Megan Quinn: I want to thank Pat Murphy again for his presentation. We've kind of been going over these dark scenarios that may come about. That's because we really understand the challenges that we face, which we all know are really important, but this conference from now on is going to be focusing on solutions. So let's put away all those scenarios and focus on the scenario that we want to move towards, and that's the third scenario, the consumer restraint. Another way is changing our lifestyles. We all know that we have the choice to change our lifestyles. And we don't make that choice every four years, we make that choice every single day, of where we're spending our money, where we're getting the goods and services where we live. Let's always keep that in mind and now look forward to the future in a hopeful way. I'm really honored to introduce David Blume here.

David Blume: While we're getting settled, I'll just say a few things about myself and we'll get started. I've been working on issues about energy since the late '70s. And in the meantime, I've ranged around quite a few different subjects. For the last few years, I've been teaching permaculture around the world, which is a good toolbox to accomplish the very things that Richard has been talking about, about what we need to do to prepare for a lower level energy lifestyle. But in my former life, before I started teaching permaculture and being an organic farmer for 10 years, I was teaching farmers and others how to produce alcohol fuel to be able to run their vehicles, run their generators, etc., and I did a 10-part PBS series on alcohol fuels back in 1983, which I will mention a little later.

So I'm going to give you a very different message today. At this point, most people in the room should be relatively depressed over the state of the world. It's basically, well, things are winding down and we should all make the best of it. And there's no doubt at all that we have to implement severe conservation, really examine how we use materials and products, and limit the way we go about that. But we are clever monkeys. And there are things we can do working with nature to be able to alleviate some of these problems. Those are the things you're not hearing about in the press. There is a long history of that. When the first cars were invented, they didn't run on gasoline. They ran on alcohol, average everyday moonshine. Gasoline hadn't been invented yet. Oil was the province of heating and lighting homes. This is what Rockefeller's main business was. And there was this whole section of what he had taken out of the ground that he had distilled that he had to throw away, because it tended to make oil lamps explode and nobody really wanted it. And that's what nowadays is called gasoline.

So when he figured out that he could finally make cars run on this stuff after messing with them, you would be able to sell it really cheap because it was an industrial toxic waste byproduct. So in the cities, you would be able to buy gasoline at the pump. Once you got outside of the cities and you got into the countryside, you bought alcohol from farmers, because virtually every farm had a still. Anybody here read Botany of Desire? Well, for those who haven't read that, a lot of the people who moved out West, started getting out past the confines of the East Coast, where the God-fearing people and the Bible did say, "thou shalt not drink the beverage of the grape," but it never said anything about apples. So every little farm had an apple orchard full of spitters, the kind of apples where you take a bite and you go, "ptui!" because they were just too tart, too bitter. But they were fermentable into apple whisky basically. You ferment it into apple wine, then you make apple whisky. So people in Model As could stop a farm, dump a bunch of this in the tank, make a few adjustments and drive home. Anybody here have a Model A? Any Model A owners in the crowd? You just got the same thing on your tractor. Well, the Model A had a knob on the dash which people inaccurately called the choke, and that was the fuel-air mixture knob. You would turn that a couple of turns and that would adjust for alcohol versus gasoline, because alcohol needed less air than gasoline to run. And then the Model A had a digital distributor to determine when the sparks would fire. It took five digits to operate and it was up on the column, and so you would advance the spark as the car went faster by hand, and you would do it more for alcohol than you would for gasoline. And that was the total conversion of alcohol to gasoline for the Model A.

So Ford and Rockefeller were bitter enemies for most of that period. And I'm abbreviating this a lot, because I want to get to some of the main points of the conference more than the whole history of alcohol fuel. But for quite a while, there was a rivalry between the two, and alcohol was basically winning in the countryside, and only the city people were using oil, and so Rockefeller decided to stop playing fair. So he found a bunch of little old ladies who had been around since the 1800's, called the Women's Christian Temperance Movement. And he funded them to the tune of $4 million. And they proceeded to go out and buy Congress, and get a Constitutional amendment passed against the production of alcohol. So basically this took alcohol off the market as a fuel and allowed petroleum to become enmeshed as our national fuel. It took 13 years to reverse that Constitutional amendment. So this is the kind of hardball, what we now call transnational capitalism, what transnational capitalism does. Rockefeller was unsuccessful in that strategy in other countries, although he tried it in over 20 countries. So we've been up against organized resistance for a long time. It goes back even before oil. It has to do with the moneyed elite versus the people who produce. When farmers in Pennsylvania right after the Revolution were being faced with an edict from the government that they didn't like, there was nearly a second Revolution. That had to do with the fact that there were bills that had to paid from the Revolutionary War. It costs money to do war, and we borrowed money, and we had to pay it back, and the first proposition was a property tax, because now everybody had property, which before, the King owned, so that seemed to make sense. But the elite said, no, we have most of the property, we don't want to be taxed, so let's put the tax on alcohol. A sin tax, so to speak, to pay our Revolutionary War bills.

