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How Green Can Your Drive Get?

Even 'green' energy has a price. (Want fries with that?)

By Tom Glaister
ConsumerAffairs.com

January 14, 2008

"Ok, then," I snapped, exhausted from my flight, "What about a train?"

This time it took a full half minute for the laughter to subside until he pulled himself together and informed me that I'd need to hire a car.

"That's a great idea, Doug but there's just one problem: I can't drive."

Looking back I'm not sure how our friendship survived the subsequent hysterics.

Towns and cities in Europe mostly evolved organically over the ages from the times when riding a donkey was considered hi-tech. The result is that only the bigger cities are too large to be navigated on foot and in those cases a smooth public transport system is in place – hence why I never learned to drive. So you'll understand my difficulty in adjusting to American culture where even to buy a carton of milk meant firing up the internal combustion engine.

Double-crossed

Californians were way ahead of any culture I'd previously seen on the ecological front, though. Not only did the complexity of the recycling bins constantly bewilder me, I often heard low hisses of disapproval for people driving gas-guzzling vehicles, the size of which I'd never seen before. Even Big Arnie soon caught the green fever and gave up his Hummers.

(Los Angelenos, I noted with puzzlement, prided themselves on taking their reusable burlap shopping bags with them as they motored over to the Whole Foods in their Priuses, totally oblivious to the environmental devastation caused by their kingdom's rapacious draining of water from half the continent and the out-of-sight, out-of-mind electricity plants despoiling Indian reservations and pristine wilderness areas throughout the Southwest. A burlap shopping bag, or a Prius for that matter, hardly even counts as a gesture).

Leaving aside for the moment the omnipresent plastic water bottles tucked away in those reusbale shopping bags, Americans are, at least for the moment, hell-bent to save what's left of the world. But with only the hopelessly stubborn and obtuse oil companies and their hired hands still denying the fact of climate change, America finds itself in a terrible identity crisis.

The country designed and built for the car now finds that its best friend has turned against them, contributing to global warming that threatens everyone's futures. The country that immortalised the legend of the automobile as its most prominent symbol of independence and freedom is suddenly forced to reassess.

But for all the James Dean movies that put the romance into the revs, the real history of the gasoline engine is often obscured by nostalgia and vested interests.

At one time much of America got around by electric trains, similar to the trams in use in Europe and overhead voltage lines were a common sight in American cities. Right up until General Motors and Standard Oil bought up the land that trams operated on and promptly dismantled them to create demand for the motor car. The companies were convicted for this neat trick but managed to squeeze out of the ruling in a higher court.

Trams of course aren't much good for driving around a country as enormous as the US but, still, the story of gasoline was far from preordained. Even Henry Ford's legendary Model T was designed to run also on ethanol before the big bucks of the oil industry wooed the car manufacturer to follow another, more profitable course.

Yet, after all, what could be more natural?

Sunlight lets plants and bacteria grow, they decompose into oil and humans burn it to release the stored energy and improve our quality of life. Our cars are powered by ancient sunlight.

The rub of course is that the oil took 300 million years to form and that the American population has more than tripled since the days of the Model T. No one agrees on how many years of oil are left but it's certainly going to run out sometime and many of us may live to see it.

Running on grease

One ride was particularly memorable as I had to fight down nausea for the whole journey as the car stank of french fries.

I put my driver, Hans, down for a messy eater until he announced that we had to refuel and pulled over at a McDonalds. I gawked at the incongruity of a hippie ordering processed fast food until he emerged with a plastic container full of vegetable oil.

I watched with disbelief as Hans poured the oil straight into his fuel tank and he at once began a prolific lecture about biodiesel and reduced carbon emissions. It turned out that behind the dreadlocks and beard was a graduate in engineering and he explained how fuel can be made from corn, soy or even algae and 60% less greenhouse gases were released.

"Yeah but straight into your tank?" I asked, appalled for the health of his car.

He gave me a wink and embarked at tedious length of the merits of a fuel tank conversion he'd paid for with injector nozzles, parallel filters and many other technical names that made my eyes glaze over. I didn't realise it took a science degree to save the world.

Biodiesel is currently the darling of big business, however and they're striving to make it as simple as possible. Manufacturers are bringing out new models to be compatible with the new fuel and Minnesota became the first US state in 2005 to make a 2% mix of biodiesel with regular diesel mandatory.

Here's the rub though: last year I was in South East Asia and I kept overhearing backpackerers who were off to Sumatra and Borneo to experience the rainforest 'before it's all cut down'. I had naively assumed that in the 21st century governments had learned to look after their natural biodiversity and I said so.

