Your Private Energy News

You may want to cross your legs. At this very moment, people are looking into your urinary tract with intense interest.

You heard it here first, boys and girls. You know how in some towns we have to segregate newspapers, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and some such into their own bins? Well, one day soon, mark my words, it will be your civic responsibility to pee into one of those bins. Some time after that, instead of searching for a rest stop along the highway, you will relieve yourself directly into your car, a model which may be called the new Ford Sprinkle. Good for your bladder and good for the environment.

It's all about oil, and corn, and global warming. The global warming plan calls for preventing the U.S. from unlocking the trillion tons of oil in our shale (which releases carbon dioxide in the process) so that we can single-handedly lower the Earth's temperature by seven tenths of one percent in seventy years. No oil refineries are allowed to be built for the oil that is readily available, and we are allowing China to claim the oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

In service of those policies (like 'em or not), edible corn is being converted into alternative ethanol gasoline blends at an unprecedented rate. Now the price of corn, the price of feed, the price of meat, the price of all the other crops too relatively unprofitable to grow, will go through the roof (and you've seen those prices climbing) unless scientists find another way to produce fuel. They are racing to do so. (Hmm, shouldn't they have been working on that sooner?) There are 114 corn ethanol refineries and 80 more under construction.

Dupont wants to make ethanol from corn waste; six other companies want to make it from straw (sounds like a fairy tale); and genetic engineers from Berkeley are looking into palm tree sap, termite guts, and--as I said--the human urinary tract.

You thought Germans and Americans loved their beer before? Starting tomorrow, guzzling is going to be downright patriotic.