The fact of the matter is that if you bother to look around you'd see that energy is - for all practical purposes - unlimited. Energy blows in the wind and falls from the sky and pops up from the ground, and beats down on you on a hot Summer day. Everything that can burn is energy. The reason we can't or won't use it is entirely cultural. We could be self-sufficient in energy if we really wanted to. Think about this: If everybody in our country, say, took all the money they spend on oil and gas and built themselves a wind-mill and bought an electric car there absolutely would be no energy shortage - ever.

"But, Ste-eve," I hear you whining, "I don't want to build a windmill!"

Okay. I've got a solution for you polluters out there, too. Here's how it goes. I am a big fan of the Jon Stewart show. A couple of times on his show he's made the quip that he can't understand how people aren't able to produce oil a lot more cheaper since: "it's only carbon." He said that once to the former New Jersey governor and then head of the EPA, who chuckled merrily and then did not answer his question. I wrote to him at an address I got off of the Internet and then got the letter returned, so, I'll tell you instead.

Thermal depolymerization, if I remember correctly, is the name of the process. It was featured in Discover magazine in May 2003 and the name of the article was Anything into oil. This article discussed how the process was being used to take biological waste, in this case it was at a chicken farm where they took the unusable parts of the chicken and turned them into oil.

The way it works is that the biological/carbon containing material is put into the device, a vacuum is created, and the water on the material is boiled away. As this happens, it frees the bonds of the carbon containing material and it is turned into oil. The vacuum is necessary so that the amount of energy needed to cause the moisture to boil is greatly lessened. The thing looks like a huge tangle of pipes and takes up a lot of real estate, but it's really basic and simple technology that's used in an innovative way.

David Alan Grier's 'Sporting Life' On Broadway
The stand-up comedian and star of <em>In Living Color</em> was recently nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Sporting Life in the opera <em>Porgy and Bess</em>. "I think the character of Sporting Life is a salesman so he has to be flamboyant, the life of the party," he says.

The company, I believe, is called Changing World Technologies. At present it costs them twelve dollars a barrel to turn animal waste into oil - which is a nice profit with oil at fifty bucks a barrel, however, it's still a whole lot more expensive than pumping the same amount, which costs the oil company three dollars a barrel.

Discover magazine did an update on this company a few months back. They were attempting to build a demonstration facility but had a setback when their contractor produced faulty workmanship (ie) pipes that needed a huge amount of re-welding.

It really was one of these things that sounds too good to be true, turning garbage into oil. Well, you can look up the article for yourself, or I suppose have an assistant of yours do it for you.

Now, believe it or not: not all scientists accept that oil is, in fact, a fossil fuel or a limited resource. There is an alternate theory that oil is not composed of decayed biomass that seeped down into deep pockets in the Earth but rather is a result of geological processes within the planet and it bubbled up into those same pockets. Time magazine had an article about a scientist named Gold who proposed this and was also responsible for some other unconventional theories that turned out to be true. I forget what those theories were, maybe about comets. I filed his away in my mind and then forgot about it - because everyone kept saying oil was a fossil fuel and it seemed a pretty safe bet that they weren't all wrong. Although, I always found it odd that oil which would have to be created by an abundance of life is found underneath some of the world's most inhospitable areas. (Deserts, frozen wilderness, deep, deep under the ocean).

Then NASA came back and said that the probe they had sent to one of Saturn's moons, Triton, had found seas of oil on the surface. Triton, they estimated, had temperatures of below two hundred and eighty degrees centigrade and a methane atmosphere. How did that oil get there? Did Triton have a whole bunch of really cold dinosaurs up there or was it maybe the result of geologic processes that might be similar to Earth's?

Okay. That's something for you to think about. It's an alternate theory and I don't necessarily believe it, but you've got to admit that it's pretty interesting.
About the Author

Steve Sommers is the author of Breakfast with the Antichrist. Visit his Website at http://www.breakfastwiththeantichrist.com