The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (38 page)

Over time, he fine-tuned the pitch, making slight adjustments for different audiences.
To the monthly speaker’s breakfast of the Greensboro Kiwanis at the Starmount Country
Club, he talked about the potential for investment in biofuels. Sometimes he got out
ahead of his audience and later realized what had happened—too many quotes from Democratic
presidents in a Republican county, not enough explanation of the refining process
to a group of government officials. But every time—and he must have given the pitch
to a hundred different audiences—Dean sounded as if the exciting novelty of his words
was occurring to him right then for the very first time,
because it was
, and that this and only this was the road to collective salvation,
because it was
. A salesman had to believe in what he was selling, and Dean believed with the fervor
of a convert. He was a Johnny Appleseed for biodiesel, spreading the good news from
town to town.

Dean always said there was a thin line between an entrepreneur and a con man. What
made Glenn W. Turner the latter and not the former? He probably believed every word
he said with “Dare to Be Great.” Maybe Turner was in it for the money and fame, but
Dean wanted to make his fortune, too. So what was the difference? “When I first started,
I had to check myself,” Dean said. “Are they with me? Am I a shyster? Am I trying
to sell snake oil in the form of biodiesel?” But the oil he was selling wasn’t snake
oil, and that was the difference. Biodiesel was as real as the earth. It made complete
sense to anyone who listened: this was the way out of depression and into the future.
Then he would pinch himself, thinking, “Am I in this position? Has my journey taken
me to this place where we’re on the cusp?” It was mind-boggling.

One day in early February 2009, Dean was at the Omni Hotel in Richmond, preparing
to give his pitch to the Virginia Agricultural Summit, when he went to get a Starbucks
and saw a familiar-looking person sitting at a laptop. It was Tom Perriello—Dean knew
his face from TV ads. Introducing himself, Dean said, “Please wait just a minute,”
and he raced up to his room, where he had three copies of the January/February issue
of
U.S. Canola Digest
with a lead article about changes in Washington and rural America: “Red Birch Energy
could almost be the poster child for the Obama administration as it is energy independent,
sustainable, community-focused and inspirational.” Perriello waited, and when Dean
returned with a copy of the magazine and showed him the quote, the new congressman
loved it. They talked for twenty minutes, and before leaving, Dean invited Perriello
to visit Red Birch.

As for Perriello, meeting Dean Price confirmed something that he had come to believe
over the past few years and had made a tenet of his campaign: the elites in America
didn’t have answers for the problems of the working and middle class anymore. Elites
thought that everyone needed to become a computer programmer or a financial engineer,
that there would be no jobs between eight dollars an hour and six figures. Perriello
believed that the new ideas for making things in America again would come from unknown
people in obscure places.

Two months later, in early April, Perriello visited the Red Birch refinery with the
governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, and an entourage of local officials and aides and
reporters. Dean wore a brown coat and a tie, his black hair parted neatly in the middle,
looking like an uncomfortable farm boy among men in dark suits (Gary Sink wore a navy-blue
one). He gave his pitch to the assembled guests inside the refinery. Kaine actually
fell asleep in the front row, and Dean almost called him on it, remembering the time
his father had done that to him when he was a boy and fell asleep in church. But Perriello
really listened. He wasn’t like other politicians Dean had met or would come to meet,
who made him feel like a shoe salesman trying to squeeze his pitch into a few available
seconds. After the formal event, Dean took Perriello to the back of the plant and
showed him the crushing machines, which were going full tilt. The congressman gave
Dean his cell phone number and told Dean to look him up in Washington for a beer.
Dean called once, but Perriello didn’t answer and he hung up without leaving a message.

They met again in July, on a farm north of Danville, where two members of Obama’s
cabinet—Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, and Stephen Chu, the energy secretary—were
appearing as part of a tour of rural America. The month before, Perriello had voted
for the administration’s energy bill—it was known as “cap and trade,” or “the climate
change bill”—a vote that made him much less popular among some of his constituents,
who had been persuaded by energy companies and conservative groups that it would raise
their electric bills and kill jobs in coal. At the farm, Vilsack and Chu talked about
how renewable energy could tap the work ethic and the values of rural America, which
had been neglected and even lost, and Dean felt that the highest officials in President
Obama’s government were thinking along the same lines that he was. At one point Red
Birch was mentioned, and Perriello had Dean stand up to be recognized.

