High Speed Vegetables
The team at The Crucible, a non-profit educational collaboration of arts, industry and community in Oakland, California have developed Die Moto, a custom-built performance diesel motorcycle capable of running on diesel, biodiesel, or straight vegetable oil (SVO) fuels. Hitting a top speed of 121 mph in October 2006, Die Moto seriously challenges the notion that biodiesel or SVO fuels mean slow, plodding rides.
Designed and fabricated by a team of environmentally conscious vehicle enthusiasts, engineers and artisans, the Die Moto is out to prove the viability of alternative fuel technology in performance vehicles. The project is among a rising wave of independent organizations discovering, developing and using effective fuel alternatives and vehicles.
However, none are quite so fast as this one.
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- 5-25-07
- Morgan Maher's blog
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End of the joyride...
I hate to rain on the motorcade, but my thoughts tend to align with ole James Kunstler when it comes to the future of transportation and the tragic fate of sprawling suburban car culture. As he states in a recent piece in The Orion, "the single worst impediment to clear thinking among most individuals and organizations in America today is the obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs." America's infectious obsession with internal combustion has led us down this path of global non-sustainability.
Perhaps its time we lose the keys for good.
Check out Kunstler's enlightening article, "Making Other Arrangements, for more...
;)
st
"The future is frightening, but I feel fine." - The Dandy Warhols
highways
But.. it goes so fast!
seriously though, I would agree to some degree. It's not so much the vehicle itself, it is the way they are manufactured and the ways in which they are fueled that makes cars so nasty. Otherwise they can be very useful.
Not sure about the 'the single worst impediment to clear thinking..' but it's up there.
I generally walk everywhere I need to go, even avoiding public transit which, incidentally, shut down yesterday afternoon in hot, hot Toronto. Causing many people to put on their walkin' shoes.
One thing I keep 'in my pocket' is this;
So long as you are fueled by fossils, you are fueled by extinction.
more on that in a moment.
"fueled by extinction"
... I like that! I may have to borrow your quote later!
Also I'd agree that it's not necessarily the car that causes the trouble -- if you haven't seen it, rent Who Killed the Electric Car? from your local video store and prepare to be disgusted. The powers that be in the government-petroleum complex accidentally unleashed on the world an entirely pollution-free mode of dependable, individual transport that would have been a tremendous step backwards from fossil fuel dependency and its concomitant horrors. Then they quickly pulled it off the streets and destroyed the evidence. Today's hybrids are a small concession compared to the workable clean technology in the electric cars, so quickly forgotten.
Still, the fossil fuel problem is much larger than our vast fleets of SUVs, jumbo jets, and freighters even. Nearly all modern consumer products are fashioned from petrol-based substances; all industrial farming uses petrol fertilizers and pesticides; and a huge number of the world's electric power plants are themselves powered with natural gas.
Keep an eye on my blog for an article on this issue in the coming weeks...
;)
st
"The future is frightening, but I feel fine." - The Dandy Warhols
vast
>borrow your quote later
borrow, use, spread, repeat.
Spread the word and shed the world.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Your post is another example of the world's growing awareness to alternative fuels. On the surface that is a good thing, but be careful what you wish for.
One question that needs to be raised is that in a world where the majority of people are starving for lack of food, how much cropland should be converted for the production of fuel? Given the dynamics of the marketplace I would suspect that the more lucrative option would rule the day. Hence, fuel. And that in turn will make food costs even higher, and more out of reach for more people.
If you question this just check out commodity prices for corn in the past year - they have almost doubled due to soaring demand driven largely by alternative green fuels.
Daryl Hannah was in Toronto recently for The Green Living Show, and she spoke at some length about her own efforts to promote fuel alternatives i.e. plant based fuels such as Grassolean. Given her success at promoting this alternative fuel, she is now alarmed at the fact that in the Phillipines large tracts of rainforest are now being cut down to make way for lucrative plantations of palm oil.
As with all things there is cause and effect. Resolving one problem often creates new ones. More people will starve; more rainforest will be decimated; but we can feel good about having done the morally conscionable thing by driving around in our supercharged pimped out eco-rides.
This isn't shifting the paradigm; it's simply repackaging it.
healthy challenges
Excellent points Hermit.
What we're dealing with really is 'imbalance'. While SVO and bio-fuels may not be The Answer. They do raise questions and indeed do change things, however incrementally.
But in our engaging these things we need not default to sub-par metaphors like 'pimped out -eco-rides.' This tends to defeat the purpose. It's not likely that this particular vehicle (the remixed BMW) will go into any mass production. But it does 'prove' the potential of SVOs, if only for a short term/transition period.
Also of note is the bike is made not by a gang of random weekend-mechanics but by an "arts education center that fosters the collaboration of art, industry and community."
Any 'way-forward' or potential we encounter these days, like SVOs or Green products etc carries with it many questions and consequences. Yet it seems to me that this is the much better direction to go. A direction that certainly does reveal and create a huge amount of work and many challenges, but it seems to me they're healthy challenges and healthy work.
German Beer Crisis
In today's news there's more evidence of how the growth of crops for biofuel is having adverse effects in the marketplace.
Beer prices are rising in Germany, to the chagrin of many. The reason? Barley prices have almost doubled in the past 2 years as farmers shift crop planting to rapeseed and corn, for use in biofuel production.
One consumer named Volker Glutsch of Berlin summed up the crisis as follows: "It's absolutely outrageous that beer is getting even more expensive. But there's nothing we can do about it - except drinking less and that's notgoing to happen."
So if you value your beer consider the cause & effect of going green with biofuel.