Van Jones is the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a non-profit organization working to find solutions to "America’s two biggest problems: social inequality and environmental destruction."

The Ella Baker Center's Reclaim the Future campaign focuses on ensuring that jobs and job training are available for the poor and for people of color in the emerging green economy.

I spoke with Van at his office in Oakland on May 21. He had just returned from Washington D.C. where he testified before Congress about green collar jobs.

Green Options: The scope of your work and activism is extremely broad: civil rights, political activism, juvenile justice system reform… How does environmental activism fit in?

Van Jones: From my point of view, we have a legacy in Progressive politics in the last century of being very fragmented: single issue, sub-sub-sub-issue sometimes. We've worked harder and harder and gotten farther away from each other and from any real solutions. So, it's not about the environment fitting in.

I look at the world through certain lenses: race, class, gender, power. The environment is a lens: a way I look at the world. So I see the environment in everything. I see ecological perils and solutions in everything. It's not surprising that a society that has throwaway children and throwaway neighborhoods also has throwaway species and throwaway resources and throwaway continents. It's a throwaway mentality that we have.

What we do with people should be restorative. If somebody gets in trouble with the law, the goal should be a just outcome, and a just outcome should be one that leaves everybody else better off than they were before. That's not what we do. We have a retribution-based justice system. If somebody damages me, the system is going to damage them. You add damage to damage, and that's how we get justice. How do you know you have justice? Look, there's more damage! My view is that we need to have restorative justice where the victim has been made whole, the offender or the trespasser has been rehabilitated, and the community has been restored to some sense of wholeness. That's a much higher standard, but it's something to aim for.

I feel the same thing about the suicide economy that we're in. You take a bunch of living things, turn them into dead things, shrink wrap it, and that's your economic growth model. I think that's totally nuts. We should be restoring and replenishing the capacity of nature to take care of us. That should be how we grow: green growth. My hope is that someday we'll have restorative justice and we'll have restorative economics.

There's only one solution to all the problems, or to at least 80 percent of the problems we have in this country, and that's a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

GO: You use the terms "eco-apocalypse", "eco-apartheid", and "eco-equity" to describe possible future societal outcomes from an environmental perspective. What do those terms mean to you?

VJ: Eco-apocalypse is the natural outcome of how we're living. You've got six billion people, soon to be nine billion people, and everybody's eager to ride around in an S.U.V. while chugging on a Slurpee, or they wish they were! And that's just not gonna work. The outcome of that kind of lifestyle and value system is eco-apocalypse.

Eco-apartheid is the danger that certain elites, certain ecological haves, begin to think they've solved the problem because they've solved it for themselves. But the problem is actually getting worse and worse everywhere else around them. The ecological have-nots not only continue to suffer morally and physically, but also, that particular moment [when the elites think they've solved the problem] just becomes a speed bump on the way to eco-apocalypse anyway.

To me, eco-equity is a way of talking about an ecologically sustainable society that is more just, more fair, more equal, and more inclusive than the one we have now.

GO: And that's why you created the Oakland Green Jobs Corps? What is your goal with that project?

VJ: We've created the process by which it's being born. We want to train up a bunch of urban youth in green enterprise. People are always telling me, "Oh Van, you just want to make these guys be the workers and the slaves. A green plantation!" But, you know, I'm a good southern Christian guy. I'm for work. It should be paid fairly and it should be safe and clean and it shouldn't be hurting the earth and everybody around you.

I want to see green career paths, where people get a chance to start at the bottom and then step up to the next rung on the ladder and then the next rung, and get a chance to become co-owners and co-investors and co-inventors. It has to start some place.

Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.

Our big problem in this country: everybody wants people to climb out of poverty themselves. I'm for that. But they want people to climb a six story ladder with four rungs on it. Lets put some rungs on this ladder, and lets make sure that ladder is pointing toward the green economy and not the grey economy.

GO: You had the opportunity to testify before Congress about green collar jobs just a few days ago. How did that opportunity come about, and what did you have to say?

VJ: It was one of the happiest days of my life. I'll put it in the top five. It was like a movie! You put your suit on and get your shoes polished and get in the cab to go over to the big building with high ceilings and marble floors. Then you sit in front of this little table with three other people. The Congresspeople all walk in, and they sit up there like they're gods. They give their speeches, and then it's your turn, and you get a chance to talk to people who, if they believe you, can vote to send hundreds of millions of dollars to your constituency. And… it was just great.

I got a chance to say everything I had to say. Representative [Edward] Markey and Representative Hilda Solis, their comments were… I was thinking, "We should put that on our website!" They were saying things we've been saying. That was really cool: to see people in powerful positions like that saying "green pathways out of poverty" and "green collar jobs". That's stuff that the Ella Baker Center was saying in 2004 and 2005 when it was really novel. People hadn't really thought about that before. Now we've gotten to a place where people in high office feel like they can say it in public and nobody's going to laugh. That's a big change.

The opportunity came [to testify] because we were just doing our work and somebody from [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi's office heard about it. They called us in and asked some questions. We were clearly being vetted in a way. The next time they called us over, the Speaker was actually there. We got a chance to be in a meeting with her, and then did a press conference. So, basically, we ended up with about $5 million worth of free lobbying just doing this work here in Oakland and believing in it, and because we're just a stone's throw from the Speaker's home office.

It was weird to me because it was like being back in high school civics. It was like, [sings] "I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill." An idea comes from the people, then a representative introduces it and it becomes law. I'm thinking, "This is starting to get corny!" And I'm right in the middle of it!

