The San Francisco Citizen

Here’s what you’ll see tooling around San Francisco’s Mission District these days - an aging Mercedes Benz 300 SD sedan that’s been converted by Oakland’s Veg Rev to run on vegetable oil in a process called “vehicle fuel reassignment.”

So instead of inky diesel soot covering the back of this OM617 W126, we see vegetable oil. See the conversion process courtesy of this nifty video. (But just ignore a laughable MTV-style intro from the abysmal Current TV network.) The car shown can’t accelerate quickly, but in many ways is superior to (and costs about $115,000 less than) the quick, all-electric Tesla Roadster.

Of course the best way to spread the word about veggie power is to fashion a bumper sticker to make Toyota Prius owners feel bad:

Click to enlarge.

“YOUR NEW HYBRID USES GAS - HA!”

From Teh Mission with love…

According to the airlines, via that lapdog of the Air Transport Association of America known as Stop Oil Speculation Now, there is a:

…force at work that, like gravity, is invisible yet powerful. This force is rampant speculation. Every time you buy products such as food or gas, you are impacted by unregulated, secretive and often foreign commodities futures markets. Speculators in these markets are increasingly buying and selling commodities such as oil even though they have no intention of using the product.

First of all, who wrote this copy? Bob Shrum? Second of all, Hillary Clinton didn’t intend to use all that sugar and eat those cows when she speculated in the commodities markets and nobody complained about that, right? Speculation is now supposed to be a bad thing?

Our corporate overlords are worried:

Could there be a more likely explanation for high prices for avgas? CBS News offers a few. Is it possible Bill O’Reilly might be wrong? Or, maybe all this talk of speculation being the cause of high fuel prices is just a Nixonian Fallacy.

Check it out and decide for yourself. Maybe you’ll agree that both you and the airlines are being victimized by those invisible, powerful, secretive, foreign forces.

The airlines have to come up with something to explain all those fees and surcharges, right?

I shift the blame
To the worm in the bottle
I shift the blame
To anyone standing before me

This was the scene last night at the Atlantic Richfield on Fell and Divisadero last night. “No Gas.” Why’s that? Who knows. Maybe it’s a temporary shutdown at this particular station for an innocuous reason. Maybe.

Or, maybe it’s a signal to go out and buy all that you can lay your hands on. That was such a good strategy a few months back when we had that “rice shortage“. Wasn’t it?

These days, it’s not just Peak Oil or Peak Rice, it’s Peak Everything. Oh noes! Panic, panic panic!

Oh well. The upside to all this is that the Fell Street bike lane, formerly crowded with cars sitting in line for ARCO gas (check the photo from MapJack at “1160 Fell St, San Francisco, CA 94117“), is now free for bikes to use 24/7. So  the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition can count another victory. Plus the owner of the Spirit station across the street must be happy.

Hurray!  

The Ice Age is coming, the sun zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear…