If the Price of Gas Is Really Bugging You...

...why not try using real bugs?

Yes, according to this article in the UK Times Online, scientists working at a lab in California (where else?) have created a genetically modified bacterium that eats garbage and ... um ... excretes crude oil.

Yes, you read that correctly.

According to the director of a company working on exotic ways to make alternative sources of crude oil, single-cell organisms like industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli can be modified by redesigning their DNA. The result is a microbe that eats anything that can be broken down into sugars (such as agricultural waste like wood chips or wheat straw), and turns it into crude oil - which, on a molecular level, is pretty close to the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation.

Imagine that. Bacteria that poop crude oil! As one of my co-workers pointed out when he read the article, we already have bacteria that are used to eat oil slicks, so this just brings things full-circle. Maybe we could also train the bacteria that eat oil slicks to poop the oil back out in the right place! This might also provide additional work for people who used to train flea circuses.

We may be on to something, here.

Well, that's the good news. The bad news is that bacteria tend to be very small, and thus don't poop all that much crude oil at a time. The trick is going to be to grow enough bacteria, or a few bacteria big and mean enough, to poop crude oil on an economically feasible, world-supplying, industrial scale.

I hope it works out. Not only could we have plenty of crude oil, but there would be a certain perverse pleasure in seeing puffed-up religious bigots like the Saudis and blustering buffoons like Hugo Chavez replaced by bacteria. There's that whole problem of tinkering with life forms, but hey, we've been doing that with food animals and plants for hundreds of years.

Who knows? Someday, I may keep two compost piles...one to feed my garden, and the other to feed my car. And the new question might be, "how many miles-per-leftover-salad do you get?"

We can only dream...

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - if you're still irate, like me, over the effect of speculative trading on oil prices, you may be interested in this interview that ran a few days ago on NPR's Marketplace show. Host Kai Ryssdal was interviewing Mr Michael Greenberger, a former government commodities regulator, who said that,

"...about 30 percent of our crude oil energy futures are traded in what is called a dark market -- that is a market that was deregulated in December of 2000 at the behest of Enron. Prior to that legislation being passed, all energy futures traded in the United States or affecting the United States in a significant fashion were regulated by United States regulators under a very careful regime that had been perfected over about 78 years and many observers believe that because those markets are not being policed, malpractices are being committed and traders are able to boost the price virtually at their will."

Well, how about that! And which party is it that champions deregulation of everything as the solution to all our problems?

Think about that as you decide how to cast your vote this year.

Just a suggestion.

B.