Welmer

(This clip was produced by a boy as a present to his father — very touching)

The sustainability movement has a serious image problem, but to grasp this requires a shift in perspective. When one thinks of an ecologically-friendly and progressive society, what comes to mind are smart cars and Toyota hybrids gliding around hip urban enclaves from one ethnic restaurant to another, passing stylish hipsters sipping lattes outside streetside cafés. At the local city park, dreadlocked hippies sell organic produce to young couples with small dogs and designer grocery bags. The cars are tiny and quiet, wine bars abound, and immaculate specialty shops enliven the streets with art-deco facades. All is pleasant and everyone is happy, right? Not everyone, not by a longshot…

The above scenario fills most red-blooded American men with dread and disgust. They get the feeling I remember when my mother, grandmother and sister would drag me to the mall as a little boy and force me to try on saddle shoes. To this day, I occasionally experience waves of nausea in shopping malls. But so what if beer-drinking, closet pyromaniacs don’t want to get with it? They’re obviously not “progressive” and are doomed to the fate of other maladapted species of humanity. In fact, they deserve to be supplanted by scooter-riding, metrosexual yogis. Or so goes the conventional urban wisdom.

What the hipsters chatting over the brims of their recycled starbucks cups don’t know is that the guys working the pits at the Indy 500 are at the forefront of a potential revolution in sustainable energy. Every time they fill up a race car’s tank they are using a clean, renewable energy source — alcohol. Indy cars will be using ethanol fuel this year, but have been using alcohol, mainly methanol, since the 1970s. Drag racing hobbyists and semi-pros race alcohol dragsters and alcohol funny cars fueled with methanol. While methanol doesn’t have the explosive power of nitromethane - used in top fuel dragsters - the above top-alcohol funny car video demonstrates its impressive power and performance.

In what should be an encouraging development for speed and power-obsessed men around the world, methanol is emerging as a very attractive substitute for gasoline. Not only is it a versatile fuel, it can also integrate well into existing infrastructure, and some brilliant scientists are promoting it as the basis of a new, renewable energy economy. George Olah, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994, believes that methanol can replace fossil fuels as our primary energy source, and along with some other prominent scientists is working on making this feasible.

Methanol’s versatility gives the fuel great potential. It can be used directly in internal combustion engines, it is readily convertible to dimethyl ether - a high cetane diesel fuel - and it can even be used as a feedstock for synthetic gasoline. However, what really makes methanol special is its chemical simplicity and the ease with which it is produced. Today, most methanol is produced from natural gas, but Olah has demonstrated that simple fuel cells with certain catalysts can produce methanol directly from atmospheric CO2 and water. This takes only electricity, which is readily produced in renewable and nuclear powerplants that emit no CO2.

Methanol burns clean and has a high octane rating, making it attractive for use in cars. Although toxic, it is water soluble and readily biodregadable, so any large scale spills would be one-off events rather than ongoing disasters like the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Its drawbacks include increased corrosion of metals and plastics and a lower energy content by volume, but the technology required to deal with these problems is already well-understood, and the effort men will put into getting the most out of the fuel guarantees that vehicles running on methanol will perform just as well as the cars we have now.

One of the beautiful things about the prospect of a methanol economy is that it can fit right in with the same facilities and men who produce our energy today. Refineries, pipelines and supertankers can all be retrofitted to work with methanol and its derivatives. Nuclear and hydroelectric plants can provide the electric power to produce methanol from air and water. From pipeline workers to nuclear physicists, men can come together to do what they really like: make fuel to burn in machines. As they do so, they will be forging a renewable, sustainable economy that your typical Prius driver could never imagine.

Sustainability will look far different from how it is imagined today. It will be implemented by the very same people who are cast as demons in today’s environmentalist movement. Truckers will still cross the country in big, shiny diesel trucks, supertankers sloshing with a full load of fuel will still cross the open ocean, and large refineries will pump tons of fuel into giant pipes. Yes, there will be some changes, but we’ll still have our machines, and ultimately it will be industry and material progress that pull us through the rough times ahead.