Food as Fuel

Today I did an interview with Bill Moore, of EVWorld. He taped it, and plans to put it out there as a webcast for his subscribers. I have no idea what this involves, but I’ll see if I can get him to cut a copy loose for Piedmont Biofuels site. Or a link exchange or something.

He was remarkably well informed. He’s out there in Omaha, publishing a site dedicated to alternative fuels and such.

And he managed to take me onto some less familiar terrain than I am used to.

We talked about the biodiesel process, and about backyard producers, and about small producers, and about the NBB. We talked about California, and about its Air Resources Board, and about a variety of things.

And he successfully got me onto the ethics of burning food.

I tried to separate hunger, which is a “distribution problem,” from production rather like I did in GMO Monocropping

I remember a long time ago, I learned about this from Tony Kleese.

I’m not sure what Tony’s title was then. Perhaps he was running the Farm Tour. Or he might have been teaching Sustainable Agriculture over at the College. Or perhaps he was running the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.

Whatever it was, Tony knows about food. He knows about its production. And its distribution.

I was dining alone at the General Store Cafe one day. I was settling into a Doug Lorie Famous New Mexican Green Chile Burrito, I believe it may have been the 1014th they had served.

Tony joined me, and explained that our food distribution system is the thing that is broken. People are throwing out perfectly good food on one side of the fence. And people are hungry on the other.

Tony’s thing was that this is the case, even if we don’t grant Monsanto a patent on seed.

The last time we encountered the “Food as Fuel” debate at Piedmont Biofuels, was when Scott Rowe, our erstwhile fuel maker, posed a question from the floor at Kim Kristoff’s speech. See Regulatory Swamp

And I can’t help but reframe the whole question of “Food vs. Fuel” into a discussion that my brother Glen and I sometimes have:

He is in the business of shipping electrons that are created from the wind. And in the normal course of his renewable energy business, he does outreach and education.
During such he is routinely asked something like: “But what do you do when the wind doesn’t blow?

I haven’t heard his answer up close, but I am assuming he does not say: “Right. True. Sometimes the wind does not blow. Therefore we should not bother developing this free, renewable, non-polluting, locally made resource that comes to us from the sky”

At Piedmont Biofuels, we also do a terrific amount of education and outreach. And as such we are routinely asked, “But can you grow enough to create enough fuel for all of us?”

To this I say, “I don’t know. Perhaps we cannot grow enough. Therefore we should not bother developing this free, renewable, less-polluting, locally made resource that comes to us from local dumpsters”

The similarities are striking.

I don’t know the answer to the “Fuel vs. Food” debate. And I don’t know where I am vis-‡-vis GMOs. My gut feel is that if we build an indigenous fuel industry we will be amazed at how rapidly our agricultural feedstocks will ramp production.