Vegetable Oil Road Trip

In this (somewhat) weekly column, I want to highlight the fact that what we’re doing here is by no means a completely original act: we stand on the shoulders of giants. And sometimes pirates. Sometimes, we also stand on the shoulders of normal people, but not if we can at all help it.

This week: the people who have made vegetable oil road trips before us.

We’re not the first attempt at a cross-country trip on vegetable oil. Far from it.

The begs the question: why do it?

We are doing this because it still needs doing. This country is still addicted to oil. Most people have no idea that it’s possible to run a car on something other than petroleum. We’re still harming our environment and sending money to tyrants when we could be growing our own fuel. This isn’t a road trip, it’s a pilgrimage. We’re doing this to expose as many people to a simple, viral idea: you could be driving on waste vegetable oil instead of petroleum. Just by driving down the road, we are illustrating the possibility that anyone else can.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you know of a trip I’m neglecting to mention (it must have a homepage on the web), please leave a comment below.

First up are the busses:

The Big Green Bus
An ongoing student project where students from Dartmouth take an annual road trip in a veggie powered (green) schoolbus.

“We are a group of Dartmouth students committed to promoting the use of sustainable energy through education and example. On a school bus converted to run on used vegetable oil, we are traveling around the country fostering awareness about current global energy issues and creating dialogue about tangible solutions to those problems.”

Project BioBus
A 2004 trip where 12 Middlebury College students visited 21 cities in 90 days to spread biofuel awareness in a converted school bus.

Biotour
A group of artists and musicians touring around the country in (gasp) an old school bus. They will be traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast along a Northern Route this spring (if you draw their tour on the same map as our tour, you get a cool ring around America).

“BioTour seeks to build and invigorate a broad grassroots sustainable energy movement within the United States. BioTour will encourage Americans to exert political pressure for wider implementation of existing sustainable energy technologies and the push for the development of new technologies. The BioTour project will directly reach thousands and indirectly reach millions of people with crucial information on global climate change, the dangers of fossil fuels, how to use sustainable energy in their everyday lives, and how to become part of a movement to end American dependence on fossil fuels.

BioTour will bring people together for exploration and celebration.”

And now, the Mercedes Benz Tours, more personal, more risky, more lonely.

Improbability Drive 2005
Chronicles the current head of the National VegOil Board’s trip across America to purchase a Benz in California, and drive it back to the East Coast in one piece, alone. It’s a pretty cool story (and a sweet looking Benz).

The Ultimate Ball Park Tour
This guy drove around the country in a lime green Benz and toured baseball stadiums. Unfortunately, the story seems to end about halfway through. Does anyone out there know what happened? Did he give up? Did the car die?

…and of course there are celebrities in the act too…
Neil Young’s Vegetable oil powered tour busses

Willie Nelson’s personal brand of Biodiesel

I want to highlight the fact that what we’re doing here is by no means a completely original act: we stand on the shoulders of giants. And sometimes pirates. Sometimes, we also stand on the shoulders of normal people, but not if we can at all help it.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to highlight some of the shoulders upon which we stand. Most will be technical, but others will be literary, artistic, and philosophical. It’s our way of saying thanks to the many people who (knowingly or unknowingly) help and inspire us.

This week: computers, software, and general geekiness.

Google They Do Everything.
I’m certain they are blissfully unaware of this, but Google plays a huge part in our quest to publish and share information, gain sponsors, communicate, and do anything useful. Heck, they even let us use their bandwidth! We use Google maps for our mapping page (click the map picture and you’ll see a dynamic map of our planned route). Obviously we use blogger (owned by Google) for this blog, youTube (again, owned by Google) to distribute our videos (by the way: more to come), but we also use Google docs to organize our thoughts. This post was actually composed using Google notebook, and I do much of my research with Google’s RSS reader. I installed SketchUp just because they own it. In other words, I heart Google.

NVU Website Editor
I’m a true-blue geek, but I hate HTML coding – it’s tedious, slow, and a pain in the arse. There, I said it. Thanks then, to the wonderful folks who created NVU, a free, open-source WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor that made slapping our website together a breeze. If they would make a WYSIWYG CSS editor, I’d be in heaven. Hint, hint.

Apple Computers
For making the svelte 12″ powerbook I’m using right this instant, and for making iMovie – the best software experience I’ve had in recent memory.

GIMP Image Manipulation
The GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s like photoshop, only it’s free, open source, and it is easier to use when dealing with the internet. Need that picture to be 100×200 pixels? No problem for the GIMP.

NeoOffice Office Suite
When I need more powerful text formatting, or image generation, I use NeoOffice, the Mac OS port of OpenOffice.org. It looks great, and again, is free and open source.

Firefox Web Browser
It’s free, secure, and generally a better internet experience than anything else out there. Why aren’t you using this? Actually, if the website logs are to be believed, the vast majority of you are already using Firefox, so you know how awesome this thing is.