Woke up with so much excitement today — tomorrow morning I leave for Berzerkeley, where we will be shooting in the afternoon and all day Friday. An amazing thing about EnergyRush — people are so willing to share information and time for the sake of getting the word out about Green — very cool and heartening.
BUT, the major point of this blog is to relay the happy news that once I figured out how to work the solar cell phone charger, it was brilliant! I have decided to give this as a gift whenever appropriate, as it’s affordable, compact, and seems like a great way to simply raise awareness about alternative energy. If you haven’t already checked it out, I highly recommend you take a look at Solar Style. It appears that they either just updated their product designs, or are offering different styles of chargers…very very cool, and again, I think this would make an awesome and thoughtful gift for nearly anyone (I mean, come on, you’re really saving them money and power — which is pretty unique).
Wish me luck on the journey. One final biodiesel fill-up today, check tire pressure, and then I’m off early in the morning, hoping for minimal ice on the pass and no traffic near the city!
–Refined gOil

Just walking the dogs, and I saw a little pv panel rigged up to what would have normally been an electric gate in a driveway. Made me smile — I’m assuming that the gate runs off that one panel. Who knows if the owners of the house operate entirely on solar energy — but seeing that little panel cheered me. Baby steps, baby steps…EnergyRush shows so many big stories, but sometimes it’s the small things that get me the most excited. =)
–Refined gOil

Supposedly there’s a biodiesel co-op in Los Angeles…I found their site, printed out the forms to join, this all in preparation for spending time there, and I have NO idea where to get biodiesel (other than from this co-op). I’m told it’s difficult… The one bummer is that the initial fee to join is sort of high. I haven’t done all the research yet, but I’m hoping that there are more options than I know about right now. Just heard about this self-organizing group called “Green Drinks” – sort of a forum for interested people to get together over a beer and talk about alternative energy, so maybe an LA chapter will have more biodiesel suggestions. EnergyRush contacts assure me that I can at least fill up in Berkeley — and with the mileage my car gets, that will take me to Los Angeles probably pretty easily (provided there’s not a whole lot of idling in grapevine traffic). Maybe I’ll be forced to live my dream and just make my own damn processor, which wouldn’t be so bad anyway. And the other good thing: no worries about freezing temperatures and solid fuel in LALA land.
–Refined gOil

The winds are rushing through the Rogue Valley, where I live. I’m up in the foothills of the eastern side of the valley, in a double wide trailer, and there are ring-neck pheasants and quail and dove out there being blown around, the gusts are so big. I just don’t see why more people here don’t use the wind. Down on the floor of the valley, it never feels as blustery as up here, but the microclimate of these foothills seems like it would be a perfect home to lots of wind catchers. I’d like EnergyRush to do a story on microclimates (I guess macros, too, er…whatever). Maybe jump around to green energy dwellings across the nation and see what specific combination and ratio of energy sources works best where. At any rate, as I drive from San Francisco to I5 on 580 next week, I’ll try and get some good shots of the wind turbines around Tracy.
–Refined gOil

A new worry — is ‘Sustainability’ a catchphrase? Maybe I’ve been a little naive using it so much. I think that the problem is talking heads spouting it too liberally, but not really investing in knowing much about the different options and their long-term implications. Hopefully EnergyRush will help renew the meaning of the term as a real and quantifiable thing, or at least give it some clarity. The most relevant definition (I think) in the Oxford — in relation to energy — of ’sustain’:
“support, bear the weight of, esp. for a long period” .
I guess, it’s all in how you see ‘long period.’ I mean, to some, ten or fifteen years is long, others see 100 years, and some don’t see an end at all…Or maybe the duration of time is not the biggest issue — maybe we should think of energy sources not only in terms of their possible length of service, but their by-products. Is even a low-emissions energy source really ’sustainable’ for the the next 400 years? Is it the energy we need to sustain, or is it the planet itself?
–Refined gOil

Soon to be house sitting for Mom. LA-style. Should be interesting. I leave Southern Oregon around November 1st, and will be travelling south seeking out EnergyRush stories to thrill the mind! Hopefully I’ll get to talk to Doctor Frank of electric car fame, and sounds like there’s a cool women’s biodiesel cooperative in Berkeley. As my director, Paul Steinbroner says, this is like graduate school. I’m overloaded with new possibilities, but instead of being fried, I’m — energized (har har har). It’s thrilling to find out about each new person and project, to find that there’s a silent solidarity and a network of people working towards a common green goal. Sort of like the rumblings of…Revolution.
–Refined gOil

While researching the process of recycling for a story, I came across this amazing article about bottled water:

Message in a Bottle by Charles Fishman

Check it out (it made me never want to buy another Fiji again).