GO: Do you have any interest in someday running for office yourself?

VJ: No. No. Not at all. I'm totally excited and fascinated by politics and politicians. I listen to NPR and Rush Limbaugh. I'm a big political junkie. Thus, I know better than to run for office. [Laughs]

GO: What are the most important things that individuals and individual businesses can do to ensure that green collar jobs and eco-equity become realities?

VJ: I wish it was easy. Just say, "Hire urban youth." I wish it was that easy, but it's not that easy. Our public schools and our foster care system and our juvenile court system have so failed a generation of urban youth that some of them are not job ready. We may as well be honest about that.

What is possible is to identify those community-based organizations that work with young people. Those community colleges. Go out of your way to find those helping themselves to get job ready. You probably cant do it by posting on your individual website, "We have a job." You're going to have to go out of your way a little bit to identify community-based organizations or churches and say, "Look, if you have any young people who are job ready or close to it, let me know." It does take extra work. You do have to go out of your way. But every community has reputable community centers, reputable pastors, who can help you navigate that and help you find people who will do a good job.

If you want to go a step beyond that, every county has some kind of a workforce investment board or has job training available. Usually it's through the community colleges and vocational schools. Go to the local community college and say to them, listen, this is what we're doing: if you train people in solar installation or in some other particular thing I'm doing, I will hire three or four people in the next year from your program. That's all you have to say to a community college. They will turn on a dime if they believe they can get their graduates jobs.

Unfortunately, it's the polluters and the despoilers and the big-box stores that dictate what a kid can learn in a community college. It's just one section of the business community, frankly the worst section, in industries that are mature enough that can actually dictate, "We want XYZ employees." Most eco-entrepreneurs, they're hiring their dorm buddies to do vocational work, because they're so disconnected from traditional blue collar communities.

So, minimally, reach out to those community groups that are reputable. And it may take you a few times. Don't give up based on the first setback. You may hire somebody that doesn't work out. It's okay to hire, it's okay to fire, and it's okay to try to hire again. That success story is one hire away. You don't give up because this one didn't work out. You don't do that for anyone else. You never say as a business person, "Well, I'm never going to hire another college graduate! That one was a fool!"

GO: You named the Ella Baker Center after an "unsung civil rights heroine." Who are some of the Ella Bakers of the environmental movement?

VJ: You gotta start with Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was murdered by Shell and Nigerian activists. You can never honor him enough in terms of the commitment he made to the Ogoni people and his willingness to work across so many different boundaries. He put the Ogoni people on the map and Nigeria on the map and Shell on the map. And the price he paid [was] being murdered by the government with the duplicity of big corporate America.

Vivian Chang here in Oakland's Chinatown. About to become a mom, in her thirties, never seeks the spotlight. But, you go over to an event at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, there are nine different Asian nationalities there. She's doing the real work.

I love Juliet Ellis at Urban Habitat. She's just so smart and fast and able to deal with these big white bankers and also able to deal with these low-income organizers, and is impressive within herself all the time.

Majora Carter in the South Bronx, who's becoming a sung hero! [Laughs] She got the MacArthur [Fellowship], but she should get the MacArthur and the Nobel Prize and whatever else they've got.

We're really lucky to have such a strong and growing environmental movement in the country. I love Billy Parish with Energy Action. He's willing to try to figure out how to get all those wonderful white kids working together, and he's wanting to figure out how to connect with other struggles. I don't know if he's sung or unsung, but I'd add him to my list. Keep it diverse. [Laughs]

But, Julia Butterfly [Hill] is always at the top of my list. She's sung certainly well enough by now, but that's my girl. Julia Butterfly, in my life, will always be my number one through ten.

Photo: Utah Biodiesel SupplyEven with the retail price of biodiesel hovering close to the price of regular diesel ("dino-diesel" to us bio-enthusiasts) in many areas, a growing group of DIYers are making the fuel from scratch in their own garages and back yards.

Homebrewing biodiesel has many advantages: it usually costs well under $1 a gallon to produce, it eliminates trips to the gas station, and it makes a hell of a hobby.

I've been making biodiesel in my garage for almost two years with equipment that I built myself from instructions available for free online and with used vegetable oil that I pick up for free from a local restaurant. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Like most homebrewers, I started my bio-adventure by making small test batches of biodiesel in my kitchen.

Before we go any further, the Green Options legal team has asked me to include a short note about safety:

Almost everything you'll be dealing with when making biodiesel can be very dangerous. You'll be handling hot oil, methanol (which is poisonous and potentially lethal if consumed, if it gets on your skin, or if its vapors are inhaled), and sodium hydroxide (lye, which is poisonous and corrosive if consumed or inhaled, and which will burn your skin quickly and painfully immediately upon contact). Always wear heavy-duty, chemical-proof gloves, eye protection, and a dust mask during every step of the process. With methanol, not even cartridge respirators can protect you from fumes. Always minimize the time that anything containing methanol is unsealed. Literally, hold your breath for the few moments that you're working with open methanol containers. Above all, use common sense.

Biodiesel is simply heated vegetable oil mixed with methoxide (methanol + lye). The lye in the methoxide breaks apart the vegetable oil and allows a methanol molecule to recombine where a glycerin molecule used to be (methanol and glycerin are both alcohols). When the reaction is finished, the darker glycerin settles to the bottom, and the lighter biodiesel is left on top.

