Time Immortal

Renewable petroleum…kinda.

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to — especially the ones coming out of business school — this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs — very, very small ones — so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

It kinda reminds me of Red Planet, a movie that came out in 2000 (if memory serves) — except that in the movie, there were insects that ate the terraforming algae that humanity had sent to Mars and excreted oxygen after doing so.

These petroleum-producing bacteria are, admittedly, both a) somewhat different, and b) real. It’s a fascinating development, though, and certainly something that sounds like it was ripped out of a sci-fi novel.

Now…is it workable in the long term, and in the large scale? If so, the most interesting aspect of the technology might just be the shift of the balance of power. Oil-poor nations with large agricultural industries could potentially become major players in the world oil market, and the idea that any nation which is a net exporter of agricultural product could refine waste from those industries into oil for its people to use would, one can only hope, have the side effect of shattering the power of the Middle Eastern oil barons.

Although, to be fair, there’s still the issues of a) cost of implementing the program on a wide scale, and b) how much oil can actually be produced from a given quantity of raw material. If an entire farm’s worth of agricultural waste will only net the farmer a barrel or two of good crude, this development won’t exactly be the miracle cure that it kinda sounds like.

David Warren spotlights a trend that I’d suspected might just be the case after all — that production of “environmentally friendly” biofuels not only results in increased carbon emissions* (since the process of refining various grains into vehicle-ready fuel requires many processing stages, all of which require fossil fuels to be burned in order to drive the various processes — by comparison, refining crude oil into petrol is a fairly clean and efficient process), but that it drives up the price of food globally, especially in already impoverished nations.

And while folks like me, living and working in Canada, might be able to absorb a twofold or threefold increase in the cost of food, people living in Third World nations would be crushed by similar increases. And here’s the kicker: such increases aren’t just possible or likely. They are already happening.

Even in the economically advanced West, the rise in Food prices has become noticeable. My observant reader will find plenty of signs in his local supermarket, where the price of dairy products is leading an advance that must necessarily spread — for wholesale prices are outstripping retail prices in food across the board. The secondary effect of the monetary inflation this re-ignites is in itself beginning to cause economic havoc.

But we, who spend (in North America) less than 15 percent of our income on food, can nevertheless survive if that proportion doubles or triples.

It is in the poorest countries of the world, where people often spend more than half their income obtaining food, that a doubling or tripling of prices is fatal. And note, the supply of food does not need to halve, in order to double prices. It only has to fall, consistently, a little behind demand.

Please don’t take my word for this. The United Nations’ World Food Programme and various other collectivist agencies are already becoming eloquent on the subject. In a statement to the European Parliament last week, the executive director of the WFP explained that their own cost of obtaining food for distribution to the world’s hungry had risen by 40 percent since last June. They are not predicting a catastrophe. They are experiencing one.

environmentalism seems to have become just one more playground for wealthy Westerners, a way we can wring our hands and make ourselves feel good for having “done something,” the same as when we banned DDT. And yet we do not, by our actions, achieve any meaningful positive environmental impact. Indeed, the only impact we manage to achieve is that, in our selfish desire to be “green,” we further impoverish and condemn to a most terrible fate thousands or millions of people living in poorer nations. And in the end, our selfishness backfires on us as well — the same “green” fuels we might desire to use in our cars are, in fact, very difficult to produce, and the production processes far more polluting than those used to refine crude oil into petrol.

But then, that pollution happens elsewhere, and not in our back yards or on the roads upon which we drive. We do not see it, and so can safely pretend it does not exist.