transportation

Biodiesel is one of the most intriguing of those new possibilities...crops of soybeans and rapeseed and maybe even algae, grown by present day farmers, processed into a diesel fuel substitute that works just fine in modern Volkswagons and Mack trucks and school buses--even in the oil-burning furnace down in the basement. It is potentially a truely sweet solution, offering a new market for hard-pressed local farmers even as it begins to help solve some of our most pressing environmental problems. Greg Pahl's book...manages to raise the right questions (and raise them early enough) so that we can perhaps build a structure for this developing industry that serves local farmers and processors instead of simply corporate agribusiness giants.

--Bill McKibben in the Forward to Greg Pahl's Biodiesel

Biodiesel has been getting a bad name because of the potential for competition with food production. It has always struck me that some of the loudest voices criticizing biodiesel has come from the oil, coal and nuke lobbies. But it did seem like competition with food production may be a critical problem with biodiesel.

I haven’t owned a car since 2003, and it's a tremendous relief. I no longer receive parking tickets or speeding tickets, don't have to control the temptation to drive like a lunatic. (I was a road rager if there ever was one.) Each month, I need not concern myself with car payments, insurance payments or maintenance payments.

Having moved to Brazil, the dreaded task of removing snow and ice from a car windshield is not only in my past, but it is inconceivable to those in my present.

The alternatives to driving have become much more attractive to me. Having moved to within a five minute walk of the ocean, I no longer need to spend ten dollars of gas and two hours of driving to reach the Jersey Shore. I just walk.

Because the nearest shopping mall is eight hours away, the ritual of endeavoring to earn more and more money to drive to the mall and invent new ways to spend it is much deemphasized. No more shopping mall parking lots for me! Less is more.

In Brazil, there are buses that reliably take passengers to most anywhere we might want to go, no matter how remote. So, when I want to go to a beach further up the coast, I just wait at a bus stop on this beach for a bus to that other beach. Unlike in the United States, the buses in urban areas here typically run twenty-four hours per day, which makes them a viable alternative, even for nocturnal people who like, sometimes, to party all night.