""Food is fuel for people, not cars! Would you believe they're turning corn and palm oil into ethanol, while populations starve across the world?""
Good morning, people! It's 8.30 and wide awake. Reason? I was shuffling off to bed some hours ago, after junking around a quadrillion post-its way past their prime: old grocery lists, to-do memos, birthday reminders, phone numbers of people I don't recall ever having met. And I came upon this hurriedly scribbled little nugget from a month-old conversation with my currently missing-in-action mother:
""Surely there are better ways to make ethanol than to turn food crops into fuel for cars?'
Immediately, something went ""dinggg!"" in my head, because just the other day, there was a news item in the Jakarta Post saying the very same thing. So there are other people out there thinking the same way, hurrah! We have finally found our tribe!
While it's all highly laudable that so many individuals and organizations have finally begun to seriously look into alternative renewable energy sources, it seems self defeating when they come up with daft ideas like growing corn and palm oil to produce ethanol.
""They use prime agricultural land to produce corn for biofuel while the developing world starves, just so people in developed countries can drive to the supermarket? What does that say about our civilization, when a human life is worth less than a commute?"" Mum expostulates.
There's more. In order to reduce our dependence on rapidly depleting fossil fuels, we are planting oil palms for biofuel, for which vast tracts of rainforest are being clear-cut and burned down in South East Asia. How much sense does that make?
""Why don't we use kitchen waste instead? We produce plenty of that, and we're letting it rot in landfills, which are overflowing. All the organic waste from our cities could be converted to biogas, if it were subjected to some sort of simple non-polluting fermentation process,"" continues Mum.
""By the way, did you know that a 14-year-old Indian boy in the US has worked out a way to use banana peels to produce biogas, and done studies to prove they produce five times more gas than manure?""
Well, I say, he may be living overseas, but his DNA is evidently still Indian; the original don't-throw-it-away-we-can-always-use-it-again-for-something-else culture.
And what about sewage? Surely there is some aerobic/anaerobic/catabolic/mesomorphic/strumpenwurfing process to turn human waste into biofuel? I mean, we produce methane (when we pass gas) easily enough, so it shouldn't be such a stretch to go the extra mile, so to speak, and convert solid human waste into biogas?
It's a 100 percent renewable resource; as long as there are humans, we will produce the stuff. And since it's essentially waste, it's an ethically viable alternative to using food crops to produce biofuel. Now, why didn't anybody think of that before? It's hardly rocket science!
I think the private sector needs to get a move on, there's money to be made from all the human waste we produce.
Meanwhile, the race is on to provide fuel to keep the one-car-per-person American Dream on the road, sideswiping the Global Nightmare, poverty, right off the highway.
How many more people need to die from starvation before the profit motive is aligned to the greater good?
And what about solar power? Why isn't that being harnessed more efficiently? How come photo voltaic cells are still as large as a house (well almost), when laptops have shrunk to handheld size and a tiny microchip can store all the data that would have filled a couple of warehouse-sized mainframes ten years ago?
It's not like we don't have the technology. And goodness knows, the developing world gets enough sunlight throughout the year to keep the entire planet powered up, if someone adapted the same technologies that keep our communications humming and send space missions out into the Zorgosphere to collect, store and distribute solar power.
I mean, sunlight is there for the taking. If there's one thing in life we can count on, apart from the ""death and taxes"" thing, it's that the sun will rise every morning. And best of all, you don't need to clear forests and dig mines and burn coal to produce solar energy. Besides, the sun is going to be around a lot longer than you or me. I would think heavy investment in this sector would be a strategic move.
Every roof in the tropics should be sporting photovoltaics, and each building should be able to generate enough solar energy to run itself.
Today, I am going to be the dutiful daughter and let my mother have the last word. ""Well, I say biogas from human waste would be a jolly good start. I mean, my own brother's been banging on about it for 30 years, and I really think he had a point all along"", says Mum.
Google ""Prithwis Mukhopadhyay"" for the story on that brilliant young 14-year-old; the banana peel idea, of course, came to him on a visit to India.
Priya Tuli can be reached at priyatuli@randombloggz.com
