If you buy it for me, I'll pay you back...

We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down...

Berkeley has always been beating to a different bongo drummer.

It's only fitting that the University responsible for the Manhattan project also function as the original command post for the Free Speech Movement - trading bomb for calm. You can see it everywhere. In People's Park, on the infamous Bloody Thursday of 1969, James Rector died at the hands of a police shotgun. Now, the former site of the anti-war protest is a nerve center for a satellite Food Not Bombs program - a fitting end to its tragic beginning.

The school has always been at the forefront of the progressive movement. And while there are still some programs that might seems a little sketchy, possibly calling in to question their current "independence of direction" --$500 Million donation from BP to develop biofuels, $10 Million donation from DOW for sustainability-- the city/University area of Berkeley is, yet again, still way ahead of the curve.

And I'm jealous...

Berkeley's City Council has a wonderful plan for the city to finance solar panels for its residents. Basically, the homeowners pay for their panels through a 20-year additional assessment on their homes, with said assessment GUARANTEED not to exceed what their electricity would cost from the power company.

Guaranteed cheaper. Definitively cleaner. Undoubtedly accessible. Brilliant.

But will solar be embraced?

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Berkeley going solar - city pays up front, recoups over 20 years
Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, October 26, 2007

Berkeley is set to become the first city in the nation to help thousands of its residents generate solar power without having to put money up front - attempting to surmount one of the biggest hurdles for people who don't have enough cash to go green.

The City Council will vote Nov. 6 on a plan for the city to finance the cost of solar panels for property owners who agree to pay it back with a 20-year assessment on their property. Over two decades, the taxes would be the same or less than what property owners would save on their electric bills, officials say.

"This plan could be our most important contribution to fighting global warming," Mayor Tom Bates said Thursday. "We've already seen interest from all over the U.S. People really think this plan can go."

The idea is sparking interest from city and state leaders who are mindful of California's goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Officials in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica and several state agencies have contacted Berkeley about the details of its plan.

"If this works, we'd want to look at this for other cities statewide," said Ken Alex, California deputy attorney general. "We think it's a very creative way to eliminate the barriers to getting solar panels, and it's fantastic that Berkeley's going ahead with this."

Read the rest of the article HERE.

Is it any wonder that they think they're the next Silicone Valley?

That's Ecofantastic!!! Day 5...

This whole week I will be honoring ecofantastic items...

Ecofantastic: A product/method/ideology so absurdly priced/developed/formulated that its irrationality transcends any purposeful usage and/or implementation into the present-day green movement, to the point of almost becoming fantasy.

While my clan continues to recover from the glory that is 11 month-old food poisoning, hazmat suits be damned, let's continue with part 5 (actually part 4, but who's counting?) of the Ecofantastic series.

Ecofantastic: Agrciultural fuels are the wave of the future...

Agrofuels have many noble charachteristics but they are not, in fact, going to save the world. Many misconceptions range from the simple notion that agrofuels are clean and green, all the way to the exotic, lofty insinuation that agrofuels can make magic, spurring rural development and boosting economies. Many --if not all-- of the biofuel praises could not be farther from the truth.


This "solution," while founded on good-natured principles, might be (ok, it is) hurting the industry and the planet more than it's helping.

How big is the picture?

Industrialized countries are going biocrazy, but their current vision of the future might be bigger than their stomachs. They hope to provide 5.75% of Europe’s transport fuel by 2010, and 10% by 2020.

As foodfirst.org points out, those goals lead to some major problems:

These targets far exceed the agricultural capacities of the industrial North. Europe would need to plant 70% of its farmland to fuel. The U.S.’s entire corn and soy harvest would need to be processed as ethanol and bio-diesel. Northern countries expect the Global South to meet their fuel needs, and southern governments appear eager to oblige.

And oblige they do...


Currently, smaller nations like Indonesia and Malaysia are jumping on the biofuel bandwagon, rapidly cutting down forests to expand palm-oil plantations.

In Brazil, bio-fuel crops already occupy an area the size of Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Great Britain combined. They're also planning to increase sugar cane acreage 500%.

In Columbia, the government is "acquiring" land (see: stealing from indigenous people and minorities) in order to produce biofuels. Paramilitary forces insure that anyone caught resisting will be happily relocated to a more favorable locale below the crops.

And that's just a small glimpse at the "progress" in the other half of the world. Read the rest of the foodfirst article and get a much, much bigger picture of the whole story. It's wonderfully written.


Not surprisingly, chimp whisperer extraordinaire Jane Goodall is especially critical of the deforestation caused by bifouel farming. She's witnessing the production-effects firsthand:

We're cutting down forests now to grow sugarcane and palm oil for biofuels and our forests are being hacked into by so many interests that it makes them more and more important to save now.