Dean once said that Perriello could be president someday, and Perriello once said
that if there was one American he wished the president would spend five minutes talking
to, it was Dean. The congressman put Red Birch on the White House radar, and on a
Thursday in August, an e-mail addressed to “Dear Friend” arrived at Red Birch, inviting
“a select group of regional and national energy leaders” to “engage with Cabinet Secretaries
and White House staff to discuss the ongoing debate over our energy future and how
we can all contribute to a positive outcome.” The event would be held the following
Monday. On Sunday, Dean and Gary took the train to Washington and spent the night
at a hotel next to Union Station. The next morning, Dean put on his only suit—a black
one that he had bought back in December 2004 to escort his third wife’s daughter to
her homecoming dance and instead ended up wearing to his father’s funeral that same
week—and a green tie, and he and Gary took a taxi to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

They never actually set foot in the White House. The event was held next door, on
the third floor of the massive, French Second Empire–style Old Executive Office Building.
Mark Twain called it “the ugliest building in America,” but Dean was overwhelmed with
a sense of awe he’d never felt anywhere else. The granite halls and marble staircases,
the history in those rooms named after presidents! The last speaker at the conference
was the president’s young green-jobs czar, Van Jones, who was also the most dynamic.
He had a way with phrases—when it came to employing inner-city youths to weatherize
buildings, Jones said, “We’re going to take away their handguns and give them caulk
guns!”

Dean happened to get the last question of the day. He stood up and said, “Since we’re
all here advocating the same thing, and we’re going to go out and preach the gospel,
one of the things that needs to be talked about is peak oil—because without it, nothing
of what we’re doing makes any sense. How does the administration feel about peak oil?”

Jones didn’t appear to be familiar with the Obama policy on peak oil, or even what
peak oil was. He handed the question off to a woman from the Department of Energy,
who spoke for half a minute, demonstrating that she didn’t know any more than Jones.
Afterward, Dean decided that peak oil was just too hard for politicians to handle.
It meant the end of suburban, fast-food, industrial America, including Wall Street—no
wonder the White House didn’t have a position. But Dean was taken with Van Jones,
who exchanged high fives with him and Gary at the end of the event. And he was sorry
when, two weeks later, Jones resigned after Glenn Beck and other conservatives tied
him to extreme views on the 9/11 attacks and the imprisonment of Mumia Abu-Jamal,
along with the word “assholes” as applied to congressional Republicans. But Van Jones
was never going to recruit the farmers in Rockingham County to the cause of green
energy. They weren’t going to listen to a radical black man from San Francisco, and
they didn’t like Obama any better—after Dean’s trip to Washington, some men at the
local diner said, “You went to see that nigger?” The one man they might listen to
was T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire corporate raider, who was old and white and
had been appearing in ads for natural gas and renewable energy.

On his trip to Washington, Dean got nowhere near Obama, who was vacationing that week
on Martha’s Vineyard. But a few months later, he actually met the president. In March
2010 an event was held at Andrews Air Force Base to announce the first biofuel fighter
jet, and Dean was invited. He brought his son Ryan, and they waited in line as Obama
greeted the crowd. There was no time to say anything, but Dean was struck by the feel
of the president’s hand. It was the softest of any man he’d ever shaken hands with.
It told him that Obama had never done a lick of physical work in his life.

*   *   *

Red Birch Energy was looking for a piece of the stimulus money that had been passed
by Congress. The company needed help. In the last weeks of 2008, the price of fuel
had plummeted, farther and faster than ever before. Below four dollars a gallon, Red
Birch saw its competitive advantage disappear and started losing money. In the spring
of 2009, when the canola farmers drove to the refinery with their load of seed, Dean
and Gary had to tell them that the company couldn’t afford to pay for the crop it
had contracted to buy. All they could do was cover the 6 percent interest on the money
owed. Most of the farmers were understanding, but some of them threatened Gary and
Dean and others vowed to sue Red Birch. One North Carolina farmer named John French—a
Harley-type dude—pulled up in his big dually truck, the kind with four wheels on the
rear axle. Before he unloaded his seed, Dean told him, “We don’t have the money.”