Well, the farmers out there way far away from the East Coast in Pennsylvania – that was a two-week trip back then – said, "we didn't fight this war in sweat and blood, and die, and all that just to get taxed by another bunch of rich guys, so we're not going to pay the tax." So President Washington instituted the first draft in the United States, 20,000 men, not against a foreign enemy. He sent them out to Pennsylvania and they killed 200 farmers in putting down the producers of alcohol, which was called the Whisky Rebellion. You might vaguely remember this from your high school history. Well, of course that didn't work. It has never worked. It just meant that the farmers couldn't make their alcohol out in the open any more. They did it at night by the light of the moon and they became known as moonshiners. But there is an eerie parallel to it today. It turned out that the President, or you might say any President, because we're going to see a parallel, went ahead and used the nation's army to suppress his personal business interests' competition, because George Washington was the largest distiller in the United States at the time. So it's just a little creepy that way.

So let's talk about fuel. Alcohol has been around a long time. It is produced from plants primarily. Plants go ahead and take CO2 from the air. They add it to water by way of sunlight and photosynthesis, and you get a carbohydrate, carbons. So carbon dioxide plus hydrogen plus water, nothing from the soil. Ends up in alcohol. This is really quite interesting. You take the carbohydrate, whether it is sugar or starch, and nowadays we are up to being able to use cellulose as well, the plant fiber that is part of every living plant, and break this down into sugar. We feed it to yeast. And then the yeast do an imitation of humanity. They go ahead and eat everything in sight until they pollute themselves to death and choke in their own waste. So that gets up around 12 percent or 13 percent alcohol, and then it is distilled and brought up to either pure alcohol, 200 proof, or with a couple of processes, simply 193 proof, but that will run a car just fine, alcohol at that level. So basically that's just the simple process. I bring it up because when you go ahead and burn it in a car, what comes out the exhaust pipe is pretty much what you would expect, CO2 and water. And the energy, the solar energy that tied all that together, is the explosion in your piston. So you're going down the street on liquid solar energy. Now although the planet in theory, our universe in theory, is a closed energy system, the way we operate Planet Earth is really operated more as an open energy system. Because at least for the next 4 or 5 billion years, we've got a daily income of energy from the sun. After that, we're kind of screwed. But for the next 4 or 5 billion years we have an open system. So we can make alcohol from plants and it works pretty well. The technology is – well, it's mankind's second oldest profession, it's pretty well known and we've gotten it pretty down. Since the '80s when this movement really got started, when I was first involved in it, at that time the equipment to make alcohol fuel was about $2.50 per gallon of annual production and it cost about $2.50 to make. It was very expensive compared to gasoline. Due to some really most subsidies and twenty years of people really working on it, it now costs about 90 cents a gallon to make a gallon of alcohol, and you can build plants for about a dollar a gallon. So subsidies really worked with the alcohol industry, really created something that is now practical.

So when we talk about some of the – can we solve these problems? Well, there are many levels to the problem. Money is not one of them. Money is not one of them. We are using right now about 160 billion gallons of gasoline a year. Now, I just told you it costs about a dollar per gallon to build a plant, per gallon of annual capacity. So we need 160 billion to build enough plants to fuel our cars. And I'm not saying we should be burning this much. We should be burning less than half this much. And I'll explain how we can get there with alcohol. If we added to that another $40 billion to put in alternative distribution, because we can't expect the oil companies to willingly distribute the alcohol, we'd come up with about $200 billion, which is awfully close to what we've just spent in Iraq, permanently solving the problem. So when it comes to doing an alternative solution that we can afford, this is one of the few. Hydrogen – fool cells, as we call them – is really a Trojan horse in which you find coal and nuclear hiding inside. So people are beginning to realize that, and there's no magic hydrogen that's going to save us. It's going to have to be something else. Curiously enough, alcohol is a bridge to a hydrogen future, a new low-cost catalyst, let's develop this here, which has no platinum in it, which can strip the hydrogen from alcohol on board, on the hydrogen car, at a much lower cost than almost any other way. So there is actually a renewable fuel that could be used to kind of get to the hydrogen future. But it's really not all that necessary.

The thing about the internal combustion engines: they're usually between 16 percent to 20 percent efficient. There are some exceptions to that of course, but what that means is … let's say you're Martians. Let's say you're all Martians and you're looking at an internal combustion engine. In goes the fuel, so that's 100 percent of the energy. And let's say out this way goes 65 percent of the fuel through the radiator as heat. And then down here, there might be another 10-15 percent in the oil, which is friction or heat and then out the back here, you get something like 10-25 percent of the spinning shaft. And these numbers don't all add up perfectly. But the idea is if you were a Martian looking at this machine, what would you say this machine does? It's a pretty good heater! And you get a little byproduct of mechanical energy, to run your car down the road. Now I bring this up, because it gets into what the qualities of alcohol fuel are. And in fact, I'd like to go ahead and ask you to list some of the myths or things you've heard about alcohol fuel, and you'll see how we'll cut through most of those with just what we've talked about so far. What are some of the myths about alcohol fuel, or facts about alcohol fuel you think you're heard?