Here's what you'll need to make your own test batch at home:

• Safety equipment listed above

• 1 Liter of any virgin, unused vegetable oil (non-hydrogenated!)

• 1 bottle of "Red Devil Lye" drain cleaner, available at most grocery and hardware stores. Red Devil is very close to pure NaOH (sodium hydroxide), and is perfect for making small batches of biodiesel. If you can't find Red Devil, contact a local chemical supply house and ask for sodium hydroxide.

• 1 bottle of "HEET" brand antifreeze (the yellow bottle) available at most auto supply stores. HEET is close to 100% pure methanol. If you can't find it, look for a local racing fuels retailer that sells methanol.

• 1 large sealable glass jar or bottle, like a mason jar (at least 1.5 liters)

• 1 small sealable glass jar or bottle, like a mason jar (at least .5 liters)

• 1 glass (not plastic!) measuring cup (at least 250 mL)

• A scale that measures in grams

• 1 funnel

• 1 thermometer

• 1 paper cupcake wrapper

This "recipe" only works with virgin veggie oil. If you want to try making a batch from used oil, check out the external resources provided below. You'll need to do a titration to determine how much lye to use.

How to make methoxide:

1. First, go outside. You'll want to do this in a well-ventilated area. Measure out 250 mL of methanol (HEET). Pour it into the small glass jar and seal it.
2. Measure out 6 grams of NaOH (Red Devil). Don't let the lye touch anything plastic or anything living, including you. You can use a paper cupcake wrapper on the scale to hold the NaOH if necessary. Lye tends to stick to anything and everything else.
3. Unseal the jar containing the methanol and carefully pour in the NaOH. Re-seal the jar.
4. Gently swirl the jar to dissolve the lye in the methanol. This may take a few minutes. The jar will probably become slightly warmer. This is normal. A small amount of pressure will also be built up. Gently vent this pressure outside by opening the lid, but do not breathe the fumes!
5. Leave the jar outside for now, but not in the sun.

Unwashed Biodiesel (with glycerine removed)How to make biodiesel:

1. Begin by heating the liter of vegetable oil to 140-145 degrees Fahrenheit on the stove or carefully in the microwave.
2. Pour the heated oil into the large glass jar using the funnel if necessary.
3. Take the oil jar and the funnel outside. Carefully but quickly pour the methoxide into the oil jar using the same funnel. Re-seal the jar.
4. After ensuring that the jar is completely sealed, shake the mixture vigorously for 20-25 seconds.
5. Set the jar down in a well-lit area and watch the magic happen!

You'll notice immediately (probably even while you're shaking) that the mixture turns a much darker color than the original oil. This is the dark glycerin molecules being broken off of the original veggie oil molecules by the lye. After just a few minutes, you'll begin seeing the glycerin fall to the bottom of the jar. Within an hour or two, if all went well, all the glycerin should have separated out and you should have two clearly separate layers: dark glycerin on the bottom (20-25% of the volume), and cloudy looking biodiesel on top. Success!

Washed BiodieselCan you run back outside and pour the biodiesel directly into your diesel car or truck? Well, it's probably not a good idea. The reason the biodiesel layer looks cloudy is because there is still some leftover lye and other impurities floating around in there. Though some homebrewers do use this "unwashed" biodiesel, most of us choose to take a few extra steps to "wash" the fuel of all the impurities before putting it in our tanks. You can see the clarity difference in the two images. The reddish unwashed biodiesel above is too cloudy to see the text behind the jar. The washed fuel on the left is almost perfectly clear. (Don't worry about the color difference: they're just two different kinds of vegetable oil.)

If you're ready to learn more about making biodiesel, here are a few of the resources that helped me move from making small test batches to making 30 gallon, road-ready batches in my "Appleseed Biodiesel Reactor", wash tank, and dry tank:

• The Collaborative Biodiesel Tutorial - Everything from building your own processor to using the leftover glycerin to getting restaurants to give you their used oil.

• InfoPop Biodiesel Forums - The greatest and most helpful homebrewers in the world hang out here. If you're planning to become a homebrewer, trust me, you'll need their help.

• Yahoo! Biodiesel Basics Group - More great information and knowledge from experienced homebrewers.

• Green Options Resources: Check out our biodiesel archives, biodiesel in our Green Guide, and our residential biodiesel expert Clayton Bodie Cornell.

• My collection of posts about going biodiesel at The Higher Pie.

Utah Biodiesel Supply photo by Jack Jones, courtesy of Graydon Blair.

Novazone is a Livermore, California-based company that provides clean technology solutions, most notably ozone disinfection and sanitization systems, for purification of food and water. They have about 300 customers, including Safeway, Arrowhead, CocaCola, and Proctor & Gamble, in 16 countries around the world.

Ozone is simply three oxygen molecules bonded together (O³). Because ozone is an unstable substance, Novazone’s solutions create ozone on site from the oxygen in the air. When used as a food and water purifier, ozone can control and eliminate the spread of pathogens such as bacteria and mold without using chemicals or leaving any residue. Once the ozone has done it’s job, it quickly reverts back to safe, breathable oxygen (O²).

In anticipation of an announcement that the company made yesterday, I spoke with Novazone’s CEO David Cope in San Francisco on April 20^th.

Green Options: I think a lot of people have probably heard of ozone being used to clean and purify food and water, but the EPA says that ozone is a pollutant at ground level. What makes it safe for your applications?

