Going green? Not so fast

With a relatively inexpensive conversion, diesel engines can be made to run on many things other than petroleum distillates. Including ... used french-fry grease.

Advocates say more than 250,000 Americans are now running their vehicles on cooking oil, available for as little as a dollar a gallon.

Price isn't the only object, though. Fans of the alternative fuel point out it's less polluting and helps reduce our dependence on imported petroleum.

The biggest concentration of such alternative oil users is in California, which doesn't come as much of as shock, given the way the Golden State often leads the way -- for good or ill -- in trendy "green" initiatives.

Dave Eck, for instance, is a mechanic in Half Moon Bay who had attracted some attention by running his entire fleet of vehicles on used fryer grease from a local chowder house. So when officials from the state capital came calling, the Los Angeles Times reported last week, Mr. Eck understandably expected he might get some kind of little certificate for his good environmental citizenship, or maybe a request to share some of his expertise with others.

Nope. Sacramento was getting in touch to threaten Mr. Eck with huge fines if he didn't quickly comply with regulations requiring him to apply for a "diesel fuel supplier's license," under which he'd be obliged to report quarterly how many of gallons grease he burns, paying a tax on each gallon.

After all, California state taxmen insist, biofuel drivers need to be assessed a tax to pay for the upkeep on California's roads the same as anyone else OK. Mr. Eck was willing to go along with that.

But it didn't end there. Oh no. Mr. Eck was also informed he needs permission from the state Air Resources Board to burn his fat -- to burn pretty much anything, actually -- as well as a license from the state Meat and Poultry Inspection Branch -- at $75 to $300 -- to haul away the used fryer grease in the first place. And at least $1 million in liability insurance coverage, in case he should ever spill any of the stuff.

Trying to "get legal" to use the waste oil for fuel is so complex in California that a 26-year-old student from Monrovia named Matthew Tiffany, who fuels his own 1981 diesel Mercedes with fryer grease from a local restaurant, saw a business opportunity. Mr. Tiffany set up a cooperative called the Good Earth Grease Haulers, designed to help some 20 other veggie oil drivers get right with the law.

But he failed. Good Earth Grease Haulers collapsed after Mr. Tiffany and friends got snarled in red tape while doing their best to meet state license requirements.

"It is ridiculous that we live in what is presumed to be one of the greenest states in the nation," complains Josh Ticknell, an alternative-fuels advocate and filmmaker whose documentary, "Fields of Fuel," won an award at the Sundance Film Festival, "yet we have the most antiquated laws to deal with green energy."

"Antiquated"? That's not quite the right term. It's hard to imagine that, 80 years ago, you could have found such a convoluted regulatory code on the books anywhere.

No, the reason California has the most onerous applicable laws in the nation is that such laws were designed to supposedly "protect the environment" by people who consider placing costly hardships on profit-making businesses to be a fringe benefit of such enactments, not something to be avoided.

The California grease-hauling laws are in the same class with all the other laws that allow eco-extremists to go to court and sue to block the construction of virtually any project including refineries, pipelines, even "green" windmills and the transmission lines that serve them.

The environmental extreme insist they oppose only the "bad" kinds of energy, progress, and development.

But the fate of the those who want to burn used french-fry grease reveals the truth. To the green extreme and the regulatory furies they've unleashed, there really isn't any "good" energy, progress, or development.

Except perhaps some new kind of germ that would quietly eliminate 90 percent of bothersome humankind.