Bio-Diesel and Occidental: Is it Possible?

I was watching television recently and in the middle of the Super Bowl a commercial for GM cars came on. It did not start out like a normal car commercial. It began by talking about how people should help to protect the environment by using renewable resources like bio-diesel fuel. I thought that this was a great commercial at first because we have been talking about using bio-diesel in many of the classes that I am taking. Then the commercial started talking about how GM is now making cars that use bio-diesel fuel rather than regular gasoline and how if people really wanted to protect the environment then they should all go out and buy one of these new GM cars. It bothered me that the commercial failed to inform people that all cars that are functioning right now are capable of using bio-diesel. All that a car needs is a few adjustments in the engine and to be cleaned out so that the two types of fuel do not mix. It then led me to think about how it was GM that helped to push us towards massive car use in this country by taking over many of the public transportation systems in major cities and eventually shutting them down or making them so awful that it would be more convenient for people to buy cars and use those as the major mode of transportation.

In our society today, many people use cars just to go down the street to the grocery store when it would be just as easy to walk there and back. It happens here on the Occidental Campus as well. Many people ask campus safety to take them from one side of campus to the other for many reasons. They may ask for a ride because they do not feel safe walking on the campus when it is dark, or they may just be too darn lazy. Whether or not people need the transportation, the fact is, much fuel and energy is used to go back and forth across campus. If Occidental could alter the cars and vans that it owns to become bio-diesel cars, it would make this campus not only more environmentally friendly, it would be better for the college economically as well. As gas prices continue to rise, and the threat of running out of these precious natural resources looms, the need to move to other forms of energy is becoming more urgent. To move to the use of bio-diesel on the Occidental Campus would not only indicate that Oxy is serious about campus greening but also the environment of the world in general.