Border Communities Show You Can Help the Economy and the Environment

Too often, folks on the right tell us that helping the environment will somehow hurt our economy or our corporate bottom line. Kudos to Nogales and neighboring Rio Rico for creatively cleaning up the air, the sewer line, and saving money for the taxpayers. When they realized that sewers in Nogales, Mexico, were filled with used cooking oil, which can block sewer lines just as it can block your arteries, and that these sewers flowed downhill onto the Arizona side, they had a simple yet ingenious thought: BIODIESEL! Rather than clogging the sewers of Arizona and Sonora, the cooking oil will now be used to fuel school buses and fire trucks, while cleaning up the local air (as biodiesel has lower particulate emissions) and reducing dependence on foreign oil ever so slightly. If anyone reliable (i.e. not VW) ever makes a diesel passenger car again, I may have to try biodiesel. And unlike ethanol, biodiesel can be made from used food products, rather than competing for our food supply and driving up food costs.