A man with food has many worries, but a hungry man has only one.

Anonymous

I know this is kind of a local topic, but some of my friends over at Project C.U.R.E. and Denver for Darfur asked me to let you all know about an upcoming concert here in Colorado.  It sounds like a lot of fun and I am disappointed that I won’t be in town to attend. –But that doesn’t stop you from going, helping a great cause, and meeting Willie Nelson in person!  Here are the details:

WILLIE NELSON TO MEET WITH FOUR LUCKY FANS AS PART OF

VIP PRE-CONCERT RECEPTION TO BENEFIT DARFUR 

Meeting With Fans Part of August 26^th Event at Red Rocks Attended by “DARFUR NOW” Star Adam Sterling 

DENVER – Denver for Darfur and local nonprofit Project C.U.R.E. announced today that Willie Nelson has invited four people onto his tour bus for an exclusive private meeting with the star prior to his concert at Red Rocks on Tuesday, August 26.  The offer comes as part of a VIP pre-show event that Adam Sterling, a star of the movie DARFUR NOW, will attend to help raise funds to send a container filled with $400,000 worth of donated medical supplies to clinics and hospitals in the Darfur region of Sudan. 

“This is a once in a life-time chance for fans to meet with the legend himself on his private tour bus,” said Jeff Bridges, spokesman for Denver for Darfur.  “Mr. Nelson has once again shown he’s a true class act with his generosity to our cause, and we deeply appreciate the work done by Chuck Morris at AEG Live to make this happen.  We’re also delighted that Adam Sterling, one of the stars of the movie DARFUR NOW, will join us at the VIP reception.” 

While Nelson will not attend the pre-show VIP event, a premium sponsor of the event will receive two spots on his tour bus, and the other two spots will go to the winner of a drawing held during the event.  Tickets to the pre-show VIP event cost $250 and include entry into the drawing, as well as food, drinks, and premium seats for the concert. 

Tickets for the event, which will take place between 5:30-7:30pm at the Red Rocks Visitors Center, are available online at www.denverfordarfur.org.  Companies or individuals interested in sponsoring the event and securing two spots on the tour bus can contact Brittany Morris at 303-592-5458. 

The nonpartisan event is open to the public and also features entertainment by musician Nina Storey and a silent auction with several art pieces by Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones, courtesy of Fascination Street Fine Art Galleries.  Sterling will attend the VIP reception to discuss the horrific situation in Darfur and ways that individuals around the globe can help make a difference.  At 24 years old, Sterling successfully passed a bill in California to keep all state funds out of Sudan. 

“With the tragedies in Darfur it is easy to feel helpless and removed from the situation,” said Project C.U.R.E. President and CEO Dr. Douglas Jackson.  “This event allows individuals and communities the opportunity to make a direct difference in the lives of people in this beleaguered and war-torn part of the world.” 

After my last post, let’s get back onto dry land where we can get some farming done. We know that we need to move to an alcohol economy so that we can grow our own fuel instead of being dependent on hostile foreign countries for it. That’s a multi-step process. It would be great if we could just turn a valve somewhere in Missouri and have a billion barrels of ethanol come flowing out, but it doesn’t work that way. We have to develop the ability to make alcohol-based fuels, like ethanol, in economical and environmentally sustainable ways. We also have to give the transportation and heating infrastructure time to adapt to the changing fuel base of the country. A trillion barrels of ethanol does us no good if there are no cars that can burn it; right now we scrape by with adding a bit of ethanol into regular gasoline so that engines can burn it, but the millions of ethanol-friendly cars we need simply aren’t on the road yet. They can’t get on the road without a fuel base already in existence. Corn-based ethanol is the first step on a stairway that leads upwards to fuel independence for our country; it isn’t the whole stairway.

Bad press about the deficiencies of ethanol – some real, some exaggerated, and some just plain invented – has caused some people to sour on the concept of alcohol fuels. This is just wrong; it would be like deciding that basketball is a terrible sport because certain players behaved badly in their hotel rooms after the game. Corn-based ethanol will not be the salvation of our fuel economy, but it will be the first step in developing the cellulosic ethanol technologies that can save us.

