That’s me in my red Mustang, barreling down Iron Mountain Road in South Dakota, traversing the 21 miles from Rapid City to Keystone, before making the three and a half mile ascent to Mount Rushmore. Two motorbikes, a Harley-Davidson FXRS Low Glide and a Honda Gold Wing Aspencade, we’re traveling so much in tandem, myself in the lead, then one or the other, passing me as they elegantly took the big rolling curves of Highway 16A, but we don’t know each other; I’m not sure they know each other. They both look like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, but they’re not.
We’re all racing to reach Mount Rushmore before sunset, the sun is low, it’s still hot out, the mercury is still over 90, the wind is gusting near 30 miles per hour, I’d say. Hot as the dickens, my radiator’s going to be low before long. I wonder, how do I keep the old machine humming?
It’s the second week of July, the bands and bunting have just been put away after Independence Day. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally & Races, is nearly four weeks away. I’m on the lookout for pronghorn antelope, they’ve been seen around here, I’m told, near sunset. There’s a pair of bald eagles spotted somewhere, but I’ll never see them with the visor down to block the low sunlight of the dusk. These are the Black Hills, and you fall into rhythm with them—driving, climbing, chasing the last light over steep hills and blind crests.
To the north, Sturgis, the motorcycle rally a symbol of American individualism and community at full throttle. A few miles ahead, the monument itself: remote, almost resistant to easy consumption. Farther away than you expect. Smaller somehow, unless you look harder. Keystone, the town next to Rushmore, riot of neon, diners, motels, souvenir shops, Blue Bird Wanderlodge RVs doing three point turns to make the sharper corners in town.
It’s an American state of being—grit, absurdity, yearning, contradiction, commerce, grandeur, loss, stubborn persistence — tangled together and enduring in a way that defies judgment.
Monument Men
I’ve seen a bellyful of failure in my time. Systems that made sense but collapsed, biorefineries, planned cities, brittle monocultures, high-efficiency fragiletech. I’ve seen systems that feel messy but persist — English common law, oral traditions, the prairie ecosystem, constitutional democracy. It’s amazing, the persistence of the unlikely over the logical.
That’s Mt. Rushmore, if you think about it. We do not begin in triumph. We begin with contradiction. And from that contradiction—layered, strained, adapted, trusted—we carve systems that can last. And every living system must either learn to embody it— or become another forgotten ghost town of the old West.
For sure, hardly anyone remembers the towns of south-western Dakotas, west of the Badlands and east of the Thunder Basin grasslands — but most people know that Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Roosevelt are the faces carved into the mountain. Not many people are exactly sure why, except they are great Americans. There’s endurance, adaptability, depth and trust there — that’s what makes things work, that what adds up to success in the long run.
George Washington, he’s endurance. Washington didn’t win by brilliance. He won by holding the army together, maintaining cohesion, morale, the fragile coherence of a revolution. Absorbing retreats, hardship, spies, defeat.
Abraham Lincoln, he’s adaptability. “If I could save the Union by freeing all, none, or some slaves, I would,” he said, and it wasn’t moral drift, it was clarity of purpose. Lincoln kept the Union intact by any means possible. Manumission, ironclads, mastery of the railroads, the blockade, replacing commanders, repeating rifles, moral framing.
Thomas Jefferson, he’s depth. He lived contradiction. A farmer born where he dies, yet an expansionist. Freedom fighter and slaveholder. Scientist and essayist. He didn’t resolve paradox. He nested it into larger structures—the Declaration, the Louisiana Purchase, Monticello.
Theodore Roosevelt, he’s trust. He was known for trust-busting, but people trusted him. He could direct the people’s attention to imperialism, progressivism, liberation, exhort “the Man in the Arena”, praise “the strenuous life”, and meld an unlikely combination of Dakota cowboys and eastern Dudes into the Rough Riders who took San Juan Hill.
The Face of Endurance
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 Iwo 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.
“Is the system part of daily identity?” For corn famers, most of them I believe the answer is yes. But I am not even sure about the good peoples of Nebraska and Iowa, all of them, or even a plurality of them. The journey to persistence is not an impossible one, even a long one, for many companies in many small towns, but the journey is incomplete.
Petroleum is deeply embedded in ritual: the rally, the road-trip, NASCAR, Formula One, the family fill-up. It’s carved on the Mount Rushmore of our daily lives. Even electricity is now so embedded we say “charge your phone” the way we say “eat lunch”.
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? If farm-state politicians head for the hills?” Public supports do not define immaturity—many mature systems such as grids, bridges, roads, food are subsidized. Yet, the bridge must be engineered so that it does not collapse when a cable snaps, roads crumble but don’t wash away, grids falter but do not crash into eternal darkness. To grow up is the tote the load, to walk the line.
Today, many biofuels depend on a combination of volume mandates, tax credits, carbon targets, public R&D supports, loan guarantees, and accounting multipliers.
Food, it’s different. A food bank isn’t just calories—it’s ritualized mutual care. A grain silo isn’t backup—it’s a story of protection. A mature biofuels system will do the same.
Few people buy half-price goods from the back of a truck from known criminals, just because the price is low. It is not the price they are rejecting, it is the story that goes with it, that they fully see.
What Lasts Shall be First
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. So many hours demonstrated, this much CAPEX, that much OPEX, here’s my offtake, here’s my wrap, there’s my permit, and that’s my offtaker over there. Enough?
It’s time for me to leave Mount Rushmore now, it’s getting dark. I don’t know how the Mustang will perform, we’ve driven a thousand miles today in hot weather, and the radiator’s been acting up. I don’t know how the traffic will be, all the RVs trying to negotiate the sharp turns and steep bends. There’s an affordable motel in Sturgis but I don’t know about availability. I’m thirsty and not quite sure where I’ll find a roadside stop for a bottle of pop. I’m packed with uncertainty, and in uncertainty I minimize the risk. We all do that. That’s the iron rule of life.
