A Bold Plan for America's Energy Independence (or, if you prefer, 'Who runs bartertown, baby!')

Coming soon to a universe neither parallel nor alternate.

Aunty Entity: We call it Underworld. That's where Bartertown gets its energy.

Mad Max: What, oil? Natural gas?

Aunty Entity: Pigs.

Mad Max: You mean pigs like those?

Aunty Entity: That's right.

Mad Max: Bullshit!

Aunty Entity: No. Pig shit.

Mad Max: What?

The Collector: Pig shit. The lights, the motors, the vehicles, all run by a high-powered gas called methane. And methane cometh from pig shit.

Okay, that extract of dialogue from, for lack of a better term, art, leads us to life:

UI researcher makes crude oil from pig manure

They say you can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, but University of Illinois researchers are working some interesting magic at the other end of the animal.

"We are the first to actually do this," professor Yuanhui Zhang says proudly of his team's ability to turn swine manure into crude oil. He's a bio-environmental engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has led the 10-year research project that recently announced a breakthrough in porcine petroleum.

That neat trick may sound crude.

But it also sounds good to a pork industry swamped with oceans of swine manure, and it sounds like the national anthem to those looking to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.

A typical pig produces about 6 gallons of waste a day.

Right now the product is something close to diesel fuel, but research is still underway.

The U.S. currently uses over 20 million barrels of oil per day (according to the University of Omaha). This is 840 million gallons of gasoline. If pig manure could be converted with 100% efficiency (it can't) at 6 gallons per day per porker it would require 140 million pigs pooping to handle our oil needs!

Unless the pig population has increased a lot since 1999, there are only about 60 million red-blooded American pigs available. But pigs are prolific, producing average litters of seven piglets. By conserving on bacon and ham consumption for a year, we could build up pig numbers so that every family in America could do their part, by adopting a pig.

With a Manhattan Project style program, we could have pig poop processing plants placed in proper proportions to population centers, we think no later than 2010. Then we can thumb our collective noses at the shieks and the freaks (we're thinking Hugo Chavez). Added bonus: By pigifying our fruited plains, no self-respecting Islamo-fascist would want to get anywhere near our shores. Ah, yes, while weaning ourselves from the teat of foreign oil!

That leaves us with little else to say but ...


LIFT EMBARGO!