So it's subsidized. Energy balanced. Takes more land. Promotes monoculture. Monoculture and GMOs. The food versus fuel argument. I'll just put emissions, I'll cover them all. It's corrosive. Anything else? I can't wait to go to the bar with you. What was the other thing? That's an interesting question. This is going to be just about enough. Damage, and replace types of engines. Energy density. I think we can get all of this covered plus a little more. What's that? Water. Well, it does, if you have it. But the fact that we are going to be talking about this as a viable alternative, well, if it's not, excuses us from we're using as much as we're using now, because keep remembering that.

Let's talk about the subsidies things first. Pretty much – if you take a look at oil, some of the timid evaluations of how much oil is subsidized show it to be subsidized at the rate of about $5 per gallon. The more complete analysis of subsidies for oil show it to be subsidized at about $15 per gallon. Alcohol right now is subsidized at about 50 cents a gallon. So I'd say in the subsidy ballpark, we have a very unequal playing field in favor of oil. Last year, oil companies got a grant of $77 million to go ahead – this is a grant, they don't have to pay this back – from Homeland Security to beef up security against terrorism at their refineries, as if they needed more money, which was only slightly less than the entire renewable energy budget of the DOE. You're talking about a system in which every gallon of oil you take out of the ground, our public oil that theoretically we own and we lease for them to take out of the ground, that they get an oil depletion allowance and get tax relief by depleting the resource. Let's not talk about subsidies unless we're willing to talk about getting rid of all the subsidies. Let's move to some of the smaller ones first and get to some of the bigger ones so we can get some discussion going.

Makes you blind. That's subjective. The objective part of it is that methanol, which is a very different alcohol, one carbon alcohol instead of two, will make you blind; actually it destroys the retina. That's because of what happens when it hits your liver. Alcohol, when it hits your liver, becomes acealdehydes and that's what gets you drunk. But when wood alcohol, or methanol, hits your liver, it turns into a different aldehyde, formaldehyde, which literally pickles your liver, your eyes, and everything else. So ethanol doesn't do this. Methanol? Methanol, if you rub it on your skin, it can do that to you. It can soak into your skin, it's really toxic stuff, and the coal companies are really pushing methanol as a future fuel. It also puts out a pollutant called methyl nitrite, which at only 250 parts per million, is fatal. So methanol and ethanol are two very different things, when it comes to using them as fuels.

Alcohol has a lot of other good qualities, which get into some of these kinds of questions. Alcohol – there are questions about hurting the car, damage to the car – right now there's a whole campaign that's going on in Australia to try to stop alcohol from entering the market. It's exactly the same campaign that was done here twenty-five years ago. They're saying it will destroy all the rubber parts, it'll cause corrosion in all the metal, you don't want it in your car at all, etc. Turns out that alcohol doesn't do any of those things except for rubber that was made back before 1983, and then only on certain rubbers. It burns so clean actually in your engine, that the inside of your engine gets no carbon buildup whatsoever. And carbon buildup in your engine is like microscopic sandpaper, which is what wears out an engine. Test after test, decade after decade, alcohol fuel engines repeatedly show that they last three times as long as a gasoline engine. Now those of you who looked at embodied energy can see that the amount of energy that goes into making an engine is an enormous quantity, not to mention the water and everything else. Cutting down the number of engines that we have to produce is one reason alone to run alcohol. It's such a clean fuel.

Now it's so clean, produces so little carbon, that has some implications for the environment as well. I'm right now trying to get some more modern statistics on this which is very difficult, because since the '80s, the last big boom of interest in alcohol, there has been very little corporate money put into studying pure alcohols as a fuel. At the time we were studying them, the EPA and also private people were finding that when we took a look at the emissions from alcohol, we were finding a 90+ percent reduction in hydrocarbons. We were finding a 97 percent reduction in carbon monoxide, and a 60-80 percent reduction in nitrous oxides. This stuff is pretty darn clean. Now, the percent reductions today will be less, because cars today are not putting out quite as much as they did in the '80s, but still, alcohol is going to be dramatically lower. So clean, in fact, I have a story to tell you. I worked with Gordon Cooper down in LA. He was working on getting jet airplanes certified to use alcohol. Gordon Cooper, you may remember, was an astronaut and aerospace engineer, and we had just got this brand new exhaust gas analyzer and we were going to be testing alcohol in the turbine and we fired it up, and put the test probe in the back, in the exhaust stream, and none of the needles were moving, and we were going, this thing's broken! We bought this big machine, it doesn't even work, tap, tap, tap … no, it's not working. So we set it down in front of the engine on the table, and the air going in to the turbine makes all the needles go up. The air coming in from LA going into the turbine was dirtier than the air coming out of the exhaust. So by burning alcohol, we actually cleaned the pollution up.