It’s the iron rule of energy systems, too, I realize. I’ve spent years now, when not on the road, in the evenings when I had a moment away from the hurly-burly of making my living, with a pen and a series of yellow pads, trying to measure risk. My friends in the bioeconomy can measure techno-economic feasibility, technical readiness, technology adoption rates and internal rates of return so much faster and better than I can. I wouldn’t presume to try to improve on their work.
But it’s not hard to realize, here on Mount Rushmore: it’s not always about finding the best. Did our nation never produce an individual more intelligent and caring and upright than these four gentlemen whose faces are chipped into stone? I don’t think so. Are biofuels projects only ever in trouble because they are unworthy and doomed to fail? I don’t think so.
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 a 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.
IPR (Information Persistence Ratio – Trust endurance through shocks)
Fragile—trust leans on policy scaffolding, not lived ritual or identity. I’m looking for Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote that “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”, but I don’t know that the care comes across. I wish that corn was a perennial, living for years like the big bluestem grasses of northern Illinois. Instead, I see an annual, every year another plaintive wail as the Renewable Fuel Standard volumes or other policies fail to impress.
SCD (Structural Compression Depth — Entropy management across scale/time)
Shallow—bolted onto legacy food/ag infrastructure, not co-evolved with transport or resilience needs. I’m looking for Jefferson, imagery planted so deep in our minds we put it on the two-dollar bill — yet I see wheat, ejected from the back side of the penny, I see our people singing so many songs but never, now, the songs of the harvest. I see railroads but I don’t hear anyone singing, “This train is bound for glory.”
TRFI (Trust–Ritual–Function Integration — Behavioral embedding)
Weak—mandated use, not beloved or ritualized like electricity or bread. I’m looking for George Washington, to see the symbolism of crossing the Delaware at Christmas, the elevation of Valley Forge to myth; a flag of thirteen stripes, of fifty stars; the eagle on the national seal. E Pluribus Unum, out of many sources, one energy system. I see fracture, division, carping, the bioeconomy landscape as cracked as a windshield smashed by rock.
EED (Entropy Export Differential — Net reduction of disorder under stress)
Mixed—outcomes highly boundary-dependent, vulnerable to price and trust volatility. I’m looking for Abraham Lincoln, as he secured the border states in the Civil War, found the lifeline of the Confederacy to European markets and made blockade; took the rising stress of rising land prices and relieved it with the Homestead Act. Instead I see pumps not ready for E15 ethanol blends, E30 is miles away, few voices raised outside of the farm belt to remedy that. Yet, there’s a mythic world of food, I see recipes shared online, baking tips, cooking shows, Top Chef, star rating for restaurants, the tail-gate grillers.
Demand is a Thing with Feathers
To make a market, first we must make a magnificent obsession. Fuel might be Tenzing Norgay to food’s Edmund Hillary — the essential companion — but the market does not yet see the Sherpa. We’ve attended to so many things, but not all the things, not all the right things. I remember that Ed Viesturs always said, of climbing Everest, no short-cuts to the top, yet can we say we have made the case for the Sherpa, crop-based biofuels, as the Sancho Panza to food.
Have we embedded this wondrous product in the things we say and do? I don’t expect that energy will make it into the Lord’s Prayer, like food has, but to give the petroleum industry some due, Texaco had the country humming to “You Can Trust Your Car to the Man who Wears the Star“.
Is the market durable? A grain-based biofuel ought to conjure up an image like John Wayne, resilient, adaptive, persistent, a survivor, a leader, and one to follow even when the odds look long.
Oh, I know that someone will say, well, people will not choose an alternative to gasoline until it’s cheaper. 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. Yes, supply and demand. I get it: More demand, more teams, more players, more hot dogs, more mitts.
Yet, demand is a thing with feathers. It flutters, hovers, willfully changes direction, it’s fitful, imperious, skittish, unreliable. Fashion brings us fidget spinners and hula-hoops and frisbees — and fashion taketh them away. 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.
I think Franklin said after signing the Declaration of Independence, we have to hang together, or we’re sure to hang separately. What will make us hang together? It’s a question for the ages, but in the here and now I have a Mustang on the edge of quitting, she’s been driven so hard, so long. I wonder: how will I keep her going? How will I keep going, on the highways and in to the American night?
It’s dark now, and I have the Mustang running, I’m on Highway 385 headed north, I’ll bypass Rapid City and head for Spearfish, there’s uncertainty ahead — where will I stop for the night, where will I grab a bite to eat? I have a two RVs ahead of me, one is passing the other at a glacial pace, I may be five minutes here before I can clear this logjam and have the open road to myself. Out towards the far west there’s twilight over Wyoming, and I’ll be more than two hours more before I reach Gillette. I don’t know there’ll be gas, food, lodging there, but I have trust in the system. Somehow, I’ve acquired a faith in our interstate highways, mute and unliving though they are.
I’ve driven Interstate 90 so many years, and after Gillette I’ll head south to Wright, then on to Bill, then on to Douglas, on the edge of the Thunder Basin National Grassland and the Powder River Basin. I have some family chores on the old homestead ahead for me — the old cadence of family, and harvest returns to me. I think of the old song, Bringing in the Sheaves, which my uncles taught me to sing, long ago, call and response, progression and resolution. I’ve compressed the song into just one verse and the chorus, that’s what I recall.
It will pass the time, humming the tune as I drive into the night, as the twilight gives way to the whup-whup of the oil derricks as they flare off the gas in the heavy Wyoming winds. Trust me, my old Mustang knows the way. I’ll be there before long. May biofuels reign soon, and we’ll go rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
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