David Cope: Actually, that’s sort of an urban myth. If you read carefully, ozone is a proxy indicator of pollution. It itself is not pollution. When sunlight reacts with pollutants, it will create ozone as a byproduct. That [created ozone] is something that is easier to measure than sulfur dioxide, for example. So they measure ozone as a proxy indicator.

It has a very short half-life. [It breaks down into O²] literally in seconds sometimes, out in the open and depending on the temperature. So it’s actually very, very misunderstood. Ozone itself is not a pollutant. But, having said that, on average it’s healthy not to breathe in a bunch of extra ozone. OSHA has come in and has well-defined safety levels. For example, at 100 parts per billion in the air, you can have up to eight hours of continuous exposure. In none of our applications is there any ambient ozone.

GO: So it’s also safe for workers who are handling the ozone?

DC: Ozone, like all clean technologies, as a substance is not that interesting, but it’s the unique application science, the unique application of how to apply it in the right dose at the right time in a safe way, that’s interesting.

As we evolve, we come up with more clever ways to use nature to solve these problems. From the cavemen burning logs for fuel, to jet fuel and gasoline, to now, “Hey, we can use corn and we can use grass clippings to make ethanol!” Ozone is one of those things. It’s a unique way to use oxygen to solve a problem.

GO: What is ozone replacing as far as what’s typically used to purify produce? And why is ozone preferable?

DC: We can replace things like fungicides and oxidizers like chlorine that are used to disinfect produce and that get coated on produce to eliminate mold-induced decay. We can eliminate the need for those chemicals by using electrified oxygen from the air.

In the real world, most of our customers are using our products to either eliminate it or reduce chemicals. Many of them, because they’ve been using these chemicals for so long, are ratcheting down the use of their chemicals, and using less and disposing less by using our applications. Many of them, of course, are certified organic, so they use none of these chemicals.

GO: What do companies like Colgate and Proctor & Gamble use your products for?

DC: Oh it changes all the time, but literally all of their products from moist towelettes that you can’t have growing bacteria and molding once they’re wrapped up to water for Mr. Clean or Sunny Delight drinks.

GO: The term “suspended animation” has been used to describe the potential results of ozone purification. How much longer do fruits and vegetables last once they’ve been treated?

DC: I’ll give you an example: pears in the Pacific Northwest in cold storage. We have pears typically stored for six months, and we can add two months to their storage time. But more importantly, they don’t decay during that amount of time, and we actually naturally control the ripening process, so when you take the pears out of storage, they’re natural. There’s no chemical residue, no fungicides. They look beautiful. They’re not decayed, they’re nice and fresh with all the sugar content you’d expect.

GO: Do you only need to treat produce once with ozone right at the farm? Or does it get treated along the way at different places?

DC: We use what you call a low-dose, steady-state application, where the fruit will go in, and we supplement the atmosphere with parts per billion of ozone. We have specific concentrations by commodity that we’ve learned both the good and the hard way over the years to be right. We have a lot of scientists that work for our company, including ex-USDA plant pathologists, who help us figure that out.

And you’ve sort of tied in to [Novazone’s announcement]. Most of who we’ve been selling to is the grower and the packer. They harvest the produce and put it in these huge cold storage rooms and pack them. But of course there’s a whole supply chain to get little Johnny his apple. What we observed is that once these growers and packers, even if they used applications like ours, once they put it down the supply chain, they lost all control.

When you look at the food industry, what’s interesting is that domestic consumption is pretty much flat growth. The big growth is exports. And what happens with exports is that you have longer routes to market with more people handling the product, more risk of decay and over-ripening, and food safety issues. And so what we’re announcing is a new product called PurFresh that we’ve developed to move down the supply chain into the shipping segment. So now we can provide decay control, ripening control, and food safety enhancement for all produce shipped anywhere in the world.

Our PurFresh unit snaps right into an existing shipping container, and it uses the latest in Silicon Valley technology to, by commodity, generate, maintain, and record, precise dosages of ozone to control decay, control ripening, and enhance food safety.

GO: So are PurFresh units affordable to everyone along that supply chain?

DC: Well, this is interesting: we don’t actually sell the units, it’s a service. So you would say, “I’d like a PurFresh shipment.” What that would mean is that when your produce got from, say, Chile to Hong Kong 40 days later, you have no decay, you have nice, firm fruit that hasn’t ripened in transit, and you’d pay anywhere from $500 to $1500 depending on the trip premium for a PurFresh shipment.

We’ve talked about the growth of exports, but there’s another thing that’s adding fuel to that fire which is the growth of organic food. Organic is growing at 30-35% a year, compared to 2% for conventional food, so it’s the highest growing category around. You know about Wild Oats and Whole Foods and Wal-Mart trying to green themselves. What happens when you have more and more food with longer times to market, and a greater percentage of that food is organic, by definition without fungicides and pesticides, you have greater decay.

And so what happens when you have greater losses? Those losses are subsidized by price. So today consumers are paying about a 120% price premium for true, certified organic produce… With us, you could ship organic, eliminate those losses, and now get organic produce that’s the quality of conventional food and the price of conventional food without the chemicals.

GO: Something the green community has been urging for a long time is to eat local food. To not eat food that’s been shipped all the way around the world…

DC: And the people by the way against that the most is the Organic Trade Association. They hate that idea the most, which is interesting.

GO: Why do you think that is?

DC: Because I think they view that as sort of regulating the ultimate growth of organic. And by the way, this is not me expressing my opinion, this is reading what the OTA thinks: by not having the economies of scale that you get with the larger growers, you won’t be able to ever make organic truly efficiently distributed in the marketplace. It’s not my opinion, but I believe it’s their perspective.

