LA Weekly

"We need to declare a war in this country, but the war has to be on oil, and the war has to be on coal."

That's venture capitalist Vinod Khosla for you. Who's Vinod Khosla, you ask?

Perhaps more than any one venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla is leading the clean tech revolution by personally investing over $100 million in companies that could dramatically reduce the world's carbon footprint.

Steve Westly sent me this. Khosla spoke at a dinner held to honor green business leaders (including Westly, Phil Angelides and Khosla) put on by the California League of Conservation Voters.

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Critics like to cite a 2005 study that shows a negative energy balance for ethanol, but that study was coauthored by a former oil company employee. It is contradicted by five others showing that corn ethanol delivers 20 to 50 percent more energy output than it takes to produce, and cellulosic up to 600 percent more.

Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, has two articles in Wired this month defending ethanol. One, "My Big Biofuels Bet," is long and exhaustive (but entertaining), the other a straightforward dispelling of "ethanol myths," some promoted by a recent article in Consumer Reports. Worth reading, mulling and researching.

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Jeff McNeely, a scientist with the World Conservation Union writing for BBC News, writes a whole article about "biofuels" that makes not one mention of biodiesel, though he does dub ethanol "deforestation diesel," claiming that:

Much of the fuel that Europeans use will be imported from Brazil, where the Amazon is being burned to plant more sugar and soybeans, and Southeast Asia, where oil palm plantations are destroying the rainforest habitat of orangutans and many other species. Species are dying for our driving.

and

The grain required to fill the petrol tank of a Range Rover with ethanol is sufficient to feed one person per year. Assuming the petrol tank is refilled every two weeks, the amount of grain required would feed a hungry African village for a year.

The solution? Biotechnology, says McNeely. Although its reputation has been "sullied by public protests over GM foods," biotech "is already available that could enhance ethanol yield, reduce environmental damage from feedstock, and improve bioprocessing efficiency at the refinery."

For instance:

The Swiss biotech firm Syngenta is developing a genetically engineered maize that can help convert itself into ethanol by growing a particular enzyme.

Not surprisingly, McNeely's Swiss-based World Conservation Organization, whose German acronyn is IUCN, has entered into a partnership with the Swiss-based biotech giant Syngenta [link opens a .PPT of IUCN conference]"for ecoagriculture." Syngenta also supports IUCN's conferences.

I don't dispute McNeely's assertions about ethanol, but ethanol is not the only "biofuel," and genetic engineering is hardly the only solution. Isn't this more probably called paid advertising in the BBC News?

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Environmental Action today kicked off a campaign to get the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard doubled. The CAFE standard just stipulates that the fuel economy of an automakers entire fleet must average out to a certain number (it's been stuck in the 20s since the '80s). You can put four models of SUVs on the market that get 10 miles per gallon, for instance, as along as you have equal numbers of hybrids getting, say, 35 miles per gallon. (See my article from last fall, "Better Mileage on Ice: Why refrigerators are more efficient than cars.")

The auto industry has fought CAFE standards hard, complaining that it's just too expensive to made fuel-efficient cars. But it's one of the reasons Detroit is suffering while Japan is not: U.S. fuel-efficiency standards are half what they are in Japan. Even China has us beat.

So, says Dan Stafford of EA, "Our first step in the campaign is to offer the big 3 auto makers that we'll pay the difference of the cost of doubling the mileage standard." In other words, EA wants consumers to sign a pledge saying they'll pay the difference in price for more fuel efficient cars (around $2,000).

The only quibble I have here is: Have we proved that producing fuel-efficient cars costs auto companies more than making guzzlers? A University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute says something to the contrary:

Detroit automakers, who have long depended on the least fuel efficient vehicles to provide most of their profits (and some of who have argued that fuel economy did not matter very much to their customers) are seeing their sales and profits evaporate, as new vehicle buyers switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles.

In fact, Congress would likely be doing automakers a favor by forcing their fuel economy up. They would level the global car market playing field, and re-invigorate the industry, as well as reduce carbon dioxide emissions and wean us all off oil. I can't see a downside worth paying $2,000 extra for. But if that's what it takes, I'm for it.

Check out EA's "Oil Counter," too.

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Bio-Beetle, previously exclusive to Maui, has just opened in Los Angeles. You can rent a BioBug as long as you fill it only with biodiesel and limit your driving to the Los Angeles area. My bug looks just like their mascot.

Joe Gershen of Green Depot and L.A. Biofuels delivered my first 55-gallon drum of biodiesel on Saturday. I drove to Joshua Tree and back on a little under a half tank. I'll post pictures of my home filling station soon.

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Get out and enjoy nature for a few days and look what happens: Everything changes, and you miss all the nature stories.

This was the biggest environmental story over the weekend until This Happened. I wasn't surprised to hear Bush, supposedly inspired by Thomas Friedman, promote alt-fuel made from corn. It takes a lot of oil to grow corn. But "waste materials?" Will he be talking about biodiesel made from rapeseed oil next?

(Friedman's "State of the Union" column is only available through Times Select, but if you write to me I'll send it to you. It's fair. I can send it to my friends. All readers of my blog are my friends.)

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High schoolers in Arizona have managed to do what automakers haven't: Make a four-cylinder, internal-combustion-engine Chevy truck run on hydrogen -- hydrogen, I might add, the truck itself produces from sunlight and water. It only goes a few miles, but at least it goes. The story's in the Arizona Republic, and there's a broadcast version here.

"Our motto," says their teacher Cory Waxman, "is: 'How far did the first airplane fly?'"

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