HOW Green Are you?

We are seeing an inordinate amount of activity around the green house gasses topic. People from all walks of life claiming to not only care, but also to want to change the very air we breathe. They are of course laudable but sadly misled because what they are doing is called the Prius effect.

The Prius effect is the simple act of buying an overpriced piece of transportation because it puts you into a more acceptable consumer category. Let's leave aside for the moment all the pecuniary reasons for buying a Prius, from subsidies at purchase to lower cost at the pump, and concentrate on what has actually happened.

In the grand scheme of things, nothing, a large gas guzzler has been replaced by a lesser gas guzzler. What is significant is that the new Prius owner is convinced that he has made a difference and will not give up all the little things he used to do, like turning lights off, using his bike etc. It is a bit like buying a rocking chair because it gives the impression of going somewhere while standing still.

If you live in rural America, there is no reason to run your farming and transportation equipment on diesel, even if it is biodiesel. There are conversion kits that would allow the use of natural gas. No, not that fracked abomination we are shipping to China, but real NATURAL gas pumped out of the dairy farm methanizer all your neighbors have installed. That NATURAL gas which comes from letting manure sit for a week in a lagoon.

The natural gas the Germans have built 6800 digesters to collect and distribute, THAT natural gas which California produces from one of the 110 digesters they reluctantly have built over the last thirty years. Not the natural gas that is being pumped out of fractured shale in the new earthquake zones of Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and California.

When was the last time you drove by a dairy farm, feedlot or slaughterhouse and gagged at the stench of accumulated manure? That smell, my friend is the golden taste of natural gas going to waste, seriously. It is the stench of nitrates being allowed into the atmosphere instead of being captured and sold as fertilizer, it is liquid gold going to waste.

So how green do you think you are? Green enough to get back on a bicycle? Greene enough to convert to biodiesel? It's a tough question.