David Blume’s Clean Homegrown Energy

We know the solution to fossil fuel dependency. With permaculture design and practices, we can reverse global warming. We can convert our energy use from Earth-destroying fossil fuels to ecological, local-scale alcohol fuel. Since alcohol is made from plants, its production takes carbon dioxide out of the air, sequestering it, with the result that it reverses the greenhouse effect (while potentially vastly improving the soil).

Studies show that in a permaculturally designed mixed-crop alcohol fuel production system, the amount of greenhouse gases removed from the atmosphere by plants—and then exuded by plant roots into the soil as sugar—can be 13 times what is emitted by processing the crops and burning the alcohol in our cars.

We can make alcohol fuel using no nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, or herbicides; using machinery powered only by clean-burning fuels; and using almost no nonrenewable energy sources to power the fuel plant. It’s going on right now: India runs its plants using self-produced methane boilers/generators, while Brazilian alcohol plants actually generate large surpluses of electricity from their biomass-fueled boilers. That’s the bar we need to set for ourselves in producing fuel.

And since permaculture should be an integral part of the alcohol fuel revolution, no easy-to-dismiss studies of annual, monocultural crops such as corn are acceptable here. Those arguments belong to another era, and we show farmers how to make monoculture obsolete by switching to permaculturally based organic farming.

The bottom line is that oil is energy-negative, nonrenewable, and running out. Alcohol in America is already energy-positive, even when using coal or natural gas for process heat, and will become dramatically positive in the immediate future, running on its own renewable process energy.