GO: Do you see a place for ozone applications in a more localized food economy?

DC: Sure, absolutely. We have many [customers] like that, like a little grower called Kuyama is the Santa Barbara mountains that’s tiny, but probably has the premium organic Fuji and Pink Lady apples in the world. They use our product. For cold storage room applications, [our products] start very affordably for the small guy, and now they can store their organic apples for a long time pathogen free and chemical free. If they’re big enough to ship, they get enhanced decay and ripening control in transit without the use of chemicals. So I actually see it as a leveling factor for them. They can start to compete on a price basis with some of the bigger guys.

GO: Ten years from now, how will ozone be used? Am I going to have an ozone generator and applicator next to my microwave?

DC: I think you will. I think you’ll have very low levels of ozone in parts per billion in the crisper of your refrigerator. And there’s technology called “ozone destruction” so that when the ozone comes out of the refrigeration, it’s instantly destructed into pure oxygen, so there’s no risk of it getting out into the atmosphere.

GO: In response to the spinach crisis last year, you were quoted as saying, “If you use enough chlorine, you won’t have E. coli in your spinach, but people want fresh, safe food. When you get really smart, you use natural processes.” Is ozone effective enough that you believe future crises like the spinach scare can be eliminated completely?

DC: I do, I do. As a matter of fact, I won’t say who, but about a month before this crisis we were talking to the company and their concern about exposure to E. coli. We showed them a way to implement a solution, and they thought it was expensive, and then literally a month later the rug was pulled out from underneath them. I’m sure our solution looks pretty cheap now.

There’s this collision of forces taking place. On one hand, everybody wants safe food and water. In the past, the way you prevented eating E. coli was with what they call “the farmer’s little helper”: they just use a lot of chemicals. And truly, if you just use a lot of chlorine or chlorine oxide or whatever… you would not have an E. coli problem. But today, unlike ever before, we see consumers saying, “I want safe food and water, and by the way, give it to me without the use of chemicals.”

We lie at that intersection. And clean technologies lie at that intersection. An efficacious, safe solution that gives you food safety and water safety without the chemicals. That’s really what we do.

Thanks to the promise that it offers of bringing an efficient diesel sedan back into the North American market, the Mercedes-Benz E320 BLUETEC was awarded the 2007 World Green Car honors last week at the New York International Auto Show.

Mercedes is billing the E320 BLUETEC as the “cleanest diesel vehicle in the world.” Engineers incorporated a modular design concept which uses a series of components, such as an oxidation catalytic converter and a maintenance-free particulate filter, to “wash” emissions from the engine before anything leaves the tailpipe. Those features, combined with an advanced new approach to reducing nitrogen oxide emissions, make the BLUETEC’s emissions cleaner than even a standard gasoline automobile.

The BLUETEC also offers a combined 36 mpg (700 miles per tank), all the luxury Mercedes is known for, and a 208 horsepower V-6 engine that goes 0-60 in 6.6 seconds. Not bad. The last diesel vehicle I owned went 0-60 in about 6.6 minutes when the turbo still worked and with wind pushing it down a steep hill.

Though the BLUETEC’s new diesel engine technology greatly reduces emissions, Mercedes still only approves the use of B5 (5% biodiesel/95% dino-diesel) in its diesel vehicles. Unfortunately, this effectively means that Mercedes doesn’t approve of the use of biodiesel. By the time next year’s World Green Car contest rolls around, it would be a thrill to see Mercedes and other car manufacturers embrace existing and available renewable fuels along with their commitment to reducing tailpipe emissions. (If you missed Clayton’s excellent “Green Myth Busting” post on biodiesel, be sure to check it out.)

To be eligible for the World Green Car prize, vehicles must:

• Be available to the public now or in the near future, and

• Meet or exceed the requirements of California’s SULEV (Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) regulations or the US EPA’s Tier 2 standards, or

• Get at least 47.6 mpg, or

• Use advanced technology aimed at increasing the vehicle’s environmental responsibility.

The E320 beat out two other finalists, the BMW Hydrogen 7 and the 60+ mpg diesel Volkswagen Polo BlueMotion, to claim the award.

Speaking of which, from my view here in the peanut gallery, it looks to like the World Green Car jurors may have chosen the wrong car! At least, they may have chosen the wrong diesel car. The E320 BLUETEC is a fantastic automobile, and a few dozen people in the U.S. might even be able to afford one ($52,000 for the base model). The VW Polo BlueMotion diesel, on the other hand, get 25 more miles per gallon than the E320 BLUETEC and has a very reasonable MSRP of under $20,000. Of course, the downside is that VW has yet to announce when the car will be available to US consumers, if ever.

Oh Lord, maybe you can buy me a Mercedes-Benz after all…

In 1996, the X PRIZE Foundation was troubled by what it saw as 40 years of stagnation in spacecraft innovation, so they "sought to bring about a radical breakthrough in the advancement of human spaceflight." Eight years later, the foundation sparked headlines around the world when they awarded their $10 million prize to aerospace designer Burt Rutan and Microsoft's Paul Rubin for successfully launching a personal spacecraft into the earth's orbit twice in two weeks.

Now they've set their sites on spurring innovation closer to earth. We learned today from Chris Baskind at Lighter FootStep that the X PRIZE Foundation has formally announced its rules for the new Automotive X PRIZE. The multi-million dollar prize will be awarded to the teams in two categories who build cars that get at least 100 miles per gallon of gasoline (or its equivalent with other fuel types).

