Posted on 09/26/2005 7:39:01 AM PDT by SmithL
It began benignly enough as an assignment for the 15 freshmen in Tad Patzek's UC Berkeley college seminar class. But it soon mushroomed into something much larger.
Patzek found himself in the national spotlight as his scientific paper published in June touched raw nerves throughout the nation's energy and farm industries. Gas prices were climbing higher; Congress was in the midst of drafting an energy policy; and the article criticized one possible solution -- making ethanol fuel from corn.
Hundreds of newspapers wrote about the publication. E-mails flooded Patzek's in-box. People yelled at him over the phone. He was invited to the National Press Club in Washington to debate the issue and to Chicago to speak to investors.
Patzek and David Pimentel, a Cornell scientist who had been a lone public voice against corn ethanol for more than 30 years, argued that corn ethanol did the environment more harm than good. Growing corn, fertilizing the fields, transporting it to the factories and then out to where it was needed took more energy than the resulting ethanol would ultimately generate, they said.
Detractors, including corn growers, federal government researchers and other academics, took offense at Patzek's stance. They saw ethanol as an environment-friendly way of reducing the nation's dependence on foreign fossil fuels.
Opponents pointed to Patzek's oil industry days, saying he had ulterior motives. They said he and Pimentel knew nothing about agriculture and had relied on irrelevant data. They even criticized the premise of Patzek's arguments, which were based on the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
Patzek, 52, took the criticisms in stride. He is a mostly good-humored man who possesses an unflappable, but not pretentious, confidence in his intellect. And having grown up in post-World War II Poland under the Communist regime, he already knew well the role of rebel.
Patzek's rebellious roots extend at least as far back as his grandfather, a Polish officer during World War II who spent five years in a German concentration camp. To stave off the boredom and despair that permeated the camp, Patzek's grandfather, a physicist, taught physics to anyone who would listen, and organized a theater.
In postwar Poland, Patzek's father also rebelled. He joined a student militia group when the Russian army liberated the town of Gliwice where he was studying at the university. When he fired on Russian soldiers threatening some women, he was expelled, although later allowed to return. He also refused to join the Communist party, though the choice meant he could not teach despite a doctorate in chemical engineering.
As a young boy, his father continually quizzed Patzek, giving him hypothetical situations, then asking him to decide between right and wrong.
In high school, Patzek took his education into his own hands. He liked learning on his own better than at school and began staying home three of six days to study. When his teachers got wind of his program, they agreed to it, but only if he met higher standards than the other students.
Patzek rebelled against Communism in high school and college. His views were so well-known that like his father he was forbidden to teach at Silesian Technical University after graduating with a master's degree. Communist officials told him he would "deprive the Polish youth of their innocence."
While a graduate student at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Patzek, then 26, helped organize the first Solidarity chapter at the chemical engineering center -- before it was legal to do so.
If the foundation of his defiance was laid in Poland, so too was a fierce loyalty to the environment. His family's house lay on the edge of fields and forest that stretched as far as the eye could see. Returning for a visit to Poland in 1991 after 10 years in the United States, he saw the destruction wrought by industrialization. Large homes had replaced the fields. Gone were the swamp, creeks, frogs and storks.
"It was affirmation of what I already knew," he said. "That we humans do a lot of bad things to the environment."
Patzek's life is nearly consumed by his work. "He is a workaholic, that's for sure," said his wife of 25 years, Joanna.
When not at work, he's often reading, late at night and during meals. He even reads while they watch a movie, though that doesn't stop him from commenting, she said. Typical books have titles such as "Carbon-Nitrogen-Sulfur, the Environmental Science of Dirty Water," "The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World" and the three-part volume of "A History of Common Human Delusions."
At parties and at the dinner table, he's always teaching or prompting discussions around "what we should and shouldn't do," Joanna Patzek said. Current topics include saving water with shorter showers, dangerous chemicals in cosmetics and, of course, ethanol.
In his personal life, Patzek thinks somewhat obsessively about how to be a good citizen to the environment. During the summer, he rides his bike a few times a week to UC Berkeley from the Oakland hills. He drives his Nissan Altima, which gets 34 miles per gallon, only about 8,000 miles a year. Walks on the beach were never just that; he, his wife and their three grown children are always armed with bags to pick up trash. Insulating his house is an ongoing project, and he plans to try solar panels on the roof.
But until he joined the corn ethanol debate, Patzek's professional work didn't touch directly on environmental concerns. Instead, he focused on energy, working for seven years at Shell Development Co. His contribution to society was to help provide the fossil fuels it needed, he told himself.
By the time he left Shell, his philosophical views had changed. "I realized that society will never have enough energy," Patzek said. "We are incurable addicts. Our national policy is to satisfy the addict."
As a professor at UC Berkeley, he continued research that looked at how to efficiently extract fossil fuels. But he was bothered by the increasing environmental damage done as the oil fields became depleted. He began thinking about how he as a scientist could take a bigger, more relevant and more holistic approach to society's problems.
The ethanol corn debate may have thrust him into just that. What started almost as a whim after reading a book by Pimentel has become much larger. Patzek is now planning a center at UC Berkeley to take a careful look at all energy sources, including fossil fuels, biofuels like ethanol, solar and nuclear. He wants scientists to devise a common framework for evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of each. Such a forum is necessary to inform U.S. policy, he said.
Patzek's opponents on the other side of the corn ethanol discussion have similar concerns about the diminishing supply of fossil fuels.
