Alcohol Can Be A Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century - Brossura

Blume, David

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0979043778 ISBN 13: 9780979043772

Casa editrice: Intl Inst for Ecological Agric, 2007

Riassunto

The most complete manual on alcohol fuel production and use ever written. Not just a very detailed how-to manual but a thorough treatment of all the issues raging in the public debate over ethanol. Historical, political, ecological, agricultural, and ecological implications of replacing petroleum with farm produced alcohol fuel. The technical sections have been drawn from hands on grassroots expeience by the author and others in production of fuel from a wide variety of crops and waste products, conversion of literally every sort of engine in existence to utilize ethanol instead of gas or diesel. Also covers cogeneration of electricity and heat with alcohol as well as cooking, cooling and lighting with alternative fuel. Shows the economics of small scale alcohol production and instructs the reader how to legally produce their own moonshine while harvesting tax credit usually given to petroleum companies that mix alcohol with their fuel.The book contains 473 endnotes, a 6000 entry index, and extensive glossary. FROM THE BACK COVER This book is a complete toolkit for farmers, contractors, alternative energy users, mechanics, people concerned with climate change or Peak Oil and anone who thinks they are paying to much for fuel.How to make alcohol for about 47 cents per gallon How to organize a profitable, driver-controlled neighborhood alcohol fuel station Ways to convert your gas engine to 100% alcohol for as little as $50 How to beat oil companies by operating your own small alcohol fuel company.How to get the 61 cents per gallon federal ethanol tax credit refunded to you as cash.How to correctly fill out the permit that legally allows you to make 200 proof moonshine fuel.Would you be surprised to know: Detroit has made flexible fueled alcohol cars for sale in the US since 1994 You can fill up on alcohol at more than 1200 stations in the US.Your gasoline car can already use at least 50% ethanol without modification.Brazil runs 50% of its cars on straight ethanol.Ethanol is liquid solar energy and we can reverse global warming by switching to alcohol fuel.Alcohol is 105 octane, as good as the best racing or aviation fuels.Alcohol Can Be A Gas! gives every reader the power to take back control of energy from oil companies. This book is packed with actual experiences, proven data, practical designs, and great stories. It also provides the nitty gritty details neede to fuel a revolution of small businesses prepared to exploit the market opportunities around ecological auto fuel production.

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L'autore

David Blume started his ecological training young.He and his father Jerry grew almost all the food their family ate, organically—on a city lot in San Francisco in the mid-60s! Dave taught his first ecology class in 1970. After majoring in Ecological Biology and Biosystematics at San Francisco State University, he worked on experimental projects, first for NASA, and then as a member of the Mother Earth News Eco Village alternative building and alternative energy teams.When the energy crisis of 1978–79 struck, Dave started the American Homegrown Fuel Co., an educational organization that taught upwards of 7000 people how to produce and use low-cost alcohol fuel at home or on the farm.KQED, San Francisco’s Public Broadcasting System station, asked Dave to put his alcohol workshop on television, and together they spent two years making the ten-part series, Alcohol as Fuel. To accompany the series, Dave wrote the comprehensive manual on the subject, the original Alcohol Can Be A Gas! Shortly after the first show aired, in 1983, oil companies threatened to pull out their funding if the series was continued. KQED halted the distribution of the series and book (see this current book’s Introduction for the whole story.) In 1984, Dave founded Planetary Movers, an award-winning social experiment and commercial venture, well known for productive activism (e.g., on behalf of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas), as well as for pioneering practices of progressive employment, green marketing, and the sharing of a percentage of profits for peace and the environment.In 1994, he started Our Farm. This communitysupported agriculture (CSA) farm was also a teaching farm, based on sustainable practices, that hosted over 200 interns and apprentices from all over the world, and held regular tours for thousands of people. Our Farm grew as much as 100,000 pounds of food per acre, without a tractor, using only hand tools, on a terraced, 35-degree slope.The International Institute for Ecological Agriculture (IIEA), founded by Dave in 1993, is dedicated to healing the planet while providing for the human community with research, education, and the implementation of socially just, ecologically sound, resource-conserving forms of agriculture—the basis of all sustainable societies.The IIEA teaches permaculture, an ethical system of ecological land design, which incorporates the disciplines of agriculture, hydrology, energy, architecture, economics, social science, animal husbandry, forestry, and others.Dave and his IIEA associates are establishing a biofuels station in Santa Cruz, California, that will offer alcohol fuel in a driver-owned cooperative, as detailed in this book. Dave is currently Executive Director of the IIEA.He has consulted for a wide array of clients, including governments, farmers, and companies interested in turning waste into valuable and profitable products. Recent work includes a feasibility study for a macadamia growers’ cooperative in Mexico, and a water harvesting/reforestation project in Antigua, West Indies. He is working with a farming college connected to the government of Ghana to develop alternative fuels, to train agricultural extension agents in organic farming, and to design an ecological strategy to stop the Sahara Desert from advancing. He also recently inspired the city of Urbana, Illinois, to hold a conference between builders, lenders, developers, municipalities, building inspectors, architects, and engineers, to coordinate the mainstreaming of natural building technologies. He has helped the Ford Motor Company demonstrate alcohol-fuel-powered vehicles at a series of U.S. events.“Farmer Dave” is often called upon to testify before agencies on issues related to the land and democracy. He is a frequent speaker at ecological, sustainability, Peak Oil, and agricultural conferences in the Americas, and has appeared in interviews over 1000 times in print, radio, and television.Dave firmly believes in Emma Goldman’s view of, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution,” and he can frequently be found on the dance floor when he isn’t flagrantly inciting democracy.

