Alcoholics Unanimous Newsletter ~ November 2004

Gosh have we ever been busy on the alcohol book project. It seems this whole year has been flying by with all the outreach, fundraising, research and writing that we've been doing. We are now down to the last few months of work to get the book in the publisher's hands.

So much has been changing so fast in the last year that it’s been a challenge to keep up. We’ve recently won victories in the tax credit laws for alcohol fuel. All California, New York and Connecticut gasoline now contains 5.7% alcohol instead of MTBE. So those of you who were going only to Union 76 thinking that they were the only ones using alcohol can now widen your choices. Hundreds of new E-85 pumps have opened up in over 22 states and more are being added every day. Due to good market discipline, the E85 wholesalers are demanding that retailers in many areas maintain prices for ethanol at twenty cents a gallon lower than gasoline. Now that’s good PR.

A proliferation of books in the last year prophesize various forms of doom from the decline in oil. Few talk about realistic alternatives such as alcohol fuel. Most focus on how all our systems will fail without oil to power them, which ignores the power of conservation and ingenuity of people. Sure if everyone stands around and keeps electing oil executives to government and does nothing themselves the problems will be hellish. But put the native intelligence of the people to work and focus the labor of the country on restoration of the land and production of what we need, and the future looks a lot brighter.

Last spring, I bought a used Flexible Fuel Ford Ranger pickup, a 1000 gallon tank and plan to fill it soon with E98 (98% alcohol). Carson in Nevada City has made a lot of progress on getting his fuel truck on the road and a storage tank on his land, so he can start supplying people with fuel. By the time you read this, he should be in a position to do that. Michael Bock has made a lot of progress getting a small Marin coop going too.

We have been visible and vocal at many events this year and in the press. We had booths at events like Health and Harmony and Solfest, which have generated a lot of interest in what we are doing. At Solfest I shared the main stage with actress Daryl Hannah, biodiesel leader Josh Tickell and the founder of Grassolean Solutions, Charris Ford. We all interacted great and had the crowd totally excited. Our follow-up ethanol workshop was overflowing with people and enthusiasm. It was certainly the talk of Solfest.

We also had a booth at the American Coalition for Ethanol conference where we stood out like a sore thumb amongst the big industrial exhibits. We generated a lot of conversation though about smaller-scale alcohol fuel production.

I was also a keynote speaker at the North Bay Ecofest in Sebastopol which really roused people to want to start using alcohol right now. The need for the book was never more apparent.

The IIEA taught two Permaculture courses this summer to help raise money to support our work on the alcohol book. One was a groundbreaking course in Illinois. I believe it's the largest, highest quality class that’s been taught in the Midwest. Teaching this course, along with my being the keynote speaker at the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association Conference, has resulted in a lot of interest and new memberships in Alcoholics Unanimous from the Midwest. I did a very successful press tour and speaking tour in the spring all over Illinois and Indiana where I gave 10 talks in 6 days. All were well attended with 70 or more people. When I did the radio shows promoting the Midwest Permaculture course invariably half the show turned out to be about alcohol.

Our other course was in California at the Sierra Friends Center in Nevada City which was also powerful. These courses were a diversion from working on the book for a few months, but now we have cleared our calendars and are all working full-time to get the book finished and to the publisher.

The one exception to clearing the calendar is a conference on Peak Oil in which I was chosen to be a plenary speaker along with luminaries Richard Heinberg, who wrote “The Party’s Over” and Richard Register who has been involved in Ecocity design for decades. Whereas all of the other speakers were eloquent about the impending crisis of Peak Oil, my presentation on alcohol was the one that gave the crowd hope and a place to take action. Everyone wanted to know how soon the book was coming out so that they could start their own alcohol fuel production cooperatives.

READ MORE NEWS HERE

Cellulose to Ethanol - New Developments
FFVs in Brazil
Small-Scale Ethanol Plants in Brazil- Any leads?
Toyota Truck Conversion
The Alcohol Can Be A Gas! Cover Contest
Chance at the Bioneers 2005
Hydrogen Fool Cells
Better Press
Oil and Corporate Accounting
Global Warming

Cellulose to Ethanol Plant
The first commercial cellulose to alcohol plant in the world opened in Canada this year and is processing wheat straw into fuel. This is a day I had always hoped to see since every year for the last 20 years, people have been saying that cellulose to alcohol is only 5 years away. Converting cellulose, essentially any plant matter, to alcohol rather than just sugar or starch gives us a massive amount of material to work with.