But to hear them debate one can't help but wonder whether either hears anything the other says. Each accuses the other of misrepresenting, misusing and excluding data, as well as not understanding the full scope of the problem. And while supporters argue corn ethanol can be part of the energy solution, Patzek argues vehemently that it cannot.
"However you look at it, this is a rather inefficient way of concentrating solar energy into fuel," he said. It takes more energy to make ethanol than what is produced, he said.
In addition, he argues that ultimately, ethanol can contribute only a single-digit portion of the nation's fuel. Yet it causes environmental damage with pesticides and fertilizers, and co-opts land that could otherwise be dedicated to food.
There is no magic bullet to replace fossil fuels, Patzek said. He says the United States drastically needs to reduce its energy use. Fuel efficiency standards need to rise. People must commute less by living closer to work. Food should be produced locally, instead of shipped and trucked from far-away places.
Patzek's harshest critics in the corn ethanol debate say he is ignorant and arrogant.
"I think he needs to do his homework, spend some time actually learning things before he talks about them," said Bruce Dale, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University.
Friendlier opponents, like Rick Tolman, CEO of the National Corn Growers Association, say Patzek has no practical knowledge of farms or a typical ethanol production plant. Nonetheless, Patzek earned Tolman's respect at the National Press Club debate when he remained composed and friendly even when eight people consecutively stood up to shoot his logic down.
Then there are those who say they want to continue the conversation.
"Patzek's point is the same as ours," said John Sheehan, a senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. "The size of the energy problem is huge."
For the sake of the country, the differences between the two sides should be worked out, Sheehan said.
"It has to be worked out," he said. "Because this country has to make rational choices."
Reach Judy Silber at 925-977-8507 or jsilber@cctimes.com.
But your complaint wasn't about the fuel efficiency requirements.
Why should people be driving big trucks and SUVs that get 10 mpg when they could be driving full sized cars (like a camry or accord) that gets 30 mpg?
Your post #8
It was on WHO was driving those cars. And my point is that the people who drive those cars are the people who believe it is worth the extra cost. We have two SUV in my family. Driving in Alaskan mountains where 8~12" of snow overnight happens every year, I take offence to people who say I should risk my life or that of my family driving some compact car.
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.
- Hillary
Conservation is a false answer to this problem. You cannot conserve your way to plenty. The only true solution is to find a replacement for the energy supply; conservation only stretches the current supply.
The hot ticket is to replace oil use in stationary energy applications. Why are we burning oil (or coal or natural gas, for that matter) to heat homes in the nuclear age? Whatever happened to geothermal plants? Tidal generators?
hey, hendrix knows better than you!
You'll drive your yugo in alaska and you'll like it!
Corn is well under $2.00/bushel, which means the gov't is already subsidizing its production, as well as subsidizing the production of corn-based ethanol. And sugar cane-based ethanol is still cheaper! Even if ethanol makes sense, making it from corn doesn't seem to.
"I am not an environmental wacko, but it makes no sense for so many people to be driving vehicles that get such bad gas mileage and put out so much pollution."
You may want to get a new mirror, I think your current one is defective.
Today's big honking SUVs are much cleaner than the cars of the 1970s.
Fuel efficiency standards, as well as other government-imposed regulations, are doing more harm than good because they give a false sense of security.
The price of gas rises and falls on the overall world demand for fuel.
Only a very few years ago, the price of oil fell into single digits when Asia went into recession, the so-called "Asian Flu" of the late nineties.
It is being driven above 50 by the reverse of that dynamic, as the Asian economy becomes more dynamic. When a billion Chinese, and a billion Indians, and a billion others in another handful of Asian nations become more economically active, it has a very direct effect on the price of not only oil, but steel and concrete as well.
Drive your SUV all you want, leave it running all night while you sleep, compared to what is happening in the rest of the world it makes no difference at all. None. Its like worrying about the effect your refrigerator has on global warming. You can worry about it if you want to, but you're wasting your worry-quota on something that makes no difference.
So in other words, he's for the government telling people what to drive, where to live, what jobs to hold, and what food they may buy. He's turned in to one of the Communists he once rebelled against.
Because they want to and because they can afford it. I see no problem with this in a free market economy. However, they'll be suffering when gas gets expensive, not me. That's their choice, and I'll support their right to that choice, but I'll just laugh when they start bitching that gas costs them $150 a week.
He's not hated by all greens. Note the calls for cutting back energy consumption. There's no conditionals, or tempering accompanying his implied call for "Earth first" principles. The author(s) of the article also speak of this guy from Berkley and another one from Cornell as the only 2 in the whole world that know better. That's not the case at all.
Yeah, we should be cheering for the tax-dollar subsidized ethanol industry!
And then we can throw in a cheer for the vote buying scheme that both parties take part in for the 'corn vote'.
Switchgrass is better than corn.
IIRC, the Explorer is based on the F-150, and therefore should have horrible crash test results prior to the 2005 model year (when they redesigned the F-150, possibly the Explorer too). It's not just size that matters, but superior engineering.
You can't burn coal in your automobile, but you can use it to distill ethanol.
BTU's are a great way to measure the ability of a given fuel to boil water - they're less accurate as a way to measure the amount of power available to drive a piston.
While an engine optimized for gasoline will suffer poorer mileage when fueled with ethanol, an engine optimized for ethanol (generally a higher compression ratio and advanced spark) suffers lass of a mileage drop and has more power available.
"Because they want to and because they can afford it. I see no problem with this in a free market economy. However, they'll be suffering when gas gets expensive, not me. That's their choice, and I'll support their right to that choice, but I'll just laugh when they start bitching that gas costs them $150 a week."
That may be how we get a correction of this problem--through the market. It has happened before.
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