The first category is for a "mainstream class" automobile that can carry four or more passengers, has four or more wheels, and has the size and general capabilities that consumers are used to. There is also an "alternate class" category for a two or more person car with no size or wheel limits.

X PRIZE isn't just looking for nifty science fair projects, though. They want the winners' cars to be desirable, cost-efficient, and mass producible. Automotive X PRIZE rules (PDF) state that the winning vehicles cost "must be reasonable enough to justify sales of 10,000 units per year in the intended market(s)", and that it is doubtful that any car priced at more that $75,000-$80,000 will meet this requirement.

Other Automotive X PRIZE requirements include:

• C02 emissions per mile to be no more than 200 g/mi

• Accelerate from zero to 60 in under 12 seconds

• Have a minimum top speed of 100 mph (80 mph in the alternate class)

• Have safety equipment, air conditioning, heat, feedback gauges, lights, horns, and most other common features consumers have come to expect in a vehicle.

X PRIZE will begin accepting registration applications later this year and will announce the prize winners sometime in 2009.

Many of us are doing our best to decrease our gasoline and fossil fuel consumption. While we recognize that it is an honorable personal virtue to do so, most of us also realize that it isn't very realistic, and is often more trouble than it's really worth, to incorporate over-hyped and performance-reducing alternatives into our hectic lives.

That's why it's more important that ever to make the right choice when deciding where to fill 'er up. In today's Tip o' the Day, we at Green Options will try to make that choice easy for you. The best decision you can make is to drive on over to your local ExxonMobil.

Last year, ExxonMobil sold more gasoline in the United States than any other company. By keeping ExxonMobil America's top gasoline retailer, we'll be ensuring that more oil is in their hands than anyone else's. That's great news for the environment for many reasons. For one, by keeping ExxonMobil #1, there's a good chance that when the next inevitable oil spill happens, it will most likely happen to ExxonMobil. Because of their unparallelled expertise in dealing with these unfortunate situations, we can rest assured that ExxonMobile will be there to provide top-notch clean-up services before any real ecological damage can be done. Are we willing to concede that another company can provide the same level of quality environmental management? For the sake of the earth, we simply cannot afford to make that assumption.

You'll also know that ExxonMobile will use any profits they may make in environmentally responsible ways. Not only has ExxonMobil taken over the reigns here at Green Options, but for decades, they've been contributing heavily to some of the world's leading environmental groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Free Enterprise Education Institute, and the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise to name just a few. When you fill up at ExxonMobil, you're making a difference.

The next time you visit your local ExxonMobil station, you'll also want to sign up for your very own ExxonMobil Credit Card. When gas prices start going up like they have been lately (which the oil companies have little control over, and which are largely due to government regulations and the invisible hand of the free market), you can give your wallet a rest by using your new Exxon Card for all your gas, snack, and lottery purchases. Since you'll have a super-low interest rate and easily affordable minimum monthly payments, you won't have to worry the next time you're out of gas, out of cash, and need to make that 65 mile commute to work. Just use your card at the pump, run inside and grab a cup of coffee and a donut, and pay for all of it when you get that overdue raise a few months from now.

Depending on which of ExxonMobil's credit cards you choose to sign up for, you'll even have the chance to earn gas rebates and travel rewards! The more gas you buy, the more rewards you'll receive. Just ask your friendly ExxonMobil store clerk for more information.

As the old Iroquois Confederacy used to say, "In every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations." With that in mind, there's no doubt that it's essential, for your children and for your children's children and for your children's children's children and so on, to "put a tiger in your tank." Make ExxonMobil your pump of choice.

UPDATE: April Fools! 

It Can Be Greener!For me, a big part of living green is eating a plant-based diet. My wife decided to go vegan almost 4 years ago, and after I did my fair share of whining and nay-saying, I finally joined her a few months later. We've never looked back.

Well, okay, almost never. Giving up the meat was far easier than I ever expected. Eggs? Never liked those much anyway. Milk? Soymilk made de-dairying a breeze. Even ice cream, you ask? Let me introduce you to Turtle Mountain and Tofutti. All was well in our vegan world, except for one thing: cheese. Even vegans have a recommended daily intake of pizza!

At first, we decided we would cheat with cheese and pretend we were vegans anyway. This became harder and harder to do as we learned more and more about the environmental harm dairy farms can cause. We tried vegan soy cheese alternatives, but found that most brands (but not all) were mouth-numbingly bland, didn't melt, and/or tasted like wet cardboard marinated in that water you pour out of tofu packages. Mmmm.

Clearly, it was time for something new. I first read about cashew "cheese" when I read Eric Marcus' excellent book Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating (now available as a free e-book download!). I thought the idea of vegan cheese made from cashews sounded crazy… Crazy enough to try!

Fast forward a few years, and I've now refined my own version of a cashew cheese recipe to the point where I actually prefer it over cow cheese. It's also one of my favorite DIY projects because I get to use my favorite power tool: the food processor.

As with anything you put on your plate, cashew cheese can be made even greener by using ingredients that are grown locally and grown organically.

Vegan Cashew Cheese

Ingredients:

• 2/3 cup cashews (raw is best, roasted is still great, and try flavored cashews too)

• 1/2 cup water (or slightly more)

• 1/4 cup red bell pepper (raw or roasted)

• 1/4 small red onion (if you're cooking for a date, or more otherwise!)