The DOE and USDA have many programs that are making headway in the commercialization of cellulose to alcohol. There’s too many to mention here but there is one project in particular that bears mention. They have developed a yeast that’s been altered to be able to eat much of the cellulose breakdown products, the hemicelluloses. This has been a key to the cellulose to alcohol process and has been a problem in the past. This yeast is the result of 20 years of work by Purdue University and it produces a wide variety of useful by-products other than the alcohol. Although this is the result of genetic engineering, it is not done with bacteria and the genes apparently are combined from within the same genus of yeast, not some weird segment from a completely unrelated organism. I’m not so sure that this process can’t be done another way with natural yeasts, but the potential spread of this yeast is far less than the bacteria other scientists were trying to use. Some of these processes might be useful on a smaller scale. However, many of the new processes are expensive and will only work on the mega scale, due to the use of high pressures and noxious chemicals.

Toyota Truck Conversion
This month, we are going to do a conversion of a Toyota Tundra to alcohol as a model for the book and are we excited about that! We hope to make it a dual fuel conversion where a flip of the switch would change from one fuel to the other. Wish us luck since we are going from the theoretical to the practical here. Stay tuned for the next newsletter for stories and pictures of this and other car conversions that we have been doing.

FFVs in Brazil
Total Flexible Fuel vehicles have debuted in Brazil this year that can use hydrated alcohol or gasoline. They are selling like hotcakes with alcohol now priced at half the cost of gasoline there. These vehicles are a bit more sophisticated than the Flexible Fuel Vehicles made here in the U.S. with systems that are better optimized for alcohol.

Small-scale ethanol production in Brazil
We are now pursuing individuals in Brazil who might be able to help us see the small-scale ethanol fuel production and car conversion technologies. If you have friends or connections in Brazil, we need to talk with them and network to find the right people to visit. We were rather disappointed that after the Trade Counsel promised us a full tour, the Ministries of Energy and Mining who control the alcohol program refused to cooperate. Basically due to the way the U.S. is acting around the world, we were shut out since Brazil is diplomatically having a lot of disputes with the U.S. We have private funding to videotape this trip as well. Please call or email us directly if you have any friends in Brazil who might be able to help us out locating places to see.

The Alcohol Can Be A Gas! Cover Contest
Our publisher has asked us to come up with ideas for a new cover for the book as they plan for the future release date. Quite frankly their first idea of a whisky bottle with a hose coming out of it to fill a car left us feeling like our supporters could do better. We are asking you to think up what would be a great cover. You don’t even have to draw it. Just describe it in as much detail as you can and the publisher’s artists will take it the rest of the way. If you are an artist and can sketch an idea and your idea is chosen, you may be paid by the publisher to execute a cover for the book. The winner gets $100 for the best idea (and a autographed copy of the book, of course).

Chance at the Bioneers 2005
As a result of the connection between nuclear power and hydrogen, Dr. Helen Caldicott will be writing an essay for the book. Nuclear is a double threat since you make hydrogen either from nuclear electricity or by heating water with nuclear power to over 5000°F to make it split into hydrogen and oxygen. There is also a proposal into the Bioneers Conference that would have she and I in a panel and also giving separate plenary talks. If you’d like to support my speaking at the Bioneers Conference next year, you can send them a note saying you are in support of David Blume speaking at the Bioneers Conference next year with Helen Caldicott. The email address for the Bioneers Conference is: conference@bioneers.org.

Hydrogen Fool Cells
In the meantime, Hydrogen continues to be debunked and Fool Cells are now being understood more clearly by the public, so the administration’s schemes to make coal and nuclear our future hydrogen energy sources becomes more difficult everyday. Look at this comment from a report by the National Academy of Science: “In the best case scenario, the transition to a hydrogen economy would take many decades, and any reductions in oil imports and carbon dioxide emissions are likely to be minor during the next 25 years,” said the committee that wrote the report.

"Our study suggests that while hydrogen is a potential long-term energy approach for the nation, the government should keep a balanced portfolio of research and development efforts to enhance U.S. energy efficiency and develop alternative energy sources," said committee chair Michael Ramage, retired Executive Vice President at Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering, Moorestown, N.J.”

Better Press
Alcohol is starting to get better press too. Look at this clip from an editorial in the Columbia Missouri in response to Hank Waters, a critic of ethanol. The piece was written by Jerry Taylor of the Marathon Oil company!

