A friend just forwarded me an email from the editors of Mother Earth News, an eco-centric DIY magazine, compiling some of their favorite stories from the publication’s past 40 years. Those snowbound in the mid-Atlantic may appreciate imagining a little revenge on Punxsutawney Phil by reading the how-to-serve-groundhog feature from 1984, while the morbidly frugal may want to bone up on a 2003 feature on building your own coffin (“it makes a great coffee table or storage trunk before its final use”).
Those with a Green bent, like me, can enjoy a good selection on alternative fueling options for cars. In 1981, when a gallon of gasoline cost an inflation-adjusted $3.23, the magazine ran a lengthy feature on converting a pickup truck to run on wood chips, through the addition of a wood gasification system to your engine. Though not very sporty looking (part of the system includes a converted 40-gallon water heater tank), it got about a mile for every pound of wood scrap and tree trimmings.
A 1971 feature details how an English farm dweller turned a combination of pig and chicken poop into a source of cheap and cleaner-than-gasoline source of methane to run his car.
Most impressive was a 1979 feature on how one American converted his Opel sportscar into a hybrid over the course of a few weekends and evenings using commonly available parts. The resulting converted car, with the same curb weight, got 75 miles-per-gallon! The car was even given the regenerative braking the Toyota Prius boasts, with none of the braking trouble, I presume.
Most of us don’t have the time or the inclination to tinker with our car engines to make them run on another fuel. But we don’t have to anymore. While biofuels used to be an endeavor for hobbyists and hippies, they are fast becoming the core of a multibillion-dollar industry.
Most of us in the U.S. are familiar with one type of bio fuel: corn-based ethanol, which for years was seen more as an excuse to send political pork to Mid-Western farmers rather than serious policy. The Energy Independence and Security Act of December 2007 gave biofuels a huge boost by mandating that the country use 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2020, up from seven billion when the bill was passed (the nation uses a total of 120 billion gallons of gasoline annually).
Just this month, the EPA gave another boost by determining that corn-based ethanol provides a net 21% reduction in greenhouse gases over gasoline, meaning corn-based ethanol can qualify as an “advanced biofuel” under favorable federal regulations. That will help justify a proposed increase for later this year in the allowable blend of ethanol in gasoline from a voluntary 10% to 15%.
Those three facts alone should make investors sit up and take notice. After all, how often do you come across an industry with a federal mandate to quadruple its market by the end of this decade, that is receiving active support now in expanding that market plus is found to get the country further along the goal of cutting greenhouse gases?
[...] and Cabot’s other newsletters, as well as cover many of the topics you requested. In fact, earlier this week Brendan Coffey wrote about biofuels, which was one of the topics that came up frequently in the survey [...]