The first day of the Festival for the Eno here in Durham was fun and seemed like a great success. The festival was packed and gaggles of children were frolicking in the cool waters of the river. Throngs of people were checking out the crafts stands and info booths around the five stages in the West Point on the Eno park.

I spent most of the day, from 10 to 4, working at the info booth of Piedmont Biofuels, promoting the use of biodiesel and renewable fuels in general. We were very busy all day, answering many questions from “what’s biodiesel?” to “what do you do with the glycerol?” We signed up many people for our email lists and many people took brochures and wrote down website addresses for more reading up on biofuels. It was really awesome to see all this interest and discussion about energy independence, total economic cost of petroleum versus biofuels, public health and policy issues and so forth.

The experience was energizing and fun, but I also have a bit of sore throat this evening from all the talking. The booth has a great location, right next to one of the stages and a lot of people who are watching the performances end up taking a look at what the heck this biodiesel stuff is a all about. The downside of the location is that the base noise levels are rather loud and you have to speak rather forcefully to make your point.

Another challenge, I found, was to talk about biodiesel with people who don’t own a diesel vehicle. I felt it was really bad to leave the gasoline users with a shrug: “sorry, but you need a diesel vehicle.” If they are not in the market for a new vehicle they get “off the hook.” Not good. I found myself changing my pitch to asking these folks to lobby their school boards to adopt biodiesel in school buses. This is where I personally see some of the greatest potential and greatest urgency for the adoption of pure biodiesel because it has a direct impact of the health of millions of school children. For most children, the diesel fumes on school buses are the single greatest exposure to carcinogens. Adopting pure biodiesel for school buses can produce dramatic improvements of the air quality inside the buses because biodiesel burns much cleaner than petro-diesel.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Biodiesel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.