August 2004 Newsletter

Guest Editorial: Attitude Changes and Creative Investments Needed for Biodiesel Develoment

By Terry Lawhead

Our shared reality of diminishing returns, dire threats to civic security and uncertainty in our personal lives is either going to build character or drive us crazy. The way we view how the world works and how we label behavior will largely determine how we respond. Does something hopeful lurk behind the gloom and doom of what is called "hard headed realism?"

I ask this in reference to America's energy future. And I ask it right now because of very exciting opportunities in the Inland Northwest in growing biofuels and biochemicals from crops that can help farmers diversify and create new jobs while reducing our dependence on extraordinarily high-risk global petroleum.

And I ask it now because self-described "tough-minded hard-headed realists" in the energy industry and federal officials in Washington have adopted a certain attitude about our situation that is effectively shutting off dialogue about potential options. When you hear a secretary of a federal agency describe how "boutique fuels" – biofuels – are negatively impacting America's ability to import foreign oil, you understand that public relations has become an oxymoron.

Back to "realism." Lily Tomlin has called reality "a collective hunch" and for good reason. We do what we agree is possible but nothing is fixed, nothing is fated to be, change is the only constant. I have teenagers, we do need to be cautious, prudent and careful about big decisions that impact the future, their real lives. But we do need also to face both facts and imaginative scenarios. If realism becomes a denial of hope and suspends ways of thinking that promote innovation, it is an addiction to a snapshot. It is an anaesthetized heart. It is a pathology.

There are two entropic clocks ticking here. One is a surreal Dali-esque fancy pocket watch keeping time for the so-far largely successful fantasy that civilization has omnipotence forever. The other is a timepiece for biological systems – small, plain and durable. Neither clocks have faces, hands or numbers until we look at them and project whatever we think we understand of our collective hunch. We only believe what we already know is true. Religion blew out paganism, science undermined religion and politics and economics are choking science. Change happens.

Hard headed realists believe only a very thin slice of what is going on at any given time. Anybody who has been subjected in a business meeting to the withering look of the guy with the spread sheets knows this. Any enthusiast who jumps up to excitedly discuss crazy ideas falls back into the box. Of course any operation has to live within its means, so creative people acknowledge the imposed reality and go mute. For a while.

"Realists" have encountered a formidable force in new business models and the state of the world. We are witnessing some of the consequences of this tragic collision. In a nut, successful strategies incorporate agile partnerships and complex relationships. It is very complicated, loosely-connected, reciprocal and symbiotic and edgy. It is very fuzzy without hard edges.

In terms of our relationship to our shared energy future, those concerned citizens participating in the civic process have to decide where we can get to and then assume innovation and change will happen in order to get America from unsustainable to sustainable.

Or we can accept "realism" and "stay the proven course" and allow for inevitable "disruptive advances" which spreads a lot of pain around for everybody. Oh, and we can also hope for "miracles."

If we can have a local/regional/national debate on foreseeable technologies we can then work backwards from a workable future to articulate transitional paths to get there and reduce painful disruptions, not rely on miracles and create good jobs that last.

Some areas of the United States do understand and know how to make money with bio-fuels and bio-chemicals. American industry has no intention to wake up without access to the chemicals and products it requires to remain competitive because a pipeline goes down – or dries up – half way around the world. Industry will grow energy at home and make it ready for uses. Soy and corn farmers in the Midwest are participating in cluster industries producing renewable energies, adhesives, solvents, emulsifiers, lubricants, building composites, printing ink, wetting agents, carriers such as those used in pharmaceuticals and many more products.

But if you look on a map, the Pacific Northwest is currently virtually empty of such operations. Many people intend to change that picture.

Scientists refer to a humble admission from a few years past. They had believed biology and chemistry with better technology would produce heroic results. It didn't. Products stayed on very expensive shelves in laboratories and think-tanks. Recently market diversification has been inserted into the equation and American industry is getting technological homeruns – new products, new markets, new value propositions for consumers, new profits. Science needed good old American go-to enterprise, utilizing common sense and creativity in – I'll say it – the new reality to commercialize and sell the new.

And, because these new fuels and chemicals are imbedded in materials grown from the soil, we need the knowledge of a culture that is rapidly going extinct. The new cannot emerge from imitation. It does build on history and tradition to provide dreams, insights and design abilities for those who follow. Farmers have always been the providers of food and fiber to humans. Now they may raise our fuel in the form of direct crops and from the biomass or materials left over after harvest.

Who speaks for farmers, who knows them and, perhaps most importantly, who has their trust? Farmers, a no-nonsense bunch but one that historically learned to partner with the vagaries of weather, hired hands, government, lenders and the market, have excellent reasons to be skeptical and resistant to notions of people coming from suburbs and cities.

The phrase "inflection point," refers to a transformative moment that sorts businesses between the quick and the dead. Reality shows itself to be subject to change.

I wonder if an inflection point involving innovation, energy, agriculture and economic prosperity actually already happened in the Northwest but we sort of didn't get it. Historical good luck with agriculture, an abundance of hydropower and other factors made us complacent. Now, as businesses seek guidance and support to move forward under changing economic rules, we are living out the consequences. If we did fail to notice, I hope there is some leeway in the otherwise unforgiving global system of provincial winners and losers and we can get back in the race.

Anthropologists tell us that humans are simply not hard wired to do long term planning. Too much of our time as a species has been spent dealing with the immediate threat or opportunity – saber tooth tigers in the dark, bad weather at harvest, unexpected calamities requiring swift fixing by the muscular not the cerebral. Granted, we stumbled on shallow oil wells and shifted to a cheap energy economy and built an amazing standard of living and technology to fuel it. This upcoming transition looks to be far more challenging – the low hanging fruit is long gone and subsidies are being withheld.

Similarly, the federal government has been described as being able to rule in one of only two ways: via crisis or consensus. As the current energy situation is perceived by the current leadership to be neither a crisis nor something we can all agree upon, it is not prepared to take decisive action. Never forgetting that realists can display the most violent hostility when their picture is threatened.

One last furtive glance at what Lily calls our "collective hunch." Our common reality is a very weird deal. Even billionaire energy czars and their paid-off elected officials go home and celebrate birthday parties with their children and grandchildren. We are, as a culture, dangerously cantilevered over a bottomless abyss as we clutch our photograph of how things are supposed to be.

Agriculture, the energy sector and industry have a mutual self-interest to pay attention to each other. Consumers have an interest in all of it. Realists can be quite full of themselves and up until the last moment unshakable in their convictions. If people take on active roles to nudge things toward sustainable compatible fuels and chemicals vital to a high standard of living, they will need to try to have noble Zen-like unattachments to unfolding events while being fueled by an annoying Puritan-like righteous indignation. They may encourage both Luddite-like conservation while championing incredibly high-tech facilities. They need high self-determination and sky-high altruism. They need to somehow make the box work on behalf of everybody and need to accept that the box is broken and there are going to be winners and losers. They need the virtue of patience and need to push hard.

There is a old saying: "The reward of heroism is not personal glory nor riches. The reward is dreams."

Terry Lawhead works in economic development in Eastern Washington.