I read an article recently about some dude somewhere who has come up with a way to create fuel out of biomass. Mind, we're not talking about turning grain into oil here, but, potentially, compost into gasoline. The inspiration? The guy was watching cows graze and listening to them fart. It dawned on him that cows must have some micro-organism in there that consumes grass and belches out methane. Methane and gasoline both being hydrocarbons, it's not unreasonable to think that a certain amount of interference with the bacterial genome might result in an organism that eats yard waste and pees gasoline. And then, oh what an era of economic and political stability would dawn...no more appeasing the Middle Eastern nut cases just because we need their oil...why, we could end hunger in the developing world and glut the Western appetite for fuel at the same time: just round up starving people wherever they be, and offer them all the beans and cabbage they can eat, in return for having their gut colonized with designer bacteria and promising to excrete into a gas can. Utopia, here we come...
Don't light a match.
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