I honestly do not know if life teaches you lessons every day, though I often claim you can learn something every day if you are paying attention, but I do know that a couple of my favorite lessons came back to hit me over the head with obvious examples this week.

Example number one was just this Friday. I was talking to a girl who was making a model of a park. She had purchased some tiny plastic figures of skaters and skiers from some hobby shop, and a few plastic trees, as well as some other scenic elements to put into her model. She said she wanted to add a "mountain" to her model, but didn't know how big to make it. So, I asked her, "What is your scale? And how big does that make your mountain?"

Naturally enough, not having given it much advanced thought, she replied that she didn't know what scale her model was. I pointed to a tiny figure of a skier and held up a ruler beside it. The little man was a bit over an inch tall. "How tall is this man?" The young lady replied that he was probably about six feet tall. "Ah, but how tall is the plastic figure?" I persisted.

"About an inch."

"So how tall is a mountain?" I pursued.

"Oh, my gosh, I get it!" she exclaimed, "An inch is five feet so a mountain is ..." she just grimaced and rolled her eyes. She suddenly understood. She immediately knew, based on her newfound understanding, that a proportionately scaled model of a mountain was out of the question for her project, and that moment of realization on a student's face is why some people become teachers. It is a thrill to participate in that, I can tell you from personal experience. In any given week I get a lot of compliments and a lot of disappointments, but this week, I had one clear and obvious thrill. I led a student to knowledge and she drank deeply from its well.

I know, too, that George Bush's State of the Union address was well crafted, but short on substance. Ben Stein decided that the (liberal, according to him) media is on a campaign to "get" President Bush. I am afraid that they have simply seen the emperor's new clothes and they, like in the fairy tale, look an awful lot like a union suit. A Union Oil suit. The Iraq policy looks like nothing more than a last ditch effort to hang onto the oil, and the energy policy of advancing toward alternative fuel development seemed to have no substance. Senator Grassley from Iowa, one source said, looked like he had just won the lottery when Bush talked about ethanol, which was probably pretty close to true. His farming constituents, and his big agriculture backers are the obvious beneficiaries of a policy that simply seems like a tantalizingly sheer veil over the old policy which consists, in the main, of just more of the same. All happening too slowly, and with too little input from visionaries who actually have answers today.

The other lesson learned this week (re-learned that is) was that perceptions are reality for those who do the perceiving. My real life example happened just this morning as my wife was driving and I was the passenger in our minivan. Maggie was stopped at a red light, waiting to make a left turn. Opposing traffic started into the intersection when the light changed, so Maggie cautiously pulled a few feet forward and stopped. I watched as all the cars in the right-most lane facing us (that is, the left, curb lane coming towards us) approached the intersection with turn signals blinking, and proceeded to turn to their right. The center lane, the left turn lane facing us, had a couple of cars in it, also clearly signaling their intent to make the turn, while the middle lane across the intersection contained no traffic at all, although a straggler or two did show up who had to shift into the right lane to make their right hand turns. All but one of these vehicles clearly signaled their intent with their turn signal lights. But the light bulb that went on in my mind came when my wife, Maggie, said as one of the last cars cleared the intersection, "Finally someone with their turn signal on."

Now I have no explanation as to why Maggie saw all these oncoming cars as having not indicated their intent to turn, nor do I propose to speculate on what might have caused us to see the same scene played out at the same time, from a difference in perspective of only about three feet, yet with such different interpretations of "reality". Yet, it is obvious that both of us were paying close attention to all of the vehicles, and yet, we saw completely different versions of the events that unfolded there.

All of this led me to understand that while I cannot imagine why President Bush and the folks behind the scenes (or out in front of the cameras for that matter) in his administration think that a surge of troops into Iraq is the only viable option at this stage of the situation, it certainly made it easier for me to understand that President Bush and associates may genuinely believe that based on the information they are receiving and the objectives they have in mind, this is the best course. Like my wife and I at the street corner waiting for the traffic to clear, President Bush and I have seen a series of events for which he clearly (at least apparently) believes this is the best course, and I cannot imagine an explanation of that perception that has anything to do with the "reality" that I see. And like the automobiles situation, there is no way to go back and prove which perception is more accurate. Events will play out the way they will.

On the matter of energy policy, however, I do not propose to idly stand by. Ethanol from food plants, with heavy subsidies to make farmers happy may be President Bush's idea of an energy policy, but without significant steps and concrete actions to back them up, we are rapidly going down a path that will only lead to more shortfalls on the energy front, and more price hikes, and problems. We need both industry and government to move toward cellulosic biomass energy. We need that industry to address the problems of carbon dioxide, and not merely pour sawdust into combustion chambers to generate electricity instead of coal. Nor do we need to buy into the gasification of coal as the Midas touch fix to our energy needs. The "un-sequestering" of fossil carbons (or hydrocarbons) has to be a trend we address and reverse in the face of climate changes.

Biodiesel is, along with many of the other bio-based fuel technologies, at least considering the re-cycling of the current carbon load on the atmosphere, carbon neutral. Most of the solutions which do not aim at biomass feedstocks go for the "low hanging fruit" of easily convertible sugars. We need to go after the whole plant, and we need to promote more plant growth so that we don't create a new crisis while solving the old one.

One indicator that we need greater public awareness on this issue is that CES the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was expected to draw 150,000 attendees this year. In March, although trade show will roll out for 3 days in Las Vegas, the PowerGen Renewable Energy and Fuels conference will be hosted at the Mandalay Bay resort. Expected attendance at this one? Perhaps as many as 2000 participants (not counting several hundred staff at the exhibits and a few conference staff from the professional trade show group, PennWell Corp.). When you realize that this show covers not just power generation via biofuels, but all of the winds, solar and ocean tides and currents as well, such small numbers, while growing, seem a pitifully weak response to the immense opportunities.

I hope to be able to attend, and I expect that I will have a few things to report after the March 6 - 8th conference.

But just to get a handle on the scale of the progress and how far we still have to go in the area of biofuels, the Marin Independence Journal of Marin County, California reported in a web story dated January 24, 2007, that the FIRST biodiesel pump in Marin has started operating but sees only about 10 customers a day. That is, in part, because they have to join a biodiesel "user group" whose members then receive ATM-like cards that operate the unattended pump. The cost currently is about $3.60 compared to $3.05 to $2.70 for other diesel fuels in the area, but users consider it their contribution to the earth's environment to spend a little more at this time. It is a fairly hefty premium, but it is helping to get the practicality of biofuels started, and for that we should all be grateful.

I can only hope that President Bush and colleagues may soon have a pair of those life lessons that bring about sudden comprehension like the young lady and the impossible impracticality to include her model mountain. We need practical implementation to instantiate the energy policy rhetoric. We don't need to attempt the impossible in Iraq, and it is probably time to put the price tag for the war squarely on the shoulders of the industry that put us there in the first place. The lives lost, on both sides, are of incalculable value, but there is no question that the price tag is already above $400 billion that the petroleum industry owes us, the American taxpayers, for their adventurism in the middle east.

love

Stafford "Doc" Williamson

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