 |
| Top Rod: Ford powers Telluride's biodiesel bus down Main Street. (Gregg Segal) |
 |
|
Grease is the Word (Cont.)
MEANWHILE, WHERE'S the famous veggie bus? "It's gotta be around here somewhere!" Charris yells, weaving his truck through the throng of film-festival patrons.
"So we're driving my truck all over town in order to chase the public bus," he laughs, drumming his hands on the steering wheel. "How many potatoes had to die for this trip?"
Utopia and reality crash in other ways. The Scout's fuel heater is on the fritz, and occasionally the truck belches gray smoke. "This is not the look I'm going for," Charris says.
The Granola Ayatollah of Canola tells me he first landed in Telluride for a mushroom festival five years ago. He and his wife, Dulcie Clarkson, are caretakers on a ranch. To the paleohippies who now hold positions of power in local government, neocapitalist hippies like Charris signal the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. As Art Goodtimes, a Green Party county-commissioner-cum-poet, told me, "Telluride is really receptive to the 22nd century, so we put money into the individual visions of crazy people."
It didn't take long for the bearded rapper and his rig to attract attention. He starred in one of last year's film-fest hits, a documentary titled French Fries to Go, which showed in 80 venues across the country. And he will appear in another documentary (this one on the Galloping Goose experiment), financed by an Energy Department grant. Charris counts celebrities Daryl Hannah, Dennis Weaver, Val Kilmer, and doctor/guru Andrew Weil among the friends on his biowagon.
"I love driving around in his veggiemobile," says Weil, who met Charris at one of Telluride's 'shroom festivals.
"Charris has expanded a lot of people's horizons," affirms Hannah. "I am definitely buying a biodiesel truck just like his to use in L.A."
Finally, we spot the multicolored Galloping Goose picking up a load of Mexican service workers on the edge of town. Charris screeches to a stop and we jump on. The driver, Himay Palmer, sports navel-length blond dreadlocks and a floppy canvas hat. He loves driving the veggie bus, he says, because it makes people smile. Palmer is beaming. Charris is beaming.
But it may take a while for the aroma of cooked grease to waft over flatland America. "It's too early to write off petroleum," says David Lax, a senior environmental scientist at the American Petroleum Institute. Lax is quick to point out biodiesel's deficiencies, including cost (anywhere from 20 cents to a dollar more per gallon than petroleum), bacteria growth, and its tendency to corrode rubber gaskets and hoses. There are also supply and distribution problems.
"Biodiesel could contribute 5 percent of our diesel needs," counters K. Shaine Tyson, project manager of the Colorado-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory's diesel project. "There are real benefits that would diversify our energy supply, make us less dependent on foreign oil, reduce trade deficit, and improve the U.S. economy. It's a step in the right direction." If biodiesel and other alternative fuels contributed just 4 percent of our fuel needs, we could subtract 146 million barrels of imported crude annually. It sounds good, but Tyson concedes that this day is a long way off, unless the government, or popular sentiment, persuades more drivers to convert.
This is where Charris hopes to come in. "What we're trying to do with biodiesel is give people an experience," he says. "How can I inspire my generation to turn around their materialist notion of cool and make things that our survival depends on cool? I see biodiesel like the sixties sexual revolution, where people can have an experience and their minds are catching fire."
So biodiesel is like sex? Well, yeah. Says Charris, "It's not subtle, it excites your friends and neighbors, and it's fun!"
|
