GREASY RIDER

author:
GREG MELVILLE

Non-fiction
288 pages
Algonquin Books

In his novel Greasy Rider, author Greg Melville and his good friend Iggy (a mechanically gifted, recently divorced, college buddy) take the reader for a coast-to-coast ride in their Diesel Mercedes Benz that has been professionally retrofitted to run on discarded cooking grease. Their goal: to reach California (their journey begins in Vermont—go figure) without filling-up on unleaded at any point in time. According to the author, this has never been accomplished, making their grease trek supposedly all the more significant and attention worthy. Along the way to the eco-record books, Greg and Iggy suffer a few minor technical problems (filters, hoses and such), lose patience with each other, and brief us on the current status of alternative energy sources in the U.S.A. such as: Solar Power, Wind Energy, Bio-Diesel, and those companies that are at the forefront of this movement.

Melville, a travel journalist by trade, makes some strong cases for the government to begin regulating the private sector as they do within their own branches. As a case in point, he visits Fort Knox and explains how by re-engineering their heating and cooling, they have cut their costs (and ultimately our tax dollars) by roughly thirty per cent. He also makes stops at private industry such as Wal-Mart and Google, the latter a pioneer in the green movement. These stops are really more PR jaunts than investigative journalism, and we come away with little more than anecdotal insights.

As the automotive industry continues to lag behind consumer demand for fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel vehicles, it is great to find that there are those among us who seek to create change as opposed to asking corporations to deliver us from our addiction to foreign oil. The problem here is that he barely scratches the surface of the problem and offers too few solutions. Take away the vehicle’s fuel of choice and this is another buddy road-trip book. It feels less than monumental an undertaking.

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