Land o' frozen lakes

This is just sweet poetry:

“All schools in the Bloomington School District (Minnesota) will be closed today after state-required biodiesel fuel clogged in school buses Thursday morning and left dozens of students stranded in frigid weather, the district said late Thursday.

Rick Kaufman, the district’s spokesman, said elements in the biodiesel fuel that turn into a gel-like substance at temperatures below 10 degrees clogged about a dozen district buses Thursday morning. Some buses weren’t able to operate at all and others experienced problems while picking up students, he said.

We had students at bus stops longer than we think is acceptable, and that’s too dangerous in these types of temperatures,” Kaufman said.”

. . .

The decision to close school today came after district officials consulted with several neighboring districts that were experiencing similar problems. Bloomington staffers tried to get a waiver to bypass the state requirement and use pure diesel fuel, but they weren’t able to do so in enough time, Kaufman said. They also decided against scheduling a two-hour delay because the temperatures weren’t expected to rise enough that the problem would be eliminated.

In 2005, a new requirement went into effect that all diesel fuel sold in Minnesota had to contain 2 percent biodiesel. Kaufman said that some school districts keep their buses in temperature-controlled garages, and that the First Student bus service, which contracts with several metro-area school districts, keeps its buses in garages or idles them through the night.

That last line is worth pointing out. When I was in junior high, we were in a newly-built building with a modern, efficient furnace. The heat was optimized to work at a comfortable 72 degrees.

But along came the twin terrors of the Middle East Oil Crisis and Jimmy Carter. Carter decreed that all public buildings should be heated to 68 degress.

So, what did my junior high do? Run the air conditioner through the winter, of course.

A perfect example of bureaucratic one-size-fits-all policy meeting the diversity of the real world.

In Bloomington, MN they are running their buses for hours overnight in order to have functioning buses in the morning--all because of a one-size-fits-all mandate. How much fuel are they burning overnight with idling buses? How much unnecessary CO2 are they pumping in to the air in order to comply with environmental political correctness?

As I said: poetic.

Update:In the comments was a link to this blog post at gas2.0. In that post is a bit from a statement by the National Biodiesel Board which includes this:

“Nothing is more important than getting kids to school safely, which is exactly why we worked proactively to get to the bottom of the district’s concerns,” said Ed Hegland, National Biodiesel Board Chairman. “A B2 blend, when properly handled, should perform just like diesel. These extremely cold temperatures provide operational challenges to diesel vehicles regardless of whether they use biodiesel blends or diesel fuel.”

The report issued Friday by Meg Corp. said, “We found that whatever was plugging the filters was not biodiesel, but a substance found in petroleum.”

Disappointingly many reporters did not do due diligence to investigate the errant claim that biodiesel caused the buses that serve the Bloomington School District to malfunction. Initial stories inaccurately assumed and reported that biodiesel was a causing factor, when the facts strongly dispute this claim

I'm still far from convinced:

1) You still have buses in more than the one district idling their engines overnight.

2) And, since the biodiesel is the only thing running through the filters, it is still the source of the problem, whether it is the "bio" part or some other element in the mix.

3) You still have the fact that this didn't seem to happen before the "bio" mandate.

4) You also have to wonder whether the gas2.0 group would have been so ready to quote from an industrial press release if it were from, say, the paper-making industry? The National Biodiesel Board is a trade organization and industrial lobbying group.

5) Then there is the "bio" component which must be mandated or subsidized, because it is not cost-effective on its own.

6) You also have the standing question of whether the "bio" component takes more energy to produce than it gives you in return. And thus at best is only a marginal source of energy, or actually a minor energy sink.