• 1/4 cup yeast flakes

• 2 garlic cloves (see "red onion")

• 3 tbsp lemon juice

• 2 tbsp Bragg's Liquid Aminos (on the health food isle everywhere, or use lite soy sauce)

• 1 tbsp sesame oil

• 1 tsp sea salt (optional) if the cashews are unsalted

Put everything in a food processor and blend it until it's creamy. If it's too thick, add more water. If it's too watery, add more cashews. It should have a Cream of Wheat-like consistency, or just a bit thicker. For a pizza, spread it thinly over pizza sauce (it's very rich, so a little bit goes a long way), top it off with your favorite vegetables, and pop it in the oven. If the cashew cheese becomes golden-brown more than a few minutes before the pizza crust is done, cover the top of the pizza with foil.

This recipe is plenty for a medium-sized pizza. I like making larger batches and keeping leftovers in the fridge.

Cashew cheese is also great in quesadillas, toasted sandwiches, or just about any other dish that calls for cheese. Lactose intolerant? You're welcome.

Enjoy! If you try the recipe, be sure to let us know how it turns out.

New D.C. Ballpark. Courtesy of WashingtonNationals.comEditor's note: Red, Green and Blue will take a break this week, but that doesn't mean Ryan and Jimmy are! RG&B will return, though, in a new format that we really think you'll like…

That's right, sports fans. After a long, cold winter, the 2007 baseball season is just around the corner!

While many of you this time of year are watching the madness of 19 year-olds tossing balls at hoops, I'm spending my time examining Oakland A's box scores, listening to webcasts of Spring Training games, participating in Fantasy Baseball drafts (team name: Renewable Synergy), and, most importantly, keeping track of the latest efforts by Major League Baseball and its teams to "go green".

There's plenty of good eco-news coming from Major League front offices lately. Just last week, the San Francisco Giants announced that they're becoming the first team to install solar panels at their ballpark. (Our very own Senior Editorial Correspondent Jeff McIntire-Strasburg wrote about it at Treehugger, too.) Best of all, the Giants are installing the panels on the port walk by McCovey Cove, so every time Barry Bonds launches one of his signature "Splash Hit" home runs, the panels will be prominently displayed on Bay Area television and nationwide on highlight shows. If Barry himself really wants to help the cause, I'd suggest that he do his best to break Hank Aaron's home run record during a home game. If he did, the panels would become a big part of baseball history when the upper deck camera pans from home plate toward the water beyond the right field wall. Just make sure to pull it, Barry.

Other teams are showing some earth love, too. The Washington Nationals and Minnesota Twins are in a race to become the first team with a LEED Certified stadium. In seeking LEED recognition from the United States Green Building Council, the teams are planning to minimize and filter waste streams, design for energy efficiency, incorporate public transportation considerations into their planning, and take dozens of other eco-conscious steps.

The New York Yankees have hired the one of the same architectural firms as the Nationals (HOK) for the new Yankee Stadium project, though the Yankees haven't yet announced any plans to go green in the Bronx. They are the Evil Empire, so I'm not holding my breath. (Sorry, I'm still not over Game 3 of the 2001 playoffs. Where did Jeter come from!? Slide, Jeremy. Slide!)

There's also good news for those of us who choose to leave meat out of our plates: there's stuff for us to eat at the ballpark! Just a few years ago, we were stuck with peanuts and Crackerjacks at most stadiums. Now, you can get a veggie dog or veggie burger almost anywhere, and at the best venues, the selection is even much more exotic than that. When PETA ranked the top 10 veg-friendly ballparks last year, the Giants stole the show with such offerings as grilled vegetable kebabs, grilled veggie baguettes, and vegetarian sushi. My A's were ranked fourth, though I was disappointed when I walked into the Coliseum last April and discovered the Black Muslim Bakery no longer had their booth with lots of yummy vegan food behind home plate. The Yankees? Not on the list. They didn't even get an honorable mention. Figures. They must not have room for vegetables in their budget what with their $9 billion payroll and all.

For greeniac baseball fans, the hits just keep on coming. There are advanced recycling and waste reduction programs already in place at several stadiums, my forward-thinking Oakland A's became the first team to sell adult beverages in compostable, cornstarch-based cups, and Major League Baseball has formed a partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council to help the league green its act.

I know there are lots of other green initiatives being implemented stadiums all across the country. What have you seen at your local ballpark? What changes would you like to see?

See you at the ballpark. Enjoy the season, everyone! (Yankees fans not included.)

St. Matthew Island. Photo: Dave KleinWelcome to another edition of Uncle Ryan's story time…

Editor's note: Red, Green and Blue is Green Options' weekly take on politics and the environment from both sides of the aisle. Ryan Thibodaux represents the progressive position. Jimmy Hogan's conservative take on this issue is available here.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful uninhabited Alaskan paradise called St. Matthew Island. In 1944, the United States Coast Guard arrived and stationed 19 men on the island to aid ships and aircraft with navigation. To ensure a backup food supply for the men, the Coast Guard released 29 reindeer on the island.

When World War II ended, the Coast Guard decided to abandon the island base, leaving the reindeer with no predators and with a seemingly unlimited food supply of thick carpets of yummy lichen. For the reindeer, it was undoubtedly heaven on earth.

In fact, by the time Dave Klein of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service became the next human to step foot on the island in 1957, more than 1,300 reindeer were thriving there. They were healthy, fat, and their numbers were still growing.

