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Customer Review
Masterpiece
I am an environmental educator at the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm community in Summertown,Tennessee and author of Shutdown: Nuclear Power on Trial (1979); Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do (1990), and most recently, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, from New Society Publishers and Amazon.Arriving in Sao Paulo, Brazil for the International Permaculture Conference in 2007, I checked the online schedule and saw that the organizers had set me down for a morning session on "making money from tree planting." Caught by surprise, I had to scramble to prepare a powerpoint and one of the ideas I thought to explore was biofuels. Conventional wisdom has it that "agrifuels" are in competition with food production and climate remediation. I dashed off an email to David Blume asking for an example of "permaculture fuels."He replied, "Well to take a page from the book. In semiarid areas where the...
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July 21, 2008
(USA) | Helpful Votes: 55 | Rating: 5
Matthew Stein, Author of When Technology Fails, BSME MIT
I am an MIT engineer (BSME MIT, 1978) and Author of When Technology Fails, and I highly recommend this book. David Blume's opus, Alcohol Can Be a Gas, is the definitive guide to weaning America from the oil habit via biofuels. In great detail, it thoroughly debunks the myth that ethanol production takes nearly as much energy to run the process as it produces (corn does, but there are other alternatives to corn based ethanol), and shows how America can thrive by sustainably growing both an abundant food supply and biofuels at the same time (they can actually feed each other synergistically!). Blume shows us the pathway to personal and national energy independence!David Blume has been an alcohol pioneer since Buckminster Fuller, one of America's foremost visionary geniuses, coached and coaxed Blume in the 70's to continue to pursue their united dream of energy independence through biofuels. Blume is a hands-on kind of guy, having been an organic farmer, inventor,...
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November 17, 2007
(Truckee, CA) | Helpful Votes: 81 | Rating: 5
THE Book to D.I.Y. or Smarten Up.
NOTE: I wrote this review in 2007, just after getting the book. I said I didn't work for the author, etc., and that was quite true...until recently. Now, in 2009, I've recently gotten a job with the author's company, helping people put ethanol conversion kits in their vehicles.It would not be honest to fail to note that fact, so there's your update. Here is the original review. I have not edited anything from its original wording.This book showed me EXACTLY WHAT TO DO. Let me start by saying that I don't work for the author, he doesn't work for me, he doesn't owe me any money, and I haven't invested in any of his companies. Onward: this book shows you exactly how to produce your own ethanol or buy it at the pump and switch your vehicles from OIL..also known as gasoline. After reading the book, I know how to make ethanol on a farm...and NOT FROM CORN... but I learned how to make ethanol right in the city. I found that the book shows you...
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November 28, 2007
| Helpful Votes: 48 | Rating: 5
Product Description
Alcohol Can Be a Gas! is the only comprehensive book ever written on alcohol fuel production and use for home and farm. Until now, it has been very difficult for farmers, contractors, alternative energy aficionados, those concerned about Peak Oil, and small-scale entrepreneurs to obtain good, accurate information on producing alcohol, or on converting vehicles to run on alcohol fuel. And with all the conflicting news stories about ethanol, the public finds it difficult to sort fact from fiction. This text, which has been reviewed by scientists around the world, is the definitive reference work on alcohol fuel.
Alcohol Can Be A Gas! contains 640 8-1/2 by 11 pages, with 514 charts, photos, and illustrations to reinforce the information-dense text. The book is geared for the nonscientific reader, but its 473 endnotes provide the technical foundation behind the accessible prose. A 700-word glossary and a 6300-entry index extend the book's usefulness.
This book is the distilled essence of the most pertinent information ever assembled in one place on alcohol fuel, the technology that can help us finally become producers of almost limitless energy, instead of extractors of finite resources. How we produce our energy from here on out will determine how we govern ourselves and how we relate to nature and the environment; it will also create a sea change in where wealth concentrates. It will determine if the future is ruled by a small number of armed dictatorships backed by military and industrial interests (a cabal author David Blume likes to refer to as MegaOilron or the Oilygarchy), or if energy, and therefore power, is held by a diffusion of democratic entities, based on their ingenuity and ability to gather a portion of their daily solar income.
As Blume writes in the Introduction to Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: "Various prospective publishers argued that putting all of this material into one large volume might scare off readers who just want a recipe book of how to make alcohol. They said, 'All this history and politics is fascinating, but aren't you afraid that including it in your how-to book would scare away some buyers?' 'Put it in a separate publication,' their marketing experts said. But in the final analysis, I decided that this book should be a complete tool kit to revolutionize our transportation energy system, combining a broad, sweeping vision with intricate detail.
"I spent four years working on this book with a small team of researchers. I traveled all over the United States in search of the most up-to-date information. In frozen South Dakota, I talked to Orrie Swayze and his farmer and VFW buddies who are taking on the oil companies, and to alcohol combustion engineer and alcohol aviation expert, Jim Behnken. I went to Decatur, Illinois, to see the largest alcohol plant in the U.S., Archer Daniels Midland's 200-million-gallon-per-year plant. My travels also took me to Brazil to document the world's largest alcohol fuel program.
"It took over 25 years to finally get this book to you. It represents the confidence of almost 30 people who collectively loaned more than $250,000 to see this project through. It's the most comprehensive book ever written about alcohol fuel. Its production has been a massive effort that has depended on the cooperation of hundreds of people who contributed both their knowledge and, more importantly, their experiences." Top to learn more