Hi Dan! You and me both: my partner & I also got a diesel New Beetle to use biodiesel in '04, I think it was. We still drive it. But what's the benefit?
Yes, the pollutant issue--and it heartens me that you put your money and actions where your sense of what's best for all of creation is.... yet when we talk about energy, it requires more for us to consider. How this thread got started (as I perceive it) was the economics of closing businesses. In this case, it's auto dealerships. I think many people's perspective of energy use is limited to cars. They don't think of how much petrochemical went into the fertilizer and the machines that grew their food, which were transported, packed in more petrochemical products (plastic), stored, frozen or chilled and transported and stored, frozen or chilled again before they drove their car to the store to buy their damn green beans (what I'm eating at the moment). What we're looking at here is even more immediately threatening than pollutants and greenhouse gases. It's the equivalent of 100 human energy slaves for every "first-world" human (since the dawn of petrochemical energy). What we're beginning to see play out is the relationship between economics and energy. Somewhere I've read that something like 40-60% of a car's energy usage is in its own making. Does anyone have some figures on this? I can't remember the number or its source. And as you stated--even better in regards to biofuels is using waste from restaurants. But what is the benefit of biofuels if the same amount of petroleum goes into biofuel production as does go into human food production.? Every time you exchange energy you loose. Just like every time you dupe a neg or transparency, you loose. So why not put the damn petrol into the car instead of growing the crops to feed the car? However, if you can use a waste product as you stated, you are actually helping to slow the hemorrhage.
A year and a half ago I attended the annual Ecocities conference which happens each year around the world. What was the summation of that conference in the closing speech by Richard Register? Fuel efficient hybrid biofuel cars are the..............worst thing we can have. Why? Because they encourage sprawl. (Think Los Angeles where I spend a small part of each year as the poster child for cities of the past) It is the antithesis of a sustainable future. Fuel efficient cars make it easy to spend more energy towards isolation when we should be making cities where one can walk to work, your friends' house, the garden (where we get most of our food--locally), the store, the factory, our home. We have to get reality on what we're actually doing instead of dreaming up the next Prius that gets ten more miles to the biofuel gallon while spending more than ten times that savings in its own production on the assembly line.
If you spend a few weeks beginning to explore that link I first posted, we'll be starting to see the same challenge that we all face.
Here's to a new decade and another shot at f-ing it up even worse!! I'm back to my irrelevant pursuits.