Klein returned to St. Matthew again in 1963 and counted more than 6,000 reindeer this time, but all was not well in the island paradise. Klein found that food availability for the reindeer had decreased dramatically, and the toll the reindeer were taking on the health of the rest of the island's ecosystem was astounding. The reindeer themselves were smaller than they had been 6 years earlier, and Klein observed that the relative populations of males and of young reindeer were decreasing.

Klein returned once more in 1966. He was astonished to find just 42 living reindeer. The dramatic population decline was due in part to a harsh winter in 1963-64, but rapid over-consumption of resources combined with explosive population growth was also heavily to blame. By 1980, the reindeer were completely extinct on the island.

Between 1944 and 1963, the reindeer "GDP" was seemingly in great shape. They were growing, healthy, happy, well-fed, and doing their Darwinian duty of making as many of themselves as possible. They were the undisputed rulers of the island. Unfortunately, natural selection had not blessed the animals with the ability to think critically, reason inductively, or observe scientifically. If they had those abilities, they would have undoubtedly noticed that they were destroying the limited resources available to them on their small island, and were driving themselves toward an inescapable rendezvous with oblivion.

We humans, too, are living on a small island in the middle of the universe. We rule the planet with an iron fist and have lived for millenia under the assumption that the commons are limitless. Even in 2001, the Vice President of the United States could be heard saying, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

Conservation is a personal virtue. It is also a national virtue, a political virtue, and a human virtue. There's no need to stop there, either. Conservation is a fantastic basis not just for sound energy policy, but water policy, food and farm policy, waste management policy, trade policy, and, well, just about any other policy, too! Call me optimistic, but I'd like to think that humans are smarter than the reindeer of St. Matthew Island. I'm thankful that we (apparently) possess the mental abilities that could have led the reindeer to salvation.

We know that our system of industrial capitalism is adept at valuing human, financial, and manufactured capital, but arrogantly ignores the fourth essential form of capital: natural capital. We know that doing so is entirely unsustainable and in direct defiance of the laws of nature.

We recognize the limitations of GDP and other economic indicators when it comes to true economic health (not to mention quality of life, happiness, and social justice). We know that the depletion of air, water, soil, energy sources, and natural ecosystems are expenses that don't show up on balance sheets or quarterly government economic reports, but that those actions are enormously costly nonetheless.

The bookworms among us even know that Teddy Roosevelt (Republican, conservative) had it figured out a century ago:

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase it's usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very properity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

We do know all of this, don't we?

I am a liberal, and I have a confession to make: I don't like it when the government throws my money away, either. It's hard to admit, but it's just another one of those inconvenient truths. It's also exactly what I think is happening with the at least $5 billion in ethanol subsidies the federal government will hand out this year.

Now don't get me wrong: it's not farm subsidies and certainly not alternative fuel subsidies that I have a problem with. I just think that the government should encourage farmers to grow (organic and sustainable) food, not fuel. It should also support those alternative fuels and technologies that provide a demonstrable measure of increased efficiency and decreased reliance on fossil fuels. Ethanol does neither.

You may recall hearing about a report by UC Berkeley geoengineering professor Tad Patzek and Cornell ecology professor David Pimentel that concluded that it takes more energy to make ethanol than the finished ethanol actually contains:

The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs.

Those 98,000 BTUs of energy? They come mostly from fossil fuels. I'll freely admit that the results and biases of the Pimentel/Patzek report have been the subject of much debate and consternation from ethanol supporters, but it's clear that producing ethanol from corn requires lots of energy. Even with the American Coalition for Ethanol's best case estimates, it still takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to make a gallon of ethanol.

It's one reason why you'll have to forgive me for choosing not to get too giddy when American automakers start mass-producing vehicles that get 10 miles per ethanol gallon.

There are other reasons too. First, with a still-growing population, with poverty and malnutrition still a global problem, and with the unpredictable results of global climate change, do we really want to devote an increasing amount of productive farmland to growing fuel? Pimentel has aptly called government support of ethanol "subsidized food burning." If we do allow food and fuel to fight over farm acreage, we would also have to be prepared to accept the unsustainable industrialized farming of corn monocultures (in the U.S.) that would be required for ethanol to make a dent in America's fuel demands.

As a biodiesel homebrewer, I have many of the same concerns about large-scale biofuel production (and subsidies, too). The vegetable oil I use for biodiesel has already served it's purpose as fryer oil at a local restaurant. I take that waste product and turn it into fuel. Using virgin oil fresh from America's farms makes little sense to me. Even so, and even though I use some really gross, inedible waste oil, my wife and I are still planning to move beyond biodiesel and build an all-electric car later this year that will be fueled by solar energy.

With all of that said, I am still hopeful about the possibilities of the next generation of ethanol. There have been some promising advances in producing ethanol (bioethanol) from agricultural wastes, not virgin crops. These advances are indeed exciting and certainly worthy of being pursued further. Using waste to produce ethanol "would allow agricultural land to be used more efficiently and at the same time prevent competition with food supplies." (And just as bioethanol may be a solution for a more rational ethanol future, algae oil may prove to be the biofuel answer.)

Ethanol can play a role in America's clean, independent energy future, but it's important to remember that it's just one (small?) piece of the puzzle. Many of the best minds in the environmental movement have been telling us for decades that there is no one perfect answer. I think they're right. We don't need ethanol alone, or biofuels alone, or solar panels alone, or wind farms alone, or hydrogen alone, or conservation alone. We need all of them and more.