So that has big implications for your engine. One of the things about the nitrous oxide being low, is that it is a really good indicator of temperature. The engine damage – a lot of people say, alcohol burns hotter, it will destroy your engine. It actually burns about 300 degrees cooler than gasoline. Gasoline burns at about 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, alcohol burns at about 1000. So what that means is less fuel energy is going to waste heat. So although it starts off with less energy – someone asked about energy density – alcohol starts off with only two-thirds the energy density of gasoline – it burns with much higher efficiency. In fact, I just read a 2002 paper that the EPA did where they took a Volkswagen TDI diesel engine and used that as the base, and then they went ahead and put in different fuel injectors, reduced the compression ratio a little bit, and ran it on alcohol, and actually got 25 percent better miles per gallon on alcohol than they would have gotten on diesel, which is much more efficient than gasoline, with almost no emissions. So that's the future of alcohol fuel engines.

Our current engines that we have are typically going to lose between 5-8, sometimes 9 percent miles per gallon, as they come from Detroit now. Except if you have a flexible fuel vehicle. How many people here have heard of flexible fuel vehicles? Well, this is a much better informed group. For ten years now you have been able to buy cars right from the dealers that are set up to run on alcohol or gasoline or a mixture of the two without your having to even think about it. You can put whatever you want in the tank, yet you haven't heard about it, or very few of you have heard about it. I've got a Ford Ranger, for instance, that runs on it. So those are cars that have a smarter computer, that have a sensor, telling the computer how much fuel is gasoline and how much is alcohol and making the adjustments for air versus fuel, the way that we used to do in the Model A with our hand and the knob. Now we have to have a computer for that. Right, and you can go ahead and crank up the pressure on the fuel regulator. There are little tricks you can do if you want to just convert it to run on one or the other, but we have cars now that can run on both, and you can buy them for the same price as you can on gasoline – oh no, sorry, that's not right. You get a $1500 cash credit for buying the alcohol version.

Let's see – energy density. Liquid fuels are really energy dense. There are now just about to come on the market replacements for the batteries that are on your laptops that you put in alcohol, there's a tiny fuel cell in it, runs for 18 hours. So that's about to come on the market in the next year. So alcohol does make a really good fuel cell feedstock, so that's a micro use.

Getting up to some of the big ones. Promotes monoculture and GMOs. That absolutely should not be true, and won't be true, in the long run. It'll start off that way. Right now most of the alcohol in this country is made from corn, not because it's the best crop for making alcohol, but because we've got one hell of a lot of corn. And you know, what do you do with it all? I'll tell you what you do with it – 90 percent of it – not to start off – you start with 70 percent of the corn gets fed directly to animals. 20 percent of the corn goes for exports. But guess what they feed with the corn? More animals. So this goes to make other wealthy countries' animals. So most of our corn goes for animals. Now this food versus fuel argument and the monoculture thing, we're going to kind of blend them together, because in permaculture, one of the things we always do, is we go back to the source. Does anybody know the genetic origin, the place on earth, where cattle came from? Africa, northern Africa, and a little bit of southern Europe. And what's in northern Africa today? The Sahara Desert. But it was a forest at one time, and cattle lived in it. And cattle turn out to be forest living creatures. They eat brush. They've got four stomachs, you know? We don't need four stomachs because we're not eating brush. And cattle are not prairie animals, they're not grass eaters. If you take one look at their foot, you can tell that they're not a prairie animal. They have a flat foot. That's good for soft, porous soil. You need a cloven hoof, like a bison, if you want to be going through prairie turf. So anyway, that's where cattle came from and that's what they ate, the brushy stuff. The Sahara Desert, by the way, is a human-made desert by overgrazing, but that's a whole other story. We won't go there today.

So here we are feeding cattle grass, I mean, corn is grass. We feed them the seed of grass. It turns out cows do not have the enzymes to break down starch, because they are not evolved to eat it, so it goes out 80 percent undigested. 70 percent of each kernel of corn is starch. So they feed the corn to cattle for fat and protein. But what comes out the back is wasted starch. Now when you go ahead and first ferment alcohol from corn, you take out the starch and you have what's left over, called dry distillers' grains, and solubles. Now if you take this, and this has not only been fermented; now it has the yeast in with it; when you feed this to the animals, 35 pounds of this, instead of 100 pounds of corn, in other words, the equivalent amount of the corn you would have fed them, the cattle gain 17 percent more weight 30 percent faster. So when you look at it, you've got to turn the paradigm on its head. The fermentation of corn for alcohol – the alcohol is a byproduct of making higher-quality animal feed and reducing the amount of land we need to raise cattle. So the food versus fuel argument is clearly propaganda.

Now Barry Commoner took at look at this. When we looked at this in the '80s, we figured out if you start incorporating cellulosic alcohol production, when we started taking woody materials, breaking those down into alcohol, ferment them, etc. with yeast, and we did this as a national policy to replace all the gasoline, just the yeast alone, just the yeast alone, recovered from the fermentation would replace all the grain grown in the United States for cattle feed because yeast is 50 percent protein. So cellulosic alcohol will take a little more discussion, but the point is, as we start looking at these systems ecologically, there are many linkages that need to be looked at.