Also, while at the final Farm Day for my CSA on Sunday, I was talking to a farmer who was lamenting the fact that there is no simple, user-friendly primer on how to run a car on biodiesel. I mentioned Joshua Tickell’s book From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, but after talking about it, we agreed that as good as it is…it’s still not what prospective biodiesel users really need. Tickell makes a solid, clear case for biodiesel, but the practical information about actual use is scattered throughout the text. We need the ABCs. Say you’ve already decided to go biodiesel…what’s the first step after you buy a diesel car? The second step? A clear, linear step-by-step guide is needed, which got me thinking…
In the world of alternative energy and fuel, there are SO many different choices that one is free to make. Unlike the conventional ‘buy car, buy gas, service car with dealer, buy gas, buy gas, buy gas’ ad infinitum process that has been the norm for a lot of people for a lot of years, the alternatives don’t operate under a set code. There is no governmental or societal rulebook that covers alternative energy. Which, if you think about it, is actually pretty democratic. But it requires you to do a lot of the research and work yourself, which is hard when you’re used to pulling into a pump to fill up a vehicle that you can operate without knowing hardly a thing about its inner workings (as was the case with me). There is a video either posted or forthcoming on EnergyRush entitled “Green is the New Red, White and Blue”. I think that it’s aptly titled; it speaks to that facet of alternative energy use which harks back to a younger America — where everyone was carving out their own niche, figuring out what worked best for them in new, wild territories — and freedom to figure things out was a necessity of survival based on specific climates, locations and physical ability. Pioneering is difficult these days, because we don’t have to do it. Life is pretty easy as it is, and few (in America anyway) are looking for a golden ticket to an easy life Out West. The challenge is peering into the future and recognizing the fact that when we do eventually become dissatisfied with the quality of life here because of pollution or overpopulation or WHATEVER, we won’t have a new frontier to colonize. Land mass use is approaching critical mass. Successful modern pioneers recognize, I think, that we still have a choice, but that the easiest way of doing things may not be the best. No one’s freezing en masse or dying of cholera or fighting off bears on a regular basis — which means that we have the luxury to stop and think. And hopefully we will begin to choose wisely, and not just easily. But sometimes I’d still like someone to take me by the hand and tell me without equivocation or elaboration how best to run my Jetta on veggie-fuel.
–Refined gOil

As the cold weather sets in, my Jetta Horace is having issues starting up — eek. I don’t have a heated garage. I don’t have money to get an extra fuel tank installed. The other conventional methods of (bio)diesel in-vehicle heating won’t make that much difference, because a fuel tank heater or a coolant-operated fuel heater, for example, only warm the fuel when the car is RUNNING — which it obviously won’t be as it sits on my freezing hillside driveway all night long in southwestern Oregon. AAAAAHHHHHHHH
I am told that the remedy is using a 50/50 mix with regular diesel #2 in the winter. SO HOW IS THAT SUPPOSED TO HELP? Doesn’t diesel #2 react to low temp. much like biodiesel?
I am in a bind. Would an engine block heater work? (But then I am plugging into the grid for a solid 10 hours of nocturnal electricity suck, blech…) Is one winterizing agent better than another? If anyone has a suggestion, leave me a message here, PLEASE. I am haunted by horror stories of bio-fueled cars having to be towed to a local garage and kept overnight to get things warm and liquefied…please, don’t let it happen to my Horace, my dear dear Horace. I’ll keep reading up in the meantime.
–Refined gOil

Yesterday I finally broke down and got a cell phone. It had been an idyllic 1.5 years since I ditched my last ear-burner. But I realized that if I’m going to be on the road, as I plan to be in the coming months, I need one. A gOil alone must have a phone. SO, I reluctantly signed the TWO-YEAR contract (thinking a good percentage of marriages don’t last this long), and then started fantasizing about a solar charger. Here’s the site lots of folks online are recommending: SOLAR STYLE
I went for the $49.99 charger, but there’s also a $30 option. It can handle MP3 players and other sundry small electrical gadgets too. I can’t wait to try it out! And, of course, I will let you know if it’s as good as they say it is.
–Refined gOil

I am not a doomsday theorist. I’m not someone who would hunker down with enough food to last through a nuclear winter and just wait for the ‘big one’ to hit. But I will admit that a romanticized notion of the apocalypse had something to do with the parturition of my off-grid ideal (my “dream” — how precious — is to live on fifty+ acres in an earthship-type dwelling).
Having played out weird Tank Girl/Cormac McCarthy/Boy and His Dog scenarios in my head over and over, I fixated on the notion that to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape, my best bet would be to have a comprehensive knowledge of fuel sources, an understanding of auto mechanics, and a really big tool belt to wear over a greasy pair of cutoffs.
Eventually, the fact that I was even thinking about this stuff at all started to set off alarms. Why would a person fantasize so fervently about the end of civilization in the first place? I still have frequent dreams, sleeping and waking, about how cool it would be to tromp through an abandoned urban center and grab what supplies I could to produce fuel and eke out an existence in the bleak future of humankind. Is this morbid?
The answer I came to just now, driving home from leaving one of my dogs at Urgent Care because she had her (maybe) first seizure, is that we have been opportunistic, as a race, from at least the moment we harnessed the power of fire. We have spent our time learning how to better use energy resources to make life easier and more comfortable.
Perhaps we have become so dependent on energy infrastructures (grid electricity, plumbing, telephones, etc.) that…that we’ve lost some sort of control. Psychically. Imagine if the grid and all the gasoline pumps failed us for 24 hours…36 hours…42 hours…panic would ensue. Riots maybe. (Again, my extremely dramatic fantasy life takes over and has me running around in those cutoffs saving children and piloting makeshift solar rescue vehicles that only I know how to operate.)
For a long time, I didn’t even question the necessity of paying my power bill, and yet, I wouldn’t have known what to do if the power had suddenly disappeared.
Maybe all those apocalyptic visions were born of a repressed desire to regain control. If all conventional energy-harnessing methods were abolished in a worldwide explosion, the most valuable, the fittest, and the most likely to survive would be those members of the human race who could produce energy and fuel — metaphorically, those who could reach into the fire and pull out a burning branch of their own.
—-Refined gOil