An Inconvenient Flood
The first part in a series of reflections on what can be done to fight climate change.
With my basement inches deep in water for the second time in as many Sundays, it seemed a good time to voice some of my thoughts on climate change and what we might possibly do about it. In two successive weeks in a row this small town in rural Connecticut saw more water fall from the sky than at any time in my 23 years here. The storm that roared through last week left the small pond in front of our house double in size, and nearly overflowed across our driveway and out onto the road, my basement inches deep in water, carpets ruined. Something I’d never seen before. The storm that ended yesterday midday quadrupled the size of our pond and became a gushing stream rushing across the driveway and on down the side of the road—and 24 hours after the storm, rain run-off is still seeping into my basement (still inches deep in water after a full day of pumping out).
While I understand that weather doesn’t equal climate change and that abnormal storms may merely be aberrations, those who study such things have been telling us for some time now that this is coming—bigger storms, unseen flooding, pandemics…mother nature gone rogue. This past summer saw Long Lake, NY, the small town near my cabin in the Adirondacks utterly cut off from the rest of the world when a storm of never-seen proportions washed away roads and bridges and dams. This same storm then blasted through Vermont, leaving even more startling devastation in its wake.
The Arctic regions of the globe have been witnessing this kind of thing for some time now, whole towns relocated, melting pack ice devastating polar bear habitat, chunks of glaciers with the mass of large skyscrapers falling off into the melting seas. And when the balance is tipped and the Gulf-stream's eons-old course running from just off the Malecón in Havana to the shores of the UK slows, northern Europe may well start to look a lot more like other countries at that geographic parallel—the effects of global warming bringing catastrophic cooling.
Of course, we’ve known about this for some time, but like that nagging pain in your gums you don’t want to bother going to the dentist for, we have mostly chosen to ignore it. The oil industry has gone out of its way to find its own “experts” to cast doubt, and you have to look long and hard to find a Republican representative in D.C. who will acknowledge that anything out of the ordinary is happening—or that humans are to blame in any way.
I don’t want to make a long list here of all the tragic events awaiting humanity in the near future. Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe, if you want an exhaustive study of what’s happening (or just have another look at Al Gore’s classic, An Inconvenient Truth).
I just want to say a few words, which I will spread across several posts, about some relatively easy things that can be done to check and possibly even reverse the course of climate change. We may well not even need to wait for the EV car industry to develop longer range vehicles, for wind and solar to account for higher percentages of our energy usage, or for developments in nuclear fusion to finally produce net-positive energy. Yes, all of these things may well yet help us to fend off disaster, but what I’m envisioning can get us well on our way with technologies we have possessed for some time.
Biodiesel
Starting about ten years ago and up until obtaining quality biodiesel made from sustainable sources stopped being available, I ran three different vehicles on waste-oil-based biodiesel and heated my home with this same fuel as well.
Despite what many in the oil industry and others will tell you, biodiesel remains a viable resource and absolutely should play a part in any possible solution. Biodiesel is quite simply vegetable oil with the glycerin chemically removed (a byproduct that has many uses of its own). The very first diesel engine, invented by Rudolph Diesel way back in 1893, ran on straight vegetable oil (something still possible if you add heaters to your vehicle to thin the oil). Diesel created the engine specifically to run on vegetable oils at a time before gasoline refineries brought a cheap, abundant fuel to market, and gasoline-powered internal combustion engines overran other fledgling car industries (most notably, the electric vehicle, which was invented just a few year’s before Diesel’s engine in 1890—and for several years remained much more popular than the internal combustion engine).
Diesel engines are built heartier to sustain the pressure the oils must be put under to ignite and drive pistons, hence a good diesel engine will almost always outlast a gasoline powered one. Diesel engines are also about 40% more efficient than their gasoline counterparts, hence, even without really trying, small to mid-sized diesel engines have been boasting fuel efficiencies in the 40-60 miles per gallon range for decades. My mid 90s VW Passat diesel wagon could easily get 60 MPG with a little coaxing, and with its 18 gallon tank, it often provided over 1000 miles of range. Even my tank-of-a-car, 1980’s Mercedes/haul-the-kids-to-soccer-practice diesel wagon could get in the high 30s, in part because biodiesel increases lubricity and makes the engine run cleaner and even more efficiently.
