The Journey: Food vs Fuel, Grain-Based Fuels, a Trip to Mount Rushmore, and the Law of Persistence

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... To endure, a system must embed persistence deep into its structure, its rituals, its resilience, and its memory, these giants looking out over the Black Hills, they embody that. And I draw inspiration from them because I’ve been dyspeptic for some time about the debate of food vs. fuel. It’s lingered for decades, pitting the ethical imperative to feed humanity against the energy demands of our modern world. Both sides hurl data, suspicion, and moral outrage like artillery at Iow Jima—yet neither side seems to gain ground.

I’d like so much to heal that divide, bring America, and the wider world, to a sense of harmony in the opportunities of bioeconomy, but I know there is work to do. I don’t think the bioeconomy has yet discovered who it will serve, or how to ground itself in the concept of service. Mature systems don’t just serve themselves. A river that does not connect to the rain will run dry.

A mature biofuels system would regulate surplus, diversify farm income, maintain soil health, and stabilize energy supply. Until then, the fuel is just optional volume—not resilience.

Conventional crop-based fuels remain invisible, bureaucratic. In America, few know anything about the ethanol in their tank—let alone ritualize its use, or think of it as a part of their lives. Think of Brazil, every day you dial in your choice, ethanol or gasoline at the pump. It’s a ritual, not a regulation. Until biofuels live in language, they will remain immature, at risk.

Let’s ask ourselves, honestly, “Can the system survive if carbon support vanishes?

It is the narrative that biofuels have yet to build — though there have been efforts, most of these efforts have been aimed at “proving” feasibility, affordability, sustainability, availability, reliability.

It makes me wonder about things that don’t make sense but last, and things that make sense and don’t last. Perhaps the problem isn’t with the people. Perhaps it’s not even with the data. Perhaps it’s the lens we people see the data through.

That’s why, over hundreds if not thousands of sheets of paper, over many years, I went deeper into first principles to understand risk. I’ve read so many policy papers and national assessments, I could wallpaper a library with them, all of them built by intelligent people looking at hard data — with the old lens.

So, I built a new one. Starting with quantum mechanics and relativity, working a common framework until I could derive the laws of thermodynamics from the Law of Persistence — not because the laws of thermodynamics needed to be confirmed, but because, I thought, there ought to be a system that explains why those laws exist, why there is this thing, this physical thing, called persistence, and we see it in life, economics, technology, signal, and memory.

A GTESI Diagnostic of Crop-Based Fuels

The General Theory of Emergent Systemic Intelligence (GTESI) offers a new way of seeing systems—not just as markets or ethical battlegrounds, but as living, adaptive structures. GTESI doesn’t ask, Is it efficient? Is it fair?

It asks: Will this system persist when the environment changes? Does it manage entropy—not just energy? Does it carry enough symbolic and structural depth to survive collapse?

Through this lens, conventional crop-based biofuels reveal themselves not as good or bad— but as incomplete. Visible, yes. But not yet durable. Here’s what I see through my GTESI lens.

EED (Entropy Export Differential — Net reduction of disorder under stress)

Oh, I know that someone will say, well, people will not choose an alternative to gasoline until they have a cheaper alternative. People will not choose biofuels until they are available at less than the lifting cost of petroleum, not the current price. But, explain iPhones to me. Explain baseball tickets.

Demand is not a function of price — markets are a function of price. Demand is a function of narrative. It’s time for narrative: community fuels are powerful fuels, but only if they are truly community fuels. Made with Iowa corn using Chinese steel, Texan engineering, European catalysts, New York money, sold into Canada — it’s not an impossible story to tell, but it’s a story of a broader community that does not yet believe itself to be a community, as we see when the threat of a trade war made enemies out of friends. READ MORE