Monoculture as part of this... If there's any one thing that's going to break down the monoculture in the Midwest, it's going to be alcohol fuel. Right now, you go to an alcohol fuel conference, and it's corn farmers. And corn farmers – what can I say about this that is really polite? I'm a farmer, so I can say these things. I got up in front of 1500 corn farmers, and I said to them, this is an alcohol conference, "you guys are thinking about this whole thing like you're corn farmers." There was all this grrrr. I said, "I'm from California. I grow organic vegetables. I bring in $100,000 per acre on my permaculture farm. You guys are bringing in $50 an acre on your corn. So I think I have something to say here. You guys are selling a premium fuel, 105 octane, burns better than any, it's clean, it's environmental, and there's a market of people out there that would love to put that in their car instead of gasoline, and you're selling it like it's corn! You need to sell it like it's organic figs. You gotta sell it like it's worth something." So – what's happening is, half of the alcohol in the country right now is made by farm cooperatives. It's not made by Archer Daniels Midland, not made by Cargill, it's made by farmers who have gotten together, punched a bunch of money together, borrowed some more, and built 50-million-gallon plants – at some point they're going to realize "I'm not a corn farmer. I'm an energy farmer. And what might be better for me to make money on in my plant than the corn I'm growing?" and it turns out, almost anything. So depending on the climate you're in, you have many choices about what alternative crops – for instance, beets. You get this far north, sugar beets or fodder beets, which get about this big – you can get 13, 1400 gallons of alcohol per acre and more protein for animal feed than you would get from the grain. There are a bunch of other crops, Jerusalem artichokes, etc. What you would start to see in a national alcohol fuel program is polyculture, which is what we all go for in permaculture, and you can start to see multiple things happening in one field, as we get into cellulose too.

I recently filed a patent related to alcohol fuel that should put Monsanto in its grave. And I first announced it at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, right next door to the Monsanto room. So all the guys who came from the college were sitting out. I said, "I hope you all have your resumes sharpened out, because I'm about to put you all out of work." So here's how it works. And the reason why I'm going to explain this to you is that it explains to you how agriculture works, and why we need to look at the whole system, like permaculture, when we solve these problems. If you ask the USDA, what is agriculture? They have a very straightforward answer, it's corn, it's soybeans, and it's specialty crops. Anything else other than corn or soybeans is in the specialty crops category, beneath their notice. So you take a look at a corn farmer, and he's growing an acre of corn. I already mentioned to you he makes $50. Now that's his net. But he takes in $200 to start with. So $100 is fertilizer. Now I want you to pay attention to this fertilizer part, because it's going to have a lot of impact on this energy bill question. About $40 of it is herbicide for that fancy GMO corn, and about $10 is the corn seed, the extra price they are paying for GMO seed. So out of $200, $150 is all this stuff and he gets maybe $40-50 at the end. Now we take the corn in this case, we ferment it, we make the alcohol by taking the starch out. What part of the soil is in the starch? None. So that means that everything that was in the soil is where? In the DDGS, in the dry distillers' grains that are left over.

So, we first get alcohol, we also by the way got CO2, because carbon dioxide is given off during fermentation, we collect that and sell it, and we also get the dry distillers' grains. Now, instead of feeding the dry distillers' grains to the cattle, we put it back in the ground. And as my study shows – we took an average field in Nebraska, 160 bushel per acre cornfield – we took that 160 bushels, made alcohol with it, took that amount of dried distillers' grains, figure it out, how much fertilizer value is in that dried distillers' grains, and it was 10 percent more than was needed to grow the next 160 bushels. That has to do with mycorhizal fungi bringing in more nutrients to the plant than were put on it. So here's a system in which the farmer now no longer needs fertilizer, no longer – I forgot to tell you the reason why I'm doing this is – how many people have ever heard of corn gluten meal? So corn gluten meal is a protein in corn that is sometimes sold to organic gardeners to do what? Kill weeds. In other words, corn gluten meal will stop weed seeds from sprouting, no one knows why, although I do now, and I started this experiment because dry distillers' grains was a lot cheaper than corn gluten meal and I wanted to see if it would do the same thing, and it does. So the dry distillers' grains is a pre-emergent herbicide, in other words it stops weed seeds from sprouting. As soon as they sprout, they die. That's because what I've done by putting this stuff in the soil is I've fed seed-eating fungi and bacteria. There's a population explosion, when the weed seeds sprout, that exploding biology eats the little roots of the weed seeds. It's really a tricky little system, really fun. So the farmer doesn't need to buy Round-Up anymore, because he's got it built in, and he doesn't need to buy the GMO corn.

So now, instead of making $40 on a crop, he's got some cost for the dried distillers' grains, he might make now $130, and I'm telling you, if you tell a farmer, would you rather make $130 doing this hippie patented process, or do you want to make $40 and have Monsanto say, "where's that hippie? Where can I talk to him?" Because money talks. So the reason why I patented this – I'm really usually against patents, but I'm this little and Monsanto is that big, so I'm trying to get this license off to a big enough corporation so they can battle it out. But this alone, this process of alcohol alone is worth doing it just to wipe out Monsanto, because 70 percent of Monsanto's business is Round-Up and Round-Up-ready seeds or corn.

