Biodiesel's Dirty Little Secret?

I ran across this funny and interesting post on Fark. Its just a minor rant by some random dude but you know I've never seen any discussion about the emmissions from a biodiesel driven vehicle. I think we all just assume since its not normal oil and its got 'bio' in it, it must be good...

Ahh, yes... someone mentioned biodiesel.

A little experiment happened last week.

You see, I live in the uber-green town of Santa Cruz, and we have a whole armada of these french-fry-oil diesel rustbuckets blasting out smoke under the pretext of clean 'biodiesel' by lazy self-centered hippies.

Well, a fairly modern Jetta TDI that had been 'converted' to run biodiesel came into a shop for some transmission work. The tranny was sorted in short order, and since there was free time, the tech assigned to the car stuck the TDI on the smog kit because he was honestly curious to see just how much cleaner this 'biodiesel' really was than the normal CA ultra low sulfur 15-PPM diesel fuel.

Over 85 PPM on the smog. Using this homebrew 'biodiesel'. That's barely under the legal limit for SMOG on a regular car, way WAY over what the TDI should be spitting out, and nowhere near what could be considered 'green'.

Keep fooling yourself with biodiesel... It's only worth doing if you're going to take the time to do it right, you lazy hippie bastards.

In the meantime my Ducati only displaces 900cc's with every crank revolution, gets about 45 MPG, takes up far less space on the roadway, and I get rock star parking everywhere I go. And you can bet it's kept in perfect mechanical tune.

It's the irony tag when the guy wearing all the leather is more green than the guy wearing all the hemp.