Hardest hit? Hard to say.

Here's a small glimpse at Borneo.

The well-intentioned switch to biofuels in the West is destroying Borneo’s rain forests - one of the greenest places on Earth. Environmentalists claim that an area of forest the size of Wales was cleared last year as Indonesia cashes in on the new “green gold” and plants miles of palm oil trees to meet surging demand.

The UN says the entire rain forest will be gone in 15 years, and the native wild orangutan extinct in just 10...

Groups trying to highlight the destruction are being threatened by the developers...

Ninety new biodiesel factories are under construction here - the developers encouraged by far-away countries “going green”. [More]

Doesn't sound very promising, Earth-wise or otherwise. Another one bites the dust.


With all this data against biofuel (insluding the economic predictions), it's amazing to see that it still moving forward: Airplanes, Corporate Alliances, more Airplanes,

As that author noted, the biggest frustration with biofuel is its well-intended beginnings. What was supposed to be the wave of the future is now turning out to be a tsunami of destruction. And while we (now) might be quick to criticise the rush to action, you can't help but look at the ecofantastic trend market and wonder: What's the next biofuel occurring right now? What is its comprehensive effect on the environment? What's green simply for now, and what's green for now AND for later?

We are living and working under the auspicious roof of Web 2.0 - a name give to the intertube with an understanding that the old days of Gen-1 design and structure are over and done with. There are new ways to operate, analyze and function, so much so that the original model has been broken. So my question is this:

At what point do we begin to conserve/develop/implement/function in Green 2.0? Will we ever learn faster than destroy?

Camp out here and wait for some news...

Painting an eco-world in black & white...

World-renowned author, scientist, environmentalist and activist David Suzuki -the unequivocal yogi of sustainable ecology- had some veerrrry interesting thoughts on biofuel.

I likey.

This suggestion has been a long time in the making. It seems as though the green movement has somehow severed the tie between technology and rational research. Words like biofuel are now recognized for their "bio" and not their "fuel." We need to get back on track.

Suzuki manages to put some sobering questions on the table, asking about the legitimacy of biofuel and its possible help/hindrance on the environment. Fuel is still fuel, especially when fuel is needed to make fuel.

Here are some highlights:

-Ethanol made from corn only contains marginally more energy than what is needed to produce it.
-We use about a litre's worth of fossil fuels to grow, harvest, process, and transport a litre of corn-based ethanol.
-Making corn-based ethanol is more of an agricultural subsidy for farmers than it is a sound environmental policy.
-Look at the land area that would be needed to grow fuel crops.
-Switching to biofuels would not reduce the demand for fuel, just change the way we get it.
-Substituting just 10 per cent of fossil fuels to biofuels for all our vehicles would require about 40 per cent of the entire cropland in Europe and North America.
-Biofuels alone are not the quick-fix answer to global warming.

More importantly, he puts the house back on its foundation:

-Reducing the amount of fuel we use, no matter what the type, is very important.

Rationally galvanized eco-tech...I love it.

Read his full article HERE.

Cooking something other than meth...

Finally...now I can be the creepy neighbor cooking stuff in his back shed! Introducing the BioPro 190!

In all honesty --given my history of worker's comp claims/accidents-- making my own fuel scares the living CFL daylighting out of me. Fortunately, AGR LLC has dumbed down the process to bread maker-like proportions.

Needless to say, I'm still a little skeeved that one of the steps is "Add Sulfuric Acid." Nevertheless, this seems to be an interesting answer for those who like to home brew their benzine.

Still, I think I'll be pumping my bike tires before I pump my own fuel.
From their website:

The BioPro 190 produces one 50 gallon batch every 48 hours.

The actual hands-on time (adding feedstock ingredients, and interacting with the machine) to make a batch is around ½ hour. If you take adding ingredients out of the equation, you’re down to about 10 minutes per batch. Making biodiesel yourself only saves you money if it doesn’t take a lot of extra time.

The BioPro processors drastically shorten the learning curve required for making biodiesel. For instance, the BioPro is one of the few processors in its class to employ an esterification reaction along with the regular transesterification. What this means from a practical standpoint, is many oils that would yield soapy glop in other processors can be successfully turned into biodiesel using the BioPro. For typical waste vegetable oil, no titration or other chemical testing is required.

The BioPro processors are totally self contained – no settling tanks, wash tanks, external plumbing, etc. The BioPro 190 is about the size of a typical refrigerator, while the 380 is bit larger than a typical vending machine.