Nah...just 15% of one day's oil supply :>)
OPEN FORUM: On America's New Energy Future
Tapping the fat of the land
Gar Smith
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
At the 2007 Gas and Oil Exposition in Calgary, two keynote speakers introduced as representatives from ExxonMobil and the National Petroleum Council addressed the specter of Peak Oil. "Without oil," NPC's Shepard Wolf warned, "at least 4 billion people would starve." In order to "keep the oil flowing," he continued, "we need something infinitely more abundant than whales." Wolf's solution: It's time to consider transforming dying humans into biofuel.
"Some 150,000 people already die from climate-change-related effects every year," ExxonMobil's faux rep Florian Osenberg argued. "Those bodies could be turned into fuel for the rest of us." Wolf and Osenberg used a PowerPoint presentation to introduce Vivoleum(tm), a new Exxon product rendered from human fat. The attentive crowd of oil industry reps lit the complimentary Vivoleum candles placed on their tables.
Wolf and Osenberg were, in reality, The Yes Men, two anti-corporate tricksters on a mission to save the world "one prank at a time." But their "Soylent Green" fuel stunt showed that Big Oil was open to the idea of harvesting one of the continent's greatest untapped assets - the fat of the land.
In a world where federal corn subsidies and industrial fast foods have transformed Americans into fat-bearing mammals, it's no surprise that petroleum execs would see a kind of logic in harvesting human lard to fuel America's economic engine.
America is literally collapsing under the strain of overweight citizens. Disneyland's Small World ride, designed in the 1960s (when the average male park visitor weighed 175 pounds) is now being rebuilt to haul passengers weighing more than 200 pounds. In 2004, a Baltimore water taxi built to carry 25 adults (weighing an average of 140 pounds) sank because the combined weight of the boat's 25 passengers was 700 pounds more than the vessel could handle.
The American Journal of Preventive Medicine reports that super-size passengers forced U.S. airlines to burn 350 million extra gallons of fuel in 2000 at a cost of $275 million - while pouring 2.8 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A University of Illinois study concludes that, over the past 40 years, the growing heft of U.S. car passengers burned up 938 million extra gallons of gas. Projected windfall for the oil companies: $2.8 billion a year.
The World Health Organization estimates that 38.8 million Americans are now "obese" - i.e., 30 pounds or more overweight. That factors out to 583,000 tons of body fat. Since a kilogram of human fat contains 7,200 kilocalories of energy and a barrel of oil generates 1,410,579 kilocalories, Americans are hauling around (at minimum) the fat-equivalent of 2.92 million barrels of oil on their bodies.
If the concept of "flab gas" leaves you flabbergasted, prepare for a shock. Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital reportedly has signed a deal to supply Norwegian entrepreneur Lauri Venoy with 3,000 gallons-per-week of liposuction leftovers harvested by its clinics. This bio-fat could produce 2,600 gallons of biodiesel, sufficient to fuel a Hummer for a year.
And, on March 1, New Zealander Peter Bethune set out to beat the around-the-world sailing record in an eco-boat partially powered by human fat. According to Bethune, "10 pounds of fat ... would drive a car about 50 miles, once converted." Bethune and two crew members donated 2.5 pounds of body fat to the vessel's fuel tank - enough to travel 9 of the trip's 27,600 miles.
With liposuction already America's most popular cosmetic surgery (455,000 procedures in 2006 alone), the day may soon arrive when patriotic Americans can boost their health and the nation's oil reserves by making voluntary donations to a Federal Liposuction Aggregation Bureau. FLAB's slogan could be: "A waist is a terrible thing to waste."
There is, of course, a simpler way of fighting Big Oil and the Big Bulge: Swap the fries and the Hummer for carrot sticks and a bike.
Gar Smith is editor emeritus of Earth Island Journal and the co-founder of Environmentalists Against War
sfgate.com |
