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Let’s say, just hypothetically speaking, that rising oil prices cross the arbitrary discomfort threshold for Americans, again, in 2011 and return to the forefront of what passes for our national conversation.

Which of the following responses seem likely?

1. “Let’s spend even more money on various boondoggles like ethanol, shale oil or converting coal into liquid fuel.”
2. “Drill, baby, drill!”
3. “How did all our oil end up underneath those damn Arabs’ desert Latin Americans’ dirt?”
4. “It’s China’s fault! We need to get tough with those Chinese, already!”
5. “WAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! Someone fix this!! Why isn’t the government fixing this??!!?” etc., and other expressions of a generalized infantile tantrum.
6. “Wow, apparently oil really is a finite resource which doesn’t just go on gushing out of the ground forever, after all, and we should have ignored the reassurances of Republicans, car companies and oil executives and instead actually listened to all those liberals, progressives, environmentalists, sandalistas, greens, treehuggers, peakers and smelly old granola-eating hippies instead of dismissing their warnings and suggestions as ‘Chicken Little’ whining.”

I wonder whether PolitiFact and other such sanctimonious “fact check” features will ever get around to addressing this matter, eh? I’ll not hold my breath.

Now that things are starting to look up a bit in Iowa City, maybe the timing is right to post some potentially excellent news about oil.  Apparently, there’s a new company that’s figured out a way to turn agricultural waste (wood chips, wheat straw, or whatever leftover plant material is available in large quantities in an area) into crude petroleum in a carbon-negative way.  Surprisingly, they’ve convinced yeast and E. coli to literally shit oil. 

Apparently, bacteria shit is already very close to oil, so the DNA fiddling required for the final step is relatively minor.  The company says that the plants used to make the oil take more carbon out of the atmosphere than the oil itself will release.  Furthermore, since the end-product is still oil,  there’s no need to buy a new vehicle or convert your current vehicle to a new technology, or to invest in a huge infrastructure replacement project.  And, at the technology’s current level, it takes just a week for one 40-square-foot machine to produce a barrel of oil.  The linked article points out that it would take a machine array the size of Chicago to produce enough oil to keep up with America’s weekly oil usage, but surely the space requirements will decrease as the technology develops. 

Frankly, this seems to be too good to be true.  It sounds like something out of a Greg Bear novel (or maybe Vonnegut, since some are comparing these altered microorganisms to Ice-9), which may be why I have a vague feeling of unease about this.  Surely something this promising must have a horrible trade-off, right?  Still, I’m feeling a little less doomed than I was a few days ago.  Here’s to bug poop!