BERLIN - Ron Cascio calls oil "the devil's tea" and decries what he sees as America's heroin-like addiction to the flammable black goo that fuels wars in the Middle East and pollutes his small town on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
So Cascio, a 50-year-old homebuilder, has gone cold turkey. For more than five years, he has avoided the gas pump and instead uses a form of vegetable oil in his pickup truck, station wagon, lawn tractor and the generator that powers his electric drills and saws.
His rationale for running these diesel engines on biodiesel, an oil squeezed from soybeans, is that it creates less soot and carbon monoxide pollution than petroleum, and it supports farmers he sees driving tractors near his home instead of regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Libya.
Cascio is one of a growing number of people across the country who perceive a moral good in consuming less oil by switching to an alternative fuel that they "home brew" in plastic barrels or buy at one of 300 distributors nationally. Five biodiesel distributors have opened in Maryland.
"When I saw them chopping people's heads off in Iraq, I thought - `Add that to the price of gasoline'," said Cascio, as he cranked a hand pump to squirt sweet-smelling golden oil from a 500-gallon tank behind his home here into his Volkswagen Passat station wagon. "If you're putting petroleum into your car, you're putting blood into your car, too. I don't have blood on my hands."
The amount of biodiesel used by diesel trucks and cars in the United States has grown 60-fold in the past five years, to 30 million gallons last year, said Amber Pearson, a spokeswoman for the National Biodiesel Board, which is run by soy farmers.
It's not just tree-huggers trying it. The U.S. Navy, Park Service, Department of Agriculture, Postal Service and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation are among 500 agencies, organizations and companies using varying amounts of the fuel, including 100 schools and 30 colleges.
The Navy buys biodiesel to run its trucks, cars and ground equipment at bases in the Northwest, said Lt. Tommy Crosby, Navy public affairs officer: "We are becoming more environmentally friendly and less dependent on oil, using what mother nature gave us."
The number of people switching to biodiesel nationally could rise even higher starting this month because its price is expected to fall. A recently approved federal tax credit for distributors should reduce the cost of the fuel to close to that of regular diesel fuel.