Now that brings us over here to the energy balance thing. Energy balance has been a masterful piece of PR deception by the oil companies for over 40 years. What the proposition is is it takes more energy to produce alcohol than you get out of it. And the first studies that said this pre-1980 were based on beverage distilleries that were from the 1940's that didn't care anything about the price of energy, because they were making whisky. And the price of energy was immaterial to the profit from the whisky. When that cover got blown and the scientists debunked all that, the oil companies came up with a clever way of keeping the argument going. They found the perfect whitewash man in a scientist named David Pimentel. Now David Pimentel, in many fields, is a person I would respect. The guy's an organic bug scientist. In fact, he's the only organic bug scientist I know who has never had a funding problem. And it turned out that he and four other guys together wrote a study in 1982 that said that it takes more energy to make alcohol from corn than you get out of it. The only problem was that David Pimentel was working for Mobil Oil and he was being paid by them when he did that study. Jack Anderson outed that in public, and Mobil Oil was so arrogant that they came out and took out a full page ad saying, "how dare you impugn the credibility of such a man like David Pimentel simply because he was taking money from us?" Well, duh, yeah, exactly. But just like global warming. Whenever there's an article in the paper about global warming, they bring one of the six scientists left in the world who say global warming is a theory, to be balanced, to be the opposite statement for the six thousand who say it's a fact. Pimentel is that one for alcohol, and whenever he speaks, the American Petroleum Institute sends out 10,000 press releases.

So let's talk a little bit more about exactly what's wrong with his study and what the reality is. He gives no value whatsoever energy-wise to the dried distillers' grains and the process. He gives all the value to the fertilizer, which is the biggest part, the herbicide, and he does a lot of good, responsible, ecological accounting of the amount of energy it takes to make the steel for the tractor to run. This is good energy accounting when you're trying to get an accurate idea whether this system is really positive or not. But he leaves out the fact that running that tractor on alcohol means that you only need one-third as many tractors, or that all the cars running on the fuel need one-third as many engines, and all that embodied energy doesn't go into his study. He also leaves out the CO2, as a product which should get energy credit. Now a lot of you guys are thinking out there, wait a minute, CO2 doesn't burn, CO2 is what's after things are burned, how is that an energy source? You know how they make the CO2 for all your sodas? Anybody know? They burn natural gas and throw away the heat, because natural gas is one carbon and four hydrogens, they go ahead and burn it, they get CO2 and then two water molecules. So all the fermentation CO2 displaces the natural gas CO2 that's being thrown away. These are some of the numerous things he conveniently leaves out of his study, and well-meaning people quote Pimentel right and left, not realizing that he's really cherry-picked the data, and is basically … there are nicer words and I can't think of them right now. So the energy balance thing is bogus. The current best data when you do include the energy balance just for the DDGS and not for the CO2 and not for any of this other stuff, is a 2.94:1 return, and I'll get a copy of that for you, Richard, I know you'll be interested in that. When you get to other crops like cassava and sugar cane, the return is 5.6 and 11.2:1. In the case of sugar cane, no petroleum is used in the process. The sugar cane begass or the fiber left over, is burned for making electricity and heat to run the plant and actually has a surplus amount of electricity to put back into the grid. So it's actually higher than 11.2:1. They don't count the electricity they sell to the grid into the equation. We have ways of capturing solar energy in efficient ways that allow us to have an energy-positive fuel for our cars.

So that's the energy balance thing. It won't promote monoculture, because there are so many things you can grow. For instance, there are crops like camillans. I will say just a few more things and then I will let you ask some more questions. Food versus fuel we got, emissions – CO2. I'm going to do that. Corrosion, not an issue, doesn't corrode anything. Let's see, CO2. The oil companies say 20 pounds of CO2 comes out the tailpipe of an alcohol vehicle, just like a gasoline vehicle, for every gallon. Then you get people who are botanists who say, that's silly, because the 20 pounds that came out of the car go back into the plant, and that makes next year's crop, so you really have a net zero CO2 production, because it's constantly in cycle. But permaculturists go a little further, because we look underground. And 50 percent of almost any plant is underground, and all of this plant matter is made of carbon. That's half of the plant that is carbon. When you look at these trees outside, there's just as much tree below ground as there is above ground. So now you're looking at quite a bit more carbon that is recycled than was used by the car. Then you start looking a little further about how plants really work, because most of us have been taught that the flow of energy to plants is this way, that nutrients are pulled out of the ground, and they go up into the plant, and it's all a one-way trip, and there's no mutualism. It's not that way at all. Oxygen and CO2 are pumped down and through the plant and out into the soil around the roots, where these aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, 60 percent of the carbon produced by photosynthesis, in other words, sugar, is pumped out of the roots into the soil to feed bacteria, and this whole microlife that is around the root zone. So now you're looking at something like 10 times the CO2 is impounded for every one unit that goes into fuel. Now some of this will recycle eventually back into the air slowly, and some will stay tied up in this biomass, so it doesn't stay at this level, but it buffers quite a bit.

