Alcoholics Unanimous Newsletter ~ January 2004

Ten months ago—as Bush announced the official end to Combat Operations in Iraq—I stood in a small room piled to the ceiling with old boxes. I decided I had to do my duty as a citizen to take action to make sure such a horrible spectacle never happened again. The vision: to redirect our national energy policy away from wars for oil and back onto clean, renewable, domestically produced Ethanol, where it had been headed in the '80s under Jimmy Carter. That seemed a long way away.

The boxes piled high in my new office hadn't been opened in 20 years since my Alcohol Can Be A Gas project had been crushed by Big Oil. That project was the culmination of years of teaching thousands of people to produce their own clean renewable auto fuel. In 1983, during the first of the Bush clan's presidencies, my PBS 10-part series and companion book Alcohol Can Be A Gas! were cancelled while on the air during its premiere in San Francisco. KQED received a call from an oil company to cancel the series and book or lose their Big Oil funding. Our series was such a threat to the Bush Sr. /oil company cabal running our country at the time that we drew the full firepower of Big Oil. I am convinced if our series and book has not been cancelled we would not be in Iraq today and more than half our auto fuel would now be produced by this country's farmers.

Although we were ahead of our time then, there is certainly no time to lose now helping citizens personally take control of our energy future; and that future is a world where renewable solar fuel is the rule and fossil fuel producers are driven out of the commanding position they now have over all of our lives.

We are now a staff of 5 and have a group of volunteers assisting in research. Abeja is the office manager and principle editorial assistant. Dave Shaw is our key computer person and literature/information researcher. This often means looking up stuff I quoted 20 years ago and now need to locate it to cite it in our footnotes. Molly is working on the massive job of scanning in the hundreds of photographs and artwork for the book as well as verifying our permissions to reproduce the art. Mike Winks has been working from his place in New York where he digs out stories and quotes for the sidebars in the book to bring the introduction up to date.