Bug-eyed alternatives for oil addiction

By Julian Sudre

My imagination could have stretched like Spandex and sharply snapped back with surgical precision into modern 21rst century, visualising a farrago of environmental riptides gushing their way through the outgrown misgivings of my fears. Fortunately, I am no Rip Van Winkle and what I have doubted for so long is only accentuated by being more real than ever.

The whirlpools of human greed have jolted the placid waters of our ancestors; our energy consumption has tripled since 1970 to the equivalent of almost 30 million tonnes of oil a year while energy to light homes and run household appliances has rocketed by 135 per cent in the period. The problem is not cultural but sociological and societal.

The effects of modern life could to all intents and purposes alter our attitudes to our lifestyle and produce a considerable shift in family patterns.

Such phenomenon would create a divide in natural harmony with what is normally perceived as complimentary and elementary to the healthy progress of humanity. We unconsciously ratchet up a level of unnaturalness in our life today that it has become out of keeping with a progressive society.

The continuous growth of the population alongside a spirit of competitiveness cannot sustain the pressure of markets forces on one end and the politics of nations on the other. Slowly, we have come to see that the perpetual law of the fittest is eroding our mental capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff and the resulting factor transforms a family into a bilious synthesis of fractured monstrosity. The superstructure – noted in Marxist theory - is taking a turn for the worse if our institutions and cultures related to the oil production are not weaned off voluntarily.

While we enter a Frankenstein-ian era and our own sense of self-denial mirrors asinine strategies in counteracting the damage that is already there, I daresay our imagination does not play tricks on us; what we classify as science-fiction could be dormant remembrances of subconscious certitudes.

And voila! Scientists find bugs that excrete petrol. Perhaps we have found the Aladdin’s cave of oil. So then, the abiotic theory of oil formation is well and alive. According to this theory, oil is not a fossil fuel at all, but was formed deep in the Earth’s crust from inorganic materials. Tiny little creatures that would miraculously produce renewable petroleum – big sigh - we are saved.

All right folks, the storm is over, let’s get the cars out and as to the Hummer, well it’s back on the road, and you lot, can fire up your old block chevy too! Fear not, it was a blip in the oil production.

The genetic alteration of bugs, the ones that feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw is doing the imaginable – excreting crude oil.

The company – LS9 – that is pioneering the experiment is based in the Silicon Valley area, and they claim not only this oil would be renewable but carbon negative also.

No, it is not a grown-up version of Harry Potter and the Sultan of Bug-oil Gobbledygook but the marrow of catch-as-catch-can severe addiction to oil.

Saying that, we know there are many environmental-friendly ways of running a vehicle but at this rate, the niggling habit of not being able to see the forest for the trees makes our addiction to oil causticly nauseating.

As for the bugs, while it is said that the company produces one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor plan, then the invasion of the oil-excreting bugs could be well on its way.