Despite all its promise, the biodiesel industry has faced a steady onslaught of challenges. First off was the insistence of adding on the standard, fossil-fuel-based diesel road tax, first raised and implemented significantly by, of all people, Ronald Reagan in 1984. The basic logic goes: truckers use the roads more than the rest of us, hence they should pay an extra tax for the fuel they use (diesel) in order to help maintain highways…. Just about everywhere but in the U.S. and North America, petrol-diesel is cheaper than gasoline because it is so much less refined, retaining the viscous, oily qualities Rudolph Diesel required for his vegetable oil-based engines. The rationale for this tax, even for petrol-diesel powered vehicles, is, however, problematic at best, and like so many other things oil-industry related (including jacking up gasoline prices as inflation edged upward to maximize profits), is yet another way in which the oil and gas industries reap obscene profits at the cost of the environment (and our health and pocket books). And remember, the reason gasoline is so much more expensive at the pump in Europe and other places in the world stems from those countries not subsidizing the industry with tax dollars the way we do here in the U.S. Yes, we pay much less at the pump, but we’re paying for more expensive gasoline in other ways. Those cheap prices are illusory, and more nefariously, they keep fledgling, more sustainable and less polluting industries like the biodiesel industry from gaining a real foothold.
In order to compete with fossil fuels, biodiesel needed to be subsidized, just as gasoline and petroleum fuels are. An easy way to do this, would have been to exempt it from the extra petroleum-diesel “road tax”—and perhaps calling it something other than “biodiesel” would have helped in this regard. Maybe “veggie-fuel” would have been a better name? In its heyday, biodiesel received a subsidy that brought it nearly within reach of petrol-diesel, though it was always more expensive, and with the vagaries of petrol-fuel pricing, I sometimes was paying upwards of 50 cents more a gallon.
To make a long story short, biodiesel lost many of its subsidies during the Republican “vote-no-to-everything-so-Obama-fails” era, and many small biodiesel companies had to scramble. The man who would come to my house and fill my 2, 55 gallon drums I used to fill my vehicles could no longer provide me with fuel. His efforts had to shift to the home heating industry (in one small but important positive development, all home heating fuel in Connecticut is now required to contain 10% biodiesel).
The infamous Volkswagen diesel scandal, where VW were caught programing diesels to give false, cleaner emissions readouts, was another fatal blow to biodiesel. In the U.S., VW were just about the only producer of affordable, highly efficient diesel passenger vehicles. This scandal sent shockwaves through the industry, and Audi and Mercedes soon cut back significantly on their “clean diesel” initiatives as well.
Sadly, if these cars were minimally adapted, they could easily run super efficiently and truly “clean” on biodiesel or high blends of biodiesel and petrol-diesel. Even well before the scandal, VW and other diesel engine makers had made design changes to their engines that outraged us biodiesel fanboys. Biodiesel ignites at a much higher temperature than petrol-diesel, and VW and others redesigned certain parts of their emissions systems to ignite fuel at the temperature of petrol-diesel. Running at high percentages of biodiesel would leave un-ignited fuel to clog up expensive emissions parts. This forced biodiesel users to blend with regular diesel at a maximum of 20%. Any usage of higher percentages would also void your warranty…. The writing was on the wall for those of us hoping to see a car maker really embrace biodiesel as a viable fuel option. This is especially sad given how easy it would be to minimally modify a modern diesel engine to work flawlessly with 100% biodiesel.
Beyond making biodiesel-friendly vehicles, it’s easy to envision wedding the technology of hybrid electric vehicles that get in the mid 50s to 60 MPG with a small, super-efficient, biodiesel-specific engine. Fuel mileage exceeding 100 MPG could easily be achieved, all while burning a carbon net-neutral fuel.
Another major challenge to the biodiesel industry was the steady onslaught of misinformation or heavily biased information about it as a “nonviable” option, often coming directly from oil-industry funded “studies.” Again and again came claims that biodiesel could never work on a large scale due to its potential impact on the food industry and deforestation. Many studies selectively gathered data to support the thesis that precious, arable land essential for human food production would disastrously be supplanted in order to sustain the biodiesel industry. This claim is false and extreme for many reasons (the most obvious being that used cooking oils can, and are, regularly being repurposed as biodiesel). But even if you were to accept the premise that food production and biodiesel production are necessarily mutually exclusive, the potential for developing other sources of oils for biodiesel use with zero impact on food production is immense.