Dean was sure the farmer was going to kick his ass right then and there.

“Leave it here, let us crush it and try to sell some fuel,” Dean went on, talking
fast and straight, “or take it back to your farm and try to sell it somewhere else.”

Once Dean opened his mouth, it was impossible not to like him a little. The farmer
got in his dually and drove the load back to North Carolina. But the company’s reputation
took a big hit around the Piedmont.

Without five-dollar gas, it was impossible to make Red Birch profitable. This was
the hard lesson that Dean and Gary learned from the fiasco of the 2009 canola crop.
And they realized that the answer lay in changing their business model and using the
canola not once but twice: first converting the feedstock into food-grade cooking
oil, selling it for ten dollars a gallon to local restaurants, and collecting 70 percent
of it back as waste oil, then making biodiesel from that. If they could get to food-grade,
they could pay farmers eighteen dollars a bushel, which would increase the volume
of seed coming in and raise their profits. But it would cost almost half a million
dollars to buy new crushing machines and bring the plant up to Department of Agriculture
code. Perriello’s office put them in touch with officials in Richmond, who said that
food-grade canola wouldn’t qualify for a stimulus grant. Instead, Red Birch was encouraged
to apply for a grant toward the purchase of a microturbine, which could generate electricity
from the glycerin waste left over from making biofuel, take the refinery off the grid,
and create a new income stream when Red Birch sold some of the power to other users.
Dean got the application in just a few minutes ahead of the deadline. In January 2010,
Perriello came to Martinsville to announce the award of $750,000 in federal stimulus
funds for Red Birch to buy a microturbine.

The ceremony took place in the main hall of a natural history museum, under the suspended
skeleton of a fourteen-million-year-old whale. There were other dignitaries besides
Perriello, and other recipients besides Dean and Gary (on this occasion Dean wore
a yellow jacket, a yellow shirt, and black pants), and by the time Perriello got up
to speak, most of the energy had seeped out of the room. Wearing a flag lapel pin
on his charcoal suit, and looking half the age of every previous speaker, Perriello
took the podium with a kind of angry restlessness.

“The next big thing this area can be known for is clean energy,” he said, and he gave
a shout-out to Red Birch, calling Gary and Dean “freedom fighters and entrepreneurs.”
“Instead of driving by their truck stop and leaving three or four cents on a dollar
spent, you leave ninety cents at theirs. When things are ‘too big to fail,’ maybe
they’re a little too big to be the model in the first place. We are right on the cusp
of a transformation, and that’s why it’s so exciting. This is a kind of industrial
revolution moment.” He blamed both parties for policies that favored big corporations
and made America’s small producers less competitive. “I’m sick of it, I’m
sick
of buying everything from China and overseas, and sending our dollars to petrodictators.
We’re the only country in history to fund both sides of a war!” His voice was getting
louder. “Politicians from both parties have never been to a farm—only for a photo
op. They think it’s the jobs of the past, but I’m here to tell you they’re the jobs
of the future. This is a region that’s been hit hard, but it’s a proud area that wants
to stand tall and compete again.”

News crews shot video. Reporters swarmed around to interview Dean and Gary. The grant
was like an affirmation from on high that a biodiesel truck stop was not a harebrained
scheme, that some of the most powerful people in the country found it worthy. That
day—January 14, 2010—was the high-water mark for Red Birch Energy.

After the ceremony, Dean drove back to North Carolina, and Gary went to the plant
to have lunch with Flo Jackson, a black woman in her midforties whom he had hired
to write a new business plan and who was visiting Red Birch for the first time. Flo
was a former college basketball star with an MBA from James Madison. She had managed
a Target and a Wal-Mart, and Gary wanted to bring her on to whip Red Birch into financial
shape.