A rain forest in your tank

"No way, dude," A blonde Australian traveler told me, shaking his head, "It's all being cut down to grow oil-palms for biodiesel. Everyone's putting rainforest into their tanks."

Biodiesel sourced from Asia has already caused enormous environmental devastation and as the forests are burned to make way for palm oil, the net result is more greenhouse gases being released. Cruelly ironic doesn't come close to describing it.

Even if the biofuel comes from domestic crops, some raise their eyebrows at food being grown for fuel. To provide enough biodiesel for the entire country would mean giving almost all of America's arable lands over to raising corn.

But leave it to the entrepreneurs to find a way. Investors are pouring money into finding ways to farm algae cheaply, another potential source of biodiesel. According to Roger Ruan of the University of Minnesota, one acre of algae could produce 15,000 litres (3,962 US gallons) of biodiesel, compared to just 20 from corn.

Then no one would need to make any wars in the Middle East over oil…

There are still significant technological hurdles to overcome though and many still say that we could be using all our waste oil and fat. Rather than give it away to hippies in Volkswagens, Tyson Foods, the world's largest producer of chickens, has set up a massive deal to process its 2.3 billion pounds of animal fat into bio fuel, enough for 300 million gallons of biodiesel.

But would a vegetarian drive on chicken fat?

At the end of the day, the average American driver doesn't want to delve into the science and environmental side effects of driving to work, he or she wants the clear conscience of knowing they're helping towards a better world. Nor do they want to have to worry about fatty deposits in their engines from biodiesel or hunt around to buy fuel. And only the truly dedicated green driver would make it at home (although here's the recipe in case you're motivated.

Other optons

Ethanol could be a good option. When I was in Brazil drivers used to boast how much greener they were than their gringo counterparts as they drove on 25% ethanol. But right now the only place to get ethanol in the US is if you live around the corn belt and buy a converter kit for your engine.

Of course Cuba would be more than happy to produce all the ethanol the US needed…

Then there's always the option to plug into the matrix – the energy grid.

When I was a child in England, I listened every morning for the telltale whir of the electric milk float that made my breakfast cereal possible. These vehicles trundled around at slightly more than walking speed and so the idea of an electric car seem rather absurd to me other than a means of hauling cartons of milk around.

Things have changed since the 1980's, however. There are now hybrid vehicles that reach high speeds in a matter of seconds and create a fraction of the noise and pollution of a regular car. Using a gasoline engine to power the internal batteries, the engine then switches to electric power and so has none of the range problems of an all-electric car.

Hybrid electric cars are more expensive than traditional models but with less fuel consumption, Intellichoice.com estimated in 2007 that all 22 currently available hybrid electric cars will actually save their owners money over a period of 5 years.

Your standard petroleum car can be adapted to a hybrid system and there are a whole bunch of tax incentives and parking allowances to encourage drivers to go electric. Plug-in cars will be available sometime around 2008 and you can even drive them on a partial ethanol mixture.

Still, although hybrid electric cars running on an ethanol mixture might drastically reduce emissions and dependency on oil, in the long run it's only a panacea. There's only a finite amount of the black stuff in the ground and churning out huge SUV's with hybrid engines is like "sticking lipstick on a pig", according to Ronald Hwang of the National Resource Defense Council.

Long-term alternatives exist but they still need development and the infrastructure to support them. Hydrogen would be the perfect fuel, emitting just a trail of water wherever it went. Hydrogen has the unfortunate drawback of being highly explosive, however and could turn the average highway into a Hollywood action-movie set unless the scientists find a better way to store it.

Another promising possibility is compressed air cars that emit only purified air as they move along but the tanks of compressed air need to be refilled every 200km and carrying a bicycle pump in the trunk probably won't do it.

In a world of finite resources and rapidly expanding population, it's up to technology to save us. Big business isn't inherently evil, it's inherently profit-minded.

If American drivers turn to environmentally-friendly cars then the car companies will develop models that meet that demand. General Motors, widely accused of 'killing the electric car', only turned its attention to hybrid vehicles after seeing the impressive sales that Toyota scored with its greener cars.

The American way of life may not be negotiable, as George Bush said before declining to join the Earth Summit but the American public has demonstrated its willingness to do its part in saving the world. In a free market, change follows the dollars and those are ultimately in the hands of the consumer.

And if the right kind of car comes along then, hell, I might even learn to drive.

Tom Glaister is the founder and editor of www.roadjunky.com - The Online Travel Guide for the Free and Funky Traveller. Although we normally 'translate' his stories, this article is presented in its native British English to better reflect the author's somewhat jaundiced view of the situation in which U.S. drivers find themselves.

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