President Obama drew rave reviews for his unorthodox selection
of Dr. Sanjay Gupta as the nation’s surgeon general. Not only is
Dr. Gupta an accomplished neurosurgeon, but as CNN’s in-house doc
he has also proven himself a bona fide celebrity. People
magazine tagged him as one of 2003’s “Sexiest Men Alive,” and the
swooning that met Obama’s announcement suggests the Love Doctor can
still raise pulse rates. In a culture that prizes the newsgathering
skills of Page Six and TMZ when the New York Times must
mortgage its Manhattan headquarters, Dr. Gupta stands out as a
splendidly obvious choice. It’s just a matter of time before
Associate Justices Judith Sheindlin and Joe Brown take their
rightful places on the high court.
As good as the Gupta pick was, however, President Obama missed
an opportunity to truly tap into the nation’s cultural zeitgeist
when he passed over Craig Alan Bittner, M.D., to be the nation’s
top medicine man. The founder and chief practitioner of Beverly
Hills LipoSculpture™, Dr. Bittner successfully melded our national
body-image consciousness with the eco-faddishness that dominates
the campaign to wean Americans off oil.
In Southern California, a land where plastic surgeons are as
common a feature as palm trees, Dr. Bittner stood out from his
industry brethren by his heartfelt commitment to the environment.
It turns out that Dr. Bittner was turning the fat he removed from
his patients into biodiesel and using it to fuel his and his
girlfriend’s SUVs.
“The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat
for fuel—and I have more fat than I can use,” explained Bittner on
his website (since removed). “Not only do they get to lose their
love handles or chubby belly but they get to take part in saving
the Earth.” A win-win by any definition.
Not that the good green doctor could avoid controversy.
According to several complaints lodged against him, Bittner and his
unlicensed assistants often took too much fat from patients’
bellies, thighs, and buttocks, allegedly disfiguring them. A benign
way to view it is like siphoning gas from a neighbor’s car. A more
jaundiced description is medical malpractice. Rather than cooperate
with investigators and trust his fate to the courts, Bittner
decamped in late 2008 to South America, where he is presently on
the lam. A Roman Polanski for the tummy-tuck set, Dr. Bittner gives
us something profound to think about when it comes to addressing
our nation’s energy challenges.
AT A TIME WHEN sky-high gasoline prices are still a sharp
memory, and politicians of all stripes think we need to end our
supposed addiction to oil, alternative energy advocates are casting
about for something—anything—to use instead of petroleum products,
and much of the focus has turned to biofuels.
Corn and cellulosic-based ethanol are most frequently mentioned,
and the federal government is spending a lot of money trying to
find economical ways to derive this fuel from corncobs and
switchgrass stalks. Whatever its merits, ethanol is unquestionably
boring. A far more exciting biofuel candidate, as Dr. Bittner
demonstrated, is biodiesel. Animal and vegetable fat contains
triglycerides that, with minimal effort, can be turned into diesel.
And conventional diesel engines can be converted to run on a
variety of biodiesel products. Unsurprisingly, the most
enthusiastic biodiesel advocates come from the environmental
movement.
As William Tucker notes in his excellent new book,
Terrestrial Energy, greens have proposed tapping all kinds
of sources—cooking grease, food scraps, crop wastes, anything
organic—to promote the promise of biodiesel. Dr. Bittner was merely
pushing the envelope of what has been a common practice on the
fringes of the green movement. Writes Tucker, “Typically, someone
will design a car that runs on some organic waste—turkey droppings,
hayseed, coconut oil—and drive it around until it attracts press
attention. Then they will announce they have solved the world’s
energy problems.”
It’s the ultimate in recycling. Who hasn’t seen a local news
report about the enterprising driver who has converted the engine
in his car to run on cooking grease he takes off the hands of the
local fast-food joint? Sure, the car may smell faintly like fries
or Chinese food or whatever the grease was used to cook. The upside
to that odor is it will usually mask the scent of patchouli.
For those who think turkey droppings or French fry grease are
the path to energy independence, a whole industry has sprung up to
help patriotic and environmentally minded drivers make the
switch.
Massachusetts-based Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems, Inc. is
among the leaders in the car conversion field. Greasecar offers a
network of about 40 locations nationwide where installers will
retrofit your diesel engine to handle biodiesel. The cost ranges
from about $2,000–$3,000 for the kit and installation. Whether this
was worth the effort last year, when a gallon of diesel fetched
nearly five dollars, isn’t clear; it would have taken driving a lot
of miles to recoup the investment. Now that the price of diesel is
half what it was last summer, the halfbaked idea seems to make half
as much sense.