“For instance, the American Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago credits ethanol-blended reformulated gasoline with reducing smog-forming emissions by 25 percent since 1990. And in 2003, Argonne National Laboratory determined ethanol use in the United States reduced CO2-equivalent greenhouse emissions by 5.7 million tons, an amount equal to the annual emissions of more than 853,000 automobiles. That is a real and measurable benefit.”

Oil and Corporate Accounting
From Fortune magazine about Shell Oil, “Sure, the company is still selling lots of oil, and at high prices. But it's only replacing 60% of the oil it is pumping, giving it the shortest reserve life--10.2 years--of any oil major. At current production rates, Shell will run out of oil in a decade. To boost reserves to the level of its competitors, Shell needs either a big discovery or a big acquisition. But neither of those scenarios is likely, because most big basins in the world have been explored, and oil prices are too high to make an acquisition attractive. That means Shell will be a no-growth company at least for the next few years. Executives say production will be flat this year, will fall next year by 3%, and will show slight growth in 2006. Not until 2007 will gas and oil projects in Norway, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada, and Qatar begin to pay off. ‘There's a limit to what we can do today to affect production in the next two to three years,’ says Simon Henry, Shell's head of finance in exploration and production.”

The probable reality is that the competitors have inflated their reserves just like Shell did, but haven’t been called on it by the SEC yet. But news like this is what sends investors running and Shell could collapse on shortage of capital if its stockholders sell and invest in other companies. If Shell can’t get a piece of the spoils in Iraq, it will probably go bankrupt long before it runs out of oil.

Global Warming
Excerpted from The Guardian 7/14/04 Paul Brown
“There is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for 55 million years. Enough to melt all the ice on the planet and submerge cities like London, New York and New Orleans,” Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser has warned.

“Over time the carbon dioxide level has varied between 200 ppm and 270 ppm. The low figures were during ice ages and the higher figures were during natural periods of global warming. Our current level is now over 379 ppm, a level not seen in 55 million years during a period in which all ice on earth had melted.

When Greenland melts, the seas will rise about 22 feet and if Antarctica melts, it will raise the oceans approximately 350 feet. This will inundate more than 70 percent of where the human population of the planet currently lives and more importantly where it farms.”

How You Can Help
Following the election, it’s clear that we are going to continue to be governed by corporate oil interests. Our work in getting the word out about alcohol and helping people withdraw from supporting the petroleum industry and making America more energy independent has become more important than ever. If you are one of the folks who have been thinking about investing in the book, now is the time to do it. We only need a handful more investors so we can finish the work we need to do to get the book done without interruption. We have outgrown our current inexpensive office and will be moving to a new economical strawbale Green building in the nearby town of Soquel in January. All moves are expensive. Some of our studies, trips and experiments will not happen if we can’t get funding. There are graphics, photos and artwork that we would like to include in the book, but there are fees for reproduction rights. The support for forming cooperatives is something we haven’t budgeted for at all and is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as calls come in from budding organizers that need our help. Call Dave directly at the office about investing in the book project. Our office number: 831-688-0338 or email: farmerdave@permaculture.com.

Now if you or someone you know is planning their year-end non-profit donation list, we are now accepting donations to help fund next year’s 25-city tour when the book comes out. Although the publisher is paying the publicist to book us on talk shows etc., none of the travel costs, staff costs or overhead costs are covered or rental of halls to make presentations. We hope this tour not only gets the book out there, but leaves forming cooperatives in its wake. We need to raise a pretty big chunk of money to drive from city to city with a distillery on a trailer, other devices, AV equipment, and Flexible Fuel Vehicles. If you’d like to donate to the tour fund, the checks should be written to our non-profit account CPE/IIEA-Alcohol Project.

We can also use donations of airline miles. Most airlines will let you donate full ticket airline miles and a few will let you donate partial miles towards a ticket. Check out the information on airline miles donations on our new website: http://www.permaculture.com/involved/donate/airmileage.shtml. For doing on-site interviews and investigations, the cost for airfare is often what decides whether or not we can do it.

We Can Do It!
We can set off a revolution of small alcohol fuel coops across this country to bleed the oil corporations of their lifeblood, capital. All that locally recycled capital staying close to home will make all our lives better with thriving local economies. Starting with energy we can localize our economies and rein in the globalists bent on controlling all markets. It’s clearly up to us since we can’t expect the corporations or governments of the world to respond until the environmental and energy problems reach catastrophic levels. Don’t get depressed, organize!