Dalla seconda/terza di copertina

This is a paperback so there's no flap but why waste a box. Here's some praise from others for the book.Praise for Alcohol Can Be A Gas! ¬"Brilliant! This book should be on the reading list of every American!!” —Thom Hartmann, New York Times best-selling author, and nationally syndicated host of The Thom Hartmann Program on Air America. “Humanity has used up roughly half of the world’s oil and topsoil. Just in time, David Blume has given us Alcohol Can Be A Gas! It’s a practical road map for supplying all of our energy needs without drilling, strip-mining, and/or depleting the soil. In fact, following Blume’s model, soil fertility would actually increase worldwide; energy production would be not only sustainable, but democratic—and highly profitable on the small scale. This is a brilliant visionary work. And, with Mr. Blume’s witty personality, reading it is certainly a gas.” —Larry Korn, Soil Scientist, Translator, and Editor of The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming."Dave Blume has written the definitive opus on alcohol as a fuel. From the 30,000-foot view to the most minute technical detail, Alcohol Can be a Gas! makes a strong case for the practical, ecological, political, and economic sense in converting to ethanol. It's heartening to see the world's original “alcohol pioneer” stay abreast of the times with a book that has the promise to knock some sense into our insidious fossil-fueled economy. This book is much needed in this era of Peak Oil and fast-accelerating climate change." —John Schaeffer, President and Founder of Real Goods, and Executive Director of the Institute for Solar Living.As intersections of the food-energy-climate matrix form in Iowa cornfields, Amazonian rain forests and Canadian gene splicing labs, and end-game battles for their control pit theocratic flat-worlders against biologists, climatologists, and tree-huggers over the very survival of life on Earth, David Blume emerges like a wizard on a misty pinnacle, back-lit by the full moon, revealing a gemstone in his extended palm.Albert Bates, author, The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (New Society, 2006) The over-arching importance of this delightful book is that it demonstrates how beside the point is the current pseudo-debate about the net energy from corn ethanol. As Blume demonstrates, fuel alcohol must be an important component of our solar-based future. It can be made from a huge variety of feedstocks, including sugar beets and cane, nuts, mesquite, Jerusalem artichokes, algae, even coffee-bean pulp; there is no real scarcity of land to grow fuel. There is a scarcity of independent, original thinking--and Blume’s book provides plenty of it, along with ample doses of amazing, startling, and sometimes scary information--ecological, technological, and political-economic. This is a vast, detailed compendium drawn from decades of experience by an alert, smart, and skeptical hands-on thinker. Blume has given us his biofuels bible, and we can learn from him and survive quite nicely, or follow what he calls MegaOilron into oblivion.—Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia, Ecotopia Emerging, and Ecology:A Pocket Guide What a tour-de-force! This is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide through all the controversy about ethanol as transportation fuel, showing it as a clear winner in the quest for solutions to our environmental and geopolitical problems. Engagingly written, full of important and amazing information and resources, this book meets every challenge to the vision for a clean, democratic path to a prosperous future for all.-Joe Jordan, Atmospheric Researcher, NASA/Ames Research Center Finally an alcohol book for the layman and backyard enthusiast. In our culture's collective industrialized love affair with mega everything, Blume cuts across the government-subsidized factories with ecologically practical models. Here is a viable energy system that can be embedded in a region linking rural producers to urban users of energy and food. Self-reliance and resiliency follow community-based alcohol production, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to Blume for codifying his life's passion in what is a veritable compendium of information. Joel Salatin Farmer and author of bothYou Can Farm and Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.Ethanol champion David Blume has completed his opus, Alcohol Can Be a Gas! It is a great read. The history of petroleum, history of alcohol, technical coverage of production process, vehicle development (conversion) and feedstocks. It's all in the text complete with charts and pictures.David's wit, wisdom and hardcore experience illuminate this biofuels potential. We have eagerly awaited this publication and will use it in Sustainable Transportation and Biofuels courses.Dr. Jack Martin, Appropriate Technology Program, Appalachian State University, Vice-Chair of Renewable Fuels and Transportation Division, American Solar Energy Society|Dear Reader, Thanks so much for purchasing this special limited first edition printing of Alcohol Can Be A Gas! For many of you, I want to especially thank you for your patience. I have been working full-time on this project for four years, and that’s two years longer than I thought it would take. For those of you who have hung in there with me, and kept cheering me on when the going was tough, I have to say I couldn’t have done it without your support. When I first started on this project 25 years ago—filmed my series for KQED and wrote the original book—I thought it had the potential to make a substantial difference to the economics and environmental quality of the United States.But today I have set a much higher bar for the goals for this book. I believe that the human race’s ability to survive—in the face of the interconnected problems of Peak Oil, climate change that’s heading for the tipping point, and unchecked population growth—is in question. Without a radical change in how we power our societies and conduct our agriculture, the civilization we currently take for granted will dissolve due to wars for resources, while a large part of humanity will be forced to migrate to higher ground. It is my expectation that this new book will be a tool for the revolutionary change needed to address the challenges facing the entire planet, not just the U.S. So someday, when there are alcohol biorefineries producing fuel, food, and all sorts of products in every bioregion, when greenhouse gases are on the decline and ice packs are deepening on the poles, when air pollution is a thing of the past, all of our sewage is processed in cattail marshes, kelp farms send spent mash through derelict oil pipelines to Midwest farms, agriculture becomes otherwise regionalized and organic, you will be able to pat yourself on the back and know you helped make it happen.Share. Organize. Win.Dave Blume 6/11/07

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Intl Inst for Ecological Agric
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0979043778
• ISBN 13: 9780979043772
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 596
• Redattore: Winks Michael