Still, it’s not just the half-baked crowd that’s been showing
interest in fueling up on McDonald’s discarded fry grease.
Switching the old VW bus to run on waste vegetable oil used to be
the strict preserve of hippies living off the grid and under the
radar. But with the spike in pump prices in recent years, a
somewhat more respectable clientele—like celebrated Beverly Hills
liposuctionists—has emerged as a potential market for diesel engine
conversions.
TAKING THE IDEA mainstream has brought its share of problems,
though. The Los Angeles Times profiled a mechanic last
year who has converted his fleet of vehicles to be fueled by fryer
grease from a local chowder house. Then Sacramento called, not to
praise him for his green efforts but to bust him. Apparently he had
failed to get his state “diesel fuel supplier’s license” and wasn’t
paying the required 18-cent per gallon tax on the fuel he burned.
Oh, and he faced further trouble from California’s Meat and Poultry
Inspection Branch for removing grease without a license. Then there
was his missing permit from the Air Resources Board allowing him to
burn fat, not to mention that he didn’t have liability insurance to
cover potential spills.
Don’t just pity the poor mechanic. The state’s green governor,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, faced a similar conundrum. Trying to set a
good eco-example, the Governator has made a point of powering his
Hummer on cooking oil from Costco. He wasn’t paying taxes or
complying with the regs either. Several states exempt small-time
drivers who run on kitchen grease from paying taxes, as well as
from needing to jump through the regulatory hoops that were
designed to apply to large-haul handlers of fuel or animal
by-products. Given California’s budget fiasco (the governor has
asked Washington for its own bailout), it’s unlikely Sacramento
will loosen its requirements anytime soon. Despite this hurdle (the
largest concentration of biodiesel vehicles are thought to be in
California), biodiesel advocates believe they are making
significant inroads into the culture at large.
Ironically, the effort to broaden biofuel’s image from hippies
to a wider segment of the public has employed one of America’s
best-known long-haired dope smokers as its spokesman. In 2005,
country music legend Willie Nelson lent his name and image to a
product called BioWillie diesel fuel. The Redheaded Stranger has
long toured in a biodiesel-powered bus, so his sponsorship seemed
natural.
BioWillie was pitched to independent truckers thought to be fed
up with paying huge sums to Middle Eastern sheiks when they just as
easily could be filling the pockets of American farmers. The idea,
as Willie put it, was to “put five million farmers back on the land
growing fuel and keep us from having to start wars for oil.”
Willie Nelson is certainly a great musician and songwriter, but
he has never shown much aptitude for handling women (married four
times) or money (his assets were seized in 1990 when the IRS said
he owed about $17 million in back taxes). So perhaps it’s no
surprise that BioWillie went belly up. In 2006, Earth Biofuels
Inc., the company behind BioWillie, found itself paying more to
produce a gallon of biodiesel than it was earning by selling it,
hardly a sustainable business practice. Most of the outlets that
carried it stopped doing so. Earth Biofuels reportedly lost $63
million in 2006, and Nelson himself quit the board of directors and
gave up six million shares of worthless Earth Biofuels stock. The
company retains the rights to the BioWillie brand and is continuing
feeble efforts to make a go with it.
Not that Willie is dissuaded. He is still a true believer, in
2007 publishing the page-turner On the Clean Road Again:
Biodiesel and the Future of the Family Farm. It’s worth buying
if only for the chapter entitled “To All the Oils I’ve Loved
Before.”
For all his goofiness and wrongheadedness on everything from
biofuels boosterism to 9/11 conspiracies, Willie Nelson is still
the man who penned “Crazy” and “Hello, Walls.” He’s a national
treasure. He puts on a helluva concert, even for a septuagenarian
in a perpetual cannabis fog. In my book, Willie Nelson will always
get a pass.
SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T get a pass, however, is loathsome former
Long Island congressman Vito Fossella. Before his career was ruined
by a DUI and revelations that he fathered a child with his
mistress, Fossella stumped for legislation to double the federal
tax credit for using restaurant grease as fuel: “From cooking fried
calamari to powering trucks,” he announced, “restaurant grease
represents a viable energy source for our nation.”
Except it doesn’t, not by a long shot. As Terrestrial
Energy points out, if all the kitchen grease in all the
world’s McDonald’s restaurants were converted to biodiesel, it
would amount to 75,000 barrels per day, or approximately .004
percent of America’s daily oil consumption. According to the
Environmental Protection Agency, all U.S. restaurants produce 300
million gallons of waste oil per year. That’s about one gallon for
every American.
That’s not enough to make any sort of dent in our oil
consumption, but it does give us incentive to eat more unhealthy
fast food. And if that conundrum gives the left fits, it’s good
enough for me.