Cellulosic ethanol is the production of an alcohol fuel from cellulose. Unlike current ethanol technologies, which requite a very high grade of organic product as feedstock, cellulosic ethanol can use really terrible plants (otherwise useless) and organic matter – stuff that farmers pay to have hauled away from the fields after harvest, it’s so useless at the moment. Cellulosic ethanol can also be created from old phone books, sawmill/paper mill and cotton gin byproducts, lawn clippings and all the fruits and vegetables that your grocer throws away after they expire. (–think flux capacitor from the 80’s movie Back to the Future)  The waste-to-energy potential alone of cellulosic ethanol is staggering – and that’s just using the stuff that we throw away now. Crops formulated for cellulosic ethanol potential, like switchgrass and miscanthus, actually have far more energy per acre than our current corn-based feedstock. Even preliminary test results are impressive. It would take 25% of US cropland converted to corn in order to produce enough conventional ethanol to meet 20% of US energy needs, but only about 9% of cropland planted with miscanthus – a 250% improvement over the yield from corn. And unlike corn, miscanthus is very tolerant of poor soil and weather conditions – it doesn’t need to be planted on prime agricultural land. We can grow it on garbage land that would otherwise simply be barren – expanding the farm economy, rather than just redirecting part of its output into energy.

Cellulosic production is not economically feasible at the moment – but it is getting better every year. The existence of an ethanol economy based on corn is providing the driver for research and development into cellulosic ethanol, because companies, individuals and entrepreneurs can see that there is a market for their product if they can get the processes working. Like the sailing ship economy, corn-based ethanol provides a structure for the development of new and better technologies – technologies that wouldn’t be developed in a vacuum.

Corn won’t get us to the finish line, but we need it in order to get off the starting line.

I’ve been getting a lot of good comments on an earlier post about the viability of ethanol fuel. Many commenters seem to feel that corn-based ethanol is not a realistic long-term solution to our fuel problems, and it always seems to surprise them when I acknowledge that in fact, that’s true.

Corn-based ethanol cannot possibly become the primary, or even a primary, fuel source in the United States. The reason is obvious: even if we took every acre of arable land that wasn’t absolutely required for food production and planted corn on it wall-to-wall, the amount of fuel that would be produced would only be a fairly small fraction of the fuel we use. There just isn’t enough available land; plant-based fuels are relatively low in energy density and so you need a lot of plant feedstock to make a gallon of good fuel.

Why, then, should we be pursuing corn-based ethanol? The answer is simple: it is a bridge to an alcohol economy. Bob Zubrin’s excellent book “Energy Victory” lays out the case for transitioning the US to an alcohol-based, rather than petroleum-based, economy for our heating and transportation needs. He makes the case far better than I could, so although I won’t promise not to blog about it, I will forego the ten-page lecture for now. The bottom line is that the US can very easily become self-sufficient in fuel if we have an alcohol-based fuel economy, a self-sufficiency that we simply cannot attain with a petroleum economy. We should use our oil to make plastic, and use our staggering agricultural power as the basis for our fuel needs. At the very least, we need an alternative fuel source. 

But wait – didn’t I just say that we can’t do it with corn? Yes, I did. But right now, corn is the feedstock of choice for the ethanol technologies that we have. We have to start somewhere; it’s very difficult for both technological and economic reasons to just declare a full-fledged alcohol economy. The analogy I like to use is the development of oceangoing ships. We started with sailing vessels, which over time became larger, more complex, more powerful, and more capable. Eventually sailing ships became obsolete as wood- and then coal-burning steamships were developed – and for a long time, both sailing ships and steamships plied the same trade lanes. Coal-burners were in turn made obsolete by oil-burning ships, which used the same basic technology but which were much easier to refuel at sea and could go longer distances without refueling. Those ships were in turn made obsolete – although again, there are still plenty of them in the ocean – by nuclear-powered vessels that drew on the power of the atom and never need refueling.

In terms of the alcohol economy, we are at the sailboat stage. We’ve begun to develop the next generation of coal and wood-burners – but we’re still quite dependent on the sailing ships we already have sitting out at the dock. We still have to trade with countries overseas, and we can’t just shut down the trading economy while we wait for the steamships to get better – because the steamships will never get better if there is no trading economy for the researchers to sell into. We go to sea with the ships we have, and we constantly work on making the next generation better.

On Monday I’ll tell you more about why we need corn in order to get to the next stage of ethanol development.