It was as good a day as Kristopher Moller could have hoped for, even in a part of Los Angeles where celebrity sightings are as common as Range Rovers and cloudless skies. Senator Barack Obama was in town. About 20 reporters clustered around one of the green and yellow biodiesel pumps at Moller's new Conserv Fuel gas station in Brentwood, one of only a few stations in the city that sell the cleaner– burning alternative fuel. Secret Service agents kept the crowd of onlookers to the sidewalk. Standing in front of the cameras in a dark three–button suit, Moller, with a somewhat formal smile, looked less than comfortable. His grin broadened, though, when Obama, standing behind a plexiglass podium a few feet away, publicly thanked him in a smooth, deep, perhaps even presidential voice, "for taking the lead on saving our planet."

By the next afternoon, the Obama campaign had moved on to San Francisco, and Moller, having traded Hugo Boss for surf shorts and flip–flops, stood beside his pumps with his business partner, Rob Reed, looking a lot more at ease. They're a funny pair: Moller with longish hair, carved Nordic features, and a surfer's tan; Reed more East Coast and buttoned–down. The story of how the two of them joined together to sell biodiesel—which produces dramatically less carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and particulate matter than conventional fuel—could only have occurred in the shadow of the Hollywood Hills, blending surfing, celebrity, environmental politics, and the old L.A. theme of apocalypse. "If we don't act now," Obama had warned the day before, "we know what the future will look like. We know there will be more droughts and more famines, more forest fires, more flooding."

Moller, 31, grew up in the epicenter of automotive culture, and not just because he lived in freeway–enmeshed Southern California—his father, a Danish immigrant, owned a chain of over 150 independent gas stations. When Moller went to Columbia to get his master's a few years ago, he studied energy policy. "I understood energy from the retail end, which is the furthest downstream, and I wanted to understand the bigger picture." After graduating, he moved back West with a new interest in alternative fuels, and tried to convince his father to let him sell biodiesel at one of his stations. "There's not enough hippies out there—it'll never work!" Moller remembers his dad objecting. But the son prevailed, and with surprising success. He sold 4,500 gallons of biodiesel in a month at a Pacific Palisades station that had previously been selling 500 gallons of conventional diesel. Before long, he had expanded to four other stations.