I've got to tell you a quick story and then I will take a couple of questions with the time I have left. I did this book on this subject in 1982. The book was called Alcohol Can Be a Gas, and I taught 8000 people around the country how to make alcohol in a couple of years in workshops, and PBS came to me, Channel 9 in San Francisco, KQED, came and said, "we want you to do this for public television," and we said, "all right! Revolution on TV!" So we did 10 half hour shows. We filmed the whole process of making alcohol fuel, this is a how-to show, not wouldn't it be nice if we had an alcohol-fuel economy. We had gone 1500 miles and filmed my students at their stills that they had built, making alcohol, and people doing car conversions, and the whole thing, wrote a whole book on the subject so that people could go ahead and do it themselves to go along with the series. I was at the printer in Oregon. It looked like we were running a little behind on getting the book printed, the fourth segment of the series had just aired in San Francisco. And a call comes up to the publisher, stop the presses, send the check back. I said, what's going on, what's going on? They won't talk to me. After a couple of weeks of hammering at them, they finally would meet with me and talk with me. They took the advertisement for the book tag off the end of the series and let the series finish airing, because that would have been embarrassing, to explain why they had been stopped, but they wouldn't release it to the rest of the network, and they wouldn't print the book. And it turns out they got a call from Chevron that was along the lines of "what's wrong? You don't like our money?" and cancelled the project. So that was in 1983. If that book would have been on the air in 1983, and it talked all about peak oil – peak oil is nothing new. General Motors had papers about peak oil, it was getting the government in 1982. We've known this on the inside, scientifically it was known about Hubbert, and right around 2000, and all that, for a long time. But if this series had been on the air when it was supposed to have been in 1983, we wouldn't have even been in Iraq the first time, much less this time, because at least half the country would have been running on alcohol by now.

You think that's too far-fetched? 40 percent of the cars in Brazil run on alcohol right now. They import no oil whatsoever, and they've got 100 million barrels a day they have to get rid of, because it's toxic waste they have no use for. Today it's the same thing. When they go to refine oil, they make thousands of dollars from a barrel of oil on chemicals and products, and then $100-200 on gasoline, because it's the dumping ground of all the other processes, on gasoline, never has the same formula two days in a row, it's whatever is left over from the runs at the refinery, and then they get us to buy it, to dispose of it, for them in the air. So that's what gasoline is, a waste-disposal process for the oil industry.

So anyway – to wrap this up: Basically, where we're at now is the book is 3 or 4 months from being finished, to go to New Society Press, and they're going to be publishing it. We are still trying to pull a little bit more money together. We have a few more places to visit. We just made breakthroughs in being able to visit Brazil, bring a camera team and stuff, so this project has not been – we have done this in a very permaculture way. We went to people and got loans, investors, to do this project, so we weren't under one foundation's thumb that could pull the string on us just like happened to us before, so it's got about 15 investors and we need a few more to finish the project. So if anybody wants to talk with me about that, I'm going to be around, and let's see – our website is permaculture.com. Our alterego is that we teach permaculture courses around the world, and the whole alcohol information is on our site as well.

Any more quick questions before I get cut off here?

Q: On the energy balance thing, could you talk a little bit about the fuel that you recommend for heating the mash?
Blume: I used to use wood. I used to use waste wood. I also used donut fat.

Q: On a large scale?
Blume: Did everybody hear the question? What was my heating source for the still?

Q: If this was for the whole country on a large scale, what do you see? Are you still using petroleum for that?
Blume: It depends on your feedstock for heating. If you have anything that's fibrous, then plant fiber is your best fuel, because it's renewable, it's solar-based. But when I used to collect donuts; I used to do this in San Francisco, so we'd get donuts. I mean, cops can only eat so many. And then they gotta throw them away. So we'd take home these drums of donuts and we would go ahead and cook them down, and of course what are donuts made of? Fat, starch, and sugar. There are 10 teaspoons of sugar in every donut in addition to the starch, so when you cook up the donuts, the fat floats, we would skim that off, and I guess we could have made biodiesel with it, but we used it to fire the still, because it was like 150,000 btus per pound in the donut fat. So that was really a nice integrated raw material from the city.

Q: I'm curious. $200 million – from a venture fund point of view, that's a nothing. Why don't the economics itself, let's say, invest $200 million to produce a gallon of fuel for a dollar, that's now selling almost close to $3, and then …
Blume: Well, wholesale, $1.70.

Q: But why wouldn't normal business economics just have venture people fund this thing, if it all played out the way you've discussed it?
Blume: That's because the margin just got that wide in the last year. The margin between the wholesale production price and the sale price was only 10 cents until oil shot up, and now they're getting a good margin, and so now it's the kind of thing like a venture capitalist, or a banker, an investment house would say fine. But it will be a while before - they're going to want to see if it will go up and down before venture people will come in – but right now, alcohol plants are not having trouble getting financing. It's a mature teachnology.

Q: It's started even in Ohio. There's a plant on-line in Medina that uses waste soda pop, another one planned for online in Akron that will produce 400,000 gallons a day from waste paint.

