Have you noticed that when you see pizza ads on T.V., the bigger the pizza, the lower the price?  You can get a lot of bad pizza for $9.95, but can you survive on lots of bad pizza?

What if you fed the family cheap bad pizza every night for dinner?  It might be good for the budget, but soon the health effects of a lousy diet would start to show.  It wouldn’t be long until everyone decided that the cheap bad pizza diet wasn’t working.

When society was choosing energy sources during the industrial revolution, cheap was good.  Oil and coal were less expensive than whale oil and wood.  But like with pizza, cost is not the best way to judge the value of an energy source.

With energy, we have lots of cheap bad fuel choices. We have coal, oil, oil shale and natural gas.  This stuff is cheap because there is so much of it (especially coal), and the energy yield of fossil fuels is very high.

Here is a good outline of how fossil fuels formed:

http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html

There are a couple of problems with the cheap bad fuel choices.  First of all is the fact that they are non renewable, so eventually we will run out of them (all of the pizza places will close, and there won’t be any frozen pizzas either).  Second is the fact that as with eating pizza for dinner every night, burning fossil fuels has unhealthy side effects.  They release greenhouse gases which are a cause of global warming and they release other toxins into the air.

A scientist friend of mine explained it to me this way - “it took the earth millions of years to trap the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we are in the process of putting it all back into the atmosphere in a couple of hundred years”.

Here is a video about the different types of fuels we are using currently:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-6.html

What we need is a more balanced energy diet.  We can use fossil fuels sparingly.  But we need to add lots more renewable energy to our plates (think of renewable energy as fruits and vegetables).

Renewable energy sources may not be as cheap as fossil fuels, but in the long run we will be much healthier when we change our cheap bad fuel choice diet.

There is a lot of interest in biofuels like corn ethanol.

The spike in world food prices in early 2008 which resulted in food riots in some countries proved the folly of using food products to make fuel.  But that doesn’t mean biofuels are not a viable liquid fuel.

Here is a lighthearted look at the biofuel and fuel efficiency issues:

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-53.html

We don’t need to use corn or other food products to make fuel (ethanol).  We can make ethanol from plant waste or non food crops like swithgrass.

We can also make something called biodiesel.

Here is a video about making biodiesel starring Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame.

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-49.html

Why is finding a good solution to our “liquid fuels” challenge so important?  Here is a video by Dr. Andrew Frank from the engineering school at the University of California, Davis talking about something we experienced just this past summer, spiking fuel prices rippling through the economy at the speed of trucks.

http://endependence.info/research/videos-c-1-v-7.html