are screwing their taxpayers doing it.
Here's a company in that neck of the woods making it out of waste, or at least mostly:
SeQuential Biofuels
The Veggie Van on display in front of the theater had been fueled with it.
Grease theft appears to have become a big problem as more and more people covet that over virgin oils.
Here is an excerpt from an email to local electric car enthusiasts from Tim Stearns, a Senior Energy Policy Specialist in the Washington Department of Community, Trade and economic Development:
In 2006 the legislature adopted a Renewable Fuel Standard that will require 2% of fuel supplies to come from biofuels. The state is actively participating in a number of efforts to improve the energy balance and carbon content of all fuels. Biofuels have been unjustly scapegoated for the rise in fuel prices; however, we need to work to ensure biofuels are sustainable.
...
Right now I envision the market including ... the current biofuels, but in the future using better Energy Balance biofuels.
First, I'm curious to see how the state is actively improving the energy balance and carbon content of biofuels.
Next, did he mean "food" prices when he said biofuels have been unjustly scapegoated? And if he believes that, is he at odds with Inslee or was Inslee just blowing smoke?
And finally, it is obvious that they plan to keep on using agrofuels until something better comes along, which may never happen and surely won't happen in the near future. The planet would be better off if they just went back to oil. As bad as it is, it is the least of two evils.
Washington State's King County Metro has stopped using biodiesel, partly because of cost and partly due to concerns about the latest science. Oregon is suddenly no longer leading the way. It is speeding down a blind alley having taken a wrong turn and is starting to look rather naive and unenlightened given all the new information that has come to light.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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JMG Posted 4:00 pm
08 Dec 2008
And why in hell are we pouring money into subsidizing something that even its biggest fans keep inadvertently admitting is not sustainable?
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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