Energy and Liberty: A Potent Combination

By Carl Milsted, Jr. Ph.D

In 2001 I was the campaign chair of the "Asheville Freedom Team:" Dave Goree for Mayor, Kevin Rollins and Bernard Carman for City Council. It was quite an experience: knocking on hundreds of doors, handing out fliers at public events, crafting the message, trying to get the candidates to pose properly for photographs…

The campaign was a failure in terms of vote totals. But many important lessons were learned, such as group campaigns do not work, door-knocking is inefficient, and too many messages at one time means none of the messages get out. But perhaps the most profound lesson learned was from door-knocking: nearly every person below the age of 30 identified herself as an environmentalist. Perhaps this is simply a reflection of Asheville values, or perhaps this is because the young know that they are going to be alive in the future after decades of continued environmental destruction.

Libertarians have always had powerful ideas on how to protect the environment. With property rights in parts of the oceans, semi-wild aquaculture could provide enough protein for the world’s billions while protecting the wild fisheries from over harvesting. Legalization of hemp would provide a bountiful supply of cellulose for clothing, paper and fuel. An end to agricultural subsidies would cause more land to revert to a wild state.

Unfortunately, Libertarians have generally sold these ideas as beneficial side-effects of liberty instead of as being the quickest ways to clean up the environment and protect endangered species. Further, many freedom lovers are hostile to environmentalists because the environmentalists have called for unnecessary sacrifices of freedom and prosperity.

To remedy the situation, I began writing a book on free market environmentalism, and then when I realized that I didn’t have time to finish it, I switched to creating holisticpolitics.org. Meanwhile, Dave Goree has taken a different, but parallel approach.

Walking the Walk

Whenever I hear someone complaining about some corporation making "excess profits" I tell them to join the fun; go into that business and provide more competition. If the profits are truly excessive, then there is an opening for a competitor waiting to be exploited. Admittedly, this is easier said than done. And many times excessive profits come from artificial protections from competition provided by bad laws and regulations.

But the principle holds: in many cases the solution to a problem is not to change the law, but to create a new business to fix the problem. This is the approach Dave Goree has taken. During the 2001 campaign, two of the issues were the money losses of the city’s aging Civic Center, and the under the table deal by which the city closed down the local speedway for the benefit of the Biltmore Estate. Dave decided to combine these issues with the issue of clean air and has begun starting an indoor kart racing league to run inside the old Civic Center. This is truly an example of holistic thinking!

1. Bringing racing back to Asheville will make the racing fans happy.
2. A successful sporting event inside the Civic Center will reduce the amount of money the city loses on it.
3. An indoor racing league would require clean, alternative fuels such as ethanol in order to be safely held indoors. Racing is the best way to refine automotive technology before bringing it to market. The wear and tear of pushing a motor to its limits can simulate years of normal use.
Currently, the Asheville Indoor Motorsports League is still in the formative stages. There is capital to acquire and red tape to get through.

This year, Dave is running for City Council. And once again, he is applying holistic thinking based on the 2001 election lessons. Dave is also the Ballot Access Director of the Libertarian Party of North Carolina, and this year he has worked with the Green Party to lobby for fair ballot access laws (NC laws are among the worst in the nation). In the process he took an interest in a Volkswagen Diesel Rabbit that the Greens had converted to run on heated vegetable oil. Restaurants dispose of thousands of gallons of vegetable oil from their deep fryers each year. They have to pay to get rid of it. With some filtering and pre-heating, this waste product can be burned inside of diesel engines.

Well, this seemed like a great campaign gimmick: convert an old Mercedes-Benz diesel to run on heated vegetable oil, put campaign stickers on it and drive it around. Alas, the campaign didn’t have the money to get even a used clunker (Libertarians are not Rich Republicans!) and the question of ownership after the campaign raised a red flag. So I suggested having the nascent racing league own the car to promote the league afterwards. Then a couple hours later Dave decides to make a full time business out of doing heated vegetable oil conversions, applying his racing experience to provide better quality systems than those currently on the market.

And the idea keeps growing. The city of Asheville buys roughly as many gallons of diesel fuel as the local restaurants dispose of vegetable oil. We have an opportunity to save the taxpayers money, save the restaurant owners money, and reduce air pollution. The building of conversion kits for diesel to vegetable oil and the alternative energy indoor racing league could be the beginning of turning Asheville into a center of environmental and alternative energy technology, just as Silicon Valley is a center of computer technology. This is particularly important, as the environmental and business communities have been at war with each other, resulting in the loss of good jobs in the area.

So here we see a powerful example of holistic politics in action. By thinking about multiple problems at once, Dave Goree is working on building a coalition of political factions that currently hate each other, bringing good jobs to Asheville, cleaning up the air, bring racing back to town, and creating profitable businesses for himself.