Enter algae. Some species of algae are comprised of up to 50% oil, which can easily be converted into biodiesel. Furthermore, it’s possible to grow algae in non-arable locales under a broad range of temperatures and conditions, and some species of algae double in mass every 24 hours. Deserts are an especially good place to grow algae, as all they need are water (no soil) and sun, and researchers have found viable, inexpensive and eco-friendly ways to grow algae and produce biodiesel in this manner. One particularly enterprising venture re-routed exhaust from a petroleum-fueled power plant through tubes of growing algae. The algae feasted on the carbon emissions of the factory, grew rapidly, and were then crushed, their oils made into biofuel.
One simple rational for shoring up the biodiesel industry is to blend it with all petrol-diesel and home heating oil, since even when blended at low percentages, there is a significant increase in “lubricity” and efficiency. When petrol-diesel sulphur emissions were lowered back in the early 2000s, with the objective to cut back on the damaging effects of large particulates so common to petrol-diesel emissions, the fuel became notably less lubricative, and efficiency decreased while wear and tear increased. Since biodiesel blends well with petrol-diesel and provides a significant increase in lubricity, the logical thing might have been to do what Connecticut and other states have done with home heating oil and add 10-20% blends to all road diesel fuels as well.
As it stands, small diesels are something you find mainly in Europe, though even there, their numbers and sales are decreasing as EV demand soars. I have owned two electric cars and one electric hybrid vehicle, and I do think, ultimately, they will be an important part of the future—especially if we can find more ecological materials than lithium or develop affordable solid state batteries—or find a way to remove hydrogen from water more efficiently (and literally run our cars on water). But even with these, the EV infrastructure is in its nascency, and at times it feels as if we are running blindly toward this new, shiny thing rather than turning our gaze toward what’s already available.
Some even simpler choices come to mind when considering what it is we can do now to stave off the impact of climate change. Many a new EV or hybrid boasts bigger, faster engines along with their greater efficiency, but what might an EV look like that doesn’t get to 60 in a few seconds? What range might the newly designed, highly efficient Prius Prime achieve if Toyota hadn’t felt the need to significantly boost HP at the same time?
Again and agin DIY tinkerer-environmentalists demonstrate just how easy it is to make vehicles that outperform car industry vehicles in terms of efficiency. Neil Young’s famous Lincvolt project took the body of the largest passenger car ever made, a 1959 Lincoln Continental, tore out the 10MPG massive engine, replaced it with a small, on-board generator, batteries and electric motors and achieved 55 MPG.
As I listen to the hum of a small electric pump pushing hundreds of gallons of water out of my flooded basement, and know that there are still many hours of work to be done mopping, drying with fans, then trying to find a certain-to-be-expensive solution to this new, never-before-seen problem, it pains me to watch us marching blindly forward toward oblivion while so many potential “fixes” hide in plain sight. I don’t think we can afford not to implement all resources at our disposal to combat climate change. The reintroduction of small, biodiesel-friendly passenger vehicles paired with hybrid electric systems…providing significant funding for research into biodiesel production… reasonable and logical subsidies and tax rebates…could all make a significant impact.
Working to reestablish a robust biodiesel industry also gives us a 100% domestic fuel, reminding me of the sticker I had in the rear window of my 2006 Jetta TDI, “100% Biodiesel. No war required.”
This is the first part in a series of suggestions for relatively simple things we can do now to combat climate change and build toward a more sustainable future.
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Excellent, well-researched and informative, thanks Arnie. I could see this being a ‘long read’ for The Guardian - have you thought about pitching your essays there? I reckon this is exactly the sort of environmental journalism they’re looking for.
We have solar & an EV. The panels paid for themselves a couple of years ago and the Solar now delivers 5,000 miles/yr, 8 months hot water, abt $900+ of free energy and a Feed in Export check of about $600 a year. Each additional 1000 miles in the EV costs less than $30 (overnight tariff 8.5p/kw).
Meanwhile, we always leave home with a full tank & use public chargers abt 3 times a year, for a 10 minute top-up.