Blume: I want to know about that one, because the new cellulose ones are the ones I want to know about.

Questioner: Yes, I was wondering how – you say Brazil is producing, 40 percent of their vehicles are running on alcohol. How are they doing that, and why is it that – I'm just curious, who is involved financially and why the major oil companies, if they're not getting a piece of that, are allowing that to happen?

Blume: So, in Brazil, up until 20 years ago, it was a military dictatorship, and that's when they started the program. Because when the first oil shocks happened in the '70s, Brazil had only recently stopped using alcohol. You've got to realize that prior to World War II, lots of countries that were not on tanker routes, were using alcohol – Philippines, New Zealand – nobody was delivering oil there, and nobody was delivering oil to Brazil. It was making its own alcohol. So they had only briefly been on oil for about 30 years, when the big oil shocks hit in '73, and the military said, well, we know how to do this, we're going back to that, so that's where it started. And then Brazil democratized, and it got to one point where almost 90 percent of the cars were running on alcohol, then in the middle of '90s the price dove for the price of oil down to $10 a barrel briefly, a bunch of cars got converted back, and now alcohol is half the price of gasoline in Brazil, and everybody is converting back to alcohol. It's been like that.

Questioner: When you were talking about the sustainability of alcohol production, you suggested using the DDGs for fertilizer, but it seems to conflict with the food-fuel-land argument, because there you were going to feed it to animals. How do you resolve the conflict, and if I could throw in a second one, what about the food chain argument about animal feed versus using it as direct food, using the vegetable rather than animal as food?

Blume: Well, as I said just a little bit earlier, just the yeast collected alone from a national alcohol fuel program would replace all the grain, because remember, it's only protein and fat we get from grain for the animals, so we'd get all that back from the distillery instead of the dried distillers' grains. So we wouldn't really lose animal feed there at all. There's a whole argument to be made that part of the reduction that we need to make in a post-oil world is cutting way back on meat, because meat is extremely energy-intensive for a lot of reasons. It takes 10 or 11 btus of food energy, not even fossil fuel energy, to make a pound of beef. It only takes 3 btus to make a chicken, it only takes 2 btus to make a pound of fish, so you start looking at what's better to grow. So you've got Archer Daniels Midland, the definition of corporate evil, with 5 acres of tilapia ponds that they are growing tilapia using DDGS, and they're delivering this. Part of the year, that means it's organic, because they have three months of the year where they run nothing but organic through their plant for Europe, and then they go ahead and deliver live tilapia in tank trucks running on biodiesel, to restaurants all over the East. So if a big corporation do it like that, why can't you do it? Because everything they did was in multiple units of small units. Anything that was there could have been a small farm doing it. And that's what will be in our book, this kind of integrated approach.

Questioner: Real simple math here. How much alcohol do you get per acre per crop, whatever is your best crop, whether it's sugar beets, or corn, or whatever?

Blume: This is a really curious question. What is the best yield per acre? I just heard a calculation yesterday that I had to triple check. In Arcata, California they have processed municipal sewage with cattails. They put the secondary sewage into long canals that they grow cattails, and all the nutrients are sucked out and into the cattails. We were really thrilled because the base of the cattails is almost pure starch, and Indians in this country used to make bread from that. So we were really looking at that as our primary yield, as the starchy roots, and we were getting 2000 gallons per acre. But then we started looking at 50 tons of dry cellulose above, and if we use Rocky Mountain Institute's numbers, that would be 9000 more gallons of alcohol. So you've got 11,000 gallons of alcohol per acre from our sewage. And we all have sewage. So that's like the stratosphere of it. The other thing about permaculture is we do multiple cropping, we do things that work together. So when you see these figures like 1300 gallons per acre for beets or 1800 gallons per acre for sugar cane – in permaculture, we typically plant 3, 4 or 5 things together that all have different canopy heights and different characteristics, and if we could harvest all of that and make alcohol from it, we're going to get more per acre. We're just right on the very fringe of the frontier of studying how permaculture can make this thing go forward. I did a calculation the other day for instance. You all know about the dead zones, like all the nitrates running downriver? It does a good thing, right? It makes all the bacteria in the Gulf grow. That's cool, not bacteria, but algae. But then it dies, and as it dies, the bacteria start to eat the algae and they need air, so they use all the air up in the water, so for 22,000 square kilometers at the base of the Mississippi there is no air for any animals to live and they all die. So we took calculations from how the Chinese grow kelp at the mouths of rivers where there is usually sewage, in the case of China, and we applied it to this dead zone, and we came up with being able to supply about 18 percent of the country's fuel, and return the oxygen to the water, in this dead zone. When you start looking at whole systems in permaculture, you could come up with places where you take surpluses that are not being used and make them into useful stuff. Now it's not the best way, the best way is to stop the nitrates way upstream. But as an interim strategy, kelp farming could be incredibly powerful. So it goes on and on, and we can do so much with this, and I'm happy to talk with you during the break. That was the last question. If you need to write to us, learn more about it, or talk with me about investments in the book, permaculture.com is the best place to reach me.