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Tapping the Fat of the Land
At the 2007 Gas and Oil Expo in Calgary, two keynote speakers introduced as representatives from ExxonMobil and the National Petroleum Council (NPC) addressed the specter of Peak Oil. "Without oil," NPC's Shepard Wolf warned, "at least four billion people would starve." In order to "keep the oil flowing," he suggested, "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 Florian Osenberg argued. "Those bodies could be turned into fuel for the rest of us." Wolf and Osenberg used a PowerPoint presentation to introduce VivoleumTM, a new Exxon product rendered from human fat. The attentive crowd of oil industry reps happily lit the complimentary Vivoleum candles placed on their luncheon 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, as represented by these industry higher-ups, was open to the idea of harvesting one of the continent's greatest untapped assets -- the tons of excess fat being toted around by chubby masses of citizen-consumers.
In a world where federal corn subsidies, corporate fast foods, and petroleum-based fertilizers have transformed Americans into fat-bearing animals, it's no surprise that petroleum executives would see a kind of logic in harvesting human lard to produce an infinitely renewable resource 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 re-built 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.
Meanwhile, the fattening of America is fattening the coffers of Big Oil. 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 thousand tons of excess body fat. Since a kilogram of human fat contains the 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. Talk about an untapped domestic resource.
If the concept of "flab gas" leaves you flabbergasted, prepare for a shock: researchers are already mining human fat for fuel. 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 biofat could produce 2,600 gallons of biodiesel, sufficient to fuel a Hummer for a year.
But it's all a joke, right? If the concept of "flab gas" leaves you flabbergasted, prepare for a shock: Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital has signed a deal to supply Norwegian entrepreneur Lauri Venoy with 3,000 gallons per week of liposuction leftovers. Venoy figures each 3,000 gallons of biofat will produce 2,600 gallons of biodiesel, sufficient to fuel a Hummer for a week.
And, on March 1, 2008, New Zealander Peter Bethune launched his latest attempt to break the around-the-world sailing record in his Earthrace eco-boat, a vessel 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 personally donated 2.5 pounds of body fat to Earthrace's fuel tank -- enough to travel nine 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 volunteering to make 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. In his latest book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," slow-food advocate Michael Pollan spells it out: Boycott corporate fast foods, eat local, and eat less.
Gar Smith is editor emeritus of Earth Island Journal and the cofounder of Environmentalists Against War (www.envirosagainstwar.org)
19 Comments so far
Show AllWhat a delightful article. The author manages to skewer both corporate greed and personal corpulence in a few paragraphs, providing a workable solution as well as some much needed humor.
jj
There's a much simpler way to use this stored fat for our energy needs. Burn it yourself. By using the fat calories on one's own body, it would be the equivalent of eating that many less burgers, raising so many fewer cattle that eat less grain. So the US citizens have all this fuel stored in our own bodies that would serve our energy needs in a much more direct way.
Hmm, so overeat, get the fat sucked out and use it to run the car that probably is the reason you're fat in the first place.
Use your bodily fat--which you may want to add to--as a sort of every man's hedge against the rising food and fuel prices.
www.StudentsForTheEarth.org
You mean..... biofuel is people?!?
Biofuel is us! Eat like a pig and save the planet!
I am outraged. As a retiree from 16 years marketing liposuction equipment to bottom feeding (sic) cosmetic surgeons I have entertained this idea for a long time. I even trotted it out here on CD about a year ago. You all laughed at me, except for a couple of overweight progressives who got mad at me for my lack of sensitivity. I don't see how anyone could possibly be offended by discarding the notion that humans burden under a load of obscene fat in favor of the happier thought that we are storing sunshine. Or better yet, playing a critical part in the cycle of useful energy: Sunlight > Chocolate > Fat People > Gasoline. What a shame to toss bag after bag of lipid gold into hazardous waste bins instead of using it to fuel our lipomobiles.
There are many such efficient solutions to the problems facing mankind. Shipping all those problematic mad cows, for example, from Britain to Cambodia where they could roam the countryside detonating all of Kissinger's leftover land mines. Or as I suggested the other day, sending all our captured illegal aliens to law school and flooding the streets of America with attorneys willing to work for $8.50 an hour. Does one receive a Nobel prize for such brilliant solutions? Hardly.
Do not encourage your children to think outside the box. They will live isolated lives and suffer the scorn of lesser minds for their trouble.
My god I feel I am going to be hunted down and some rich person suck the fat out of me to heat their homes. Maybe just save the money and put me on the fire whole. what next stealing my organs for profit.
Soylent Oil is PEOPLE!!!
Fat Lady has sung
"what next stealing my organs for profit."
Already done. Lots of Indian's are afraid of having any kind of surgical operation because a doctor and operating crew was arrested for stealing kidneys.
Coming soon to this side of the pond, the insurance companies offer to trade you medical care for your other bodily parts in exchange for a kidney or other paired organ.
I want to be a candle.
Finally a use for the many tonnes of liposuctioned fat harvested every year.
Whats this donate crap. Let the market determine the price for my pound of flesh.
When the terminator seeds do their deadly deed, the skinny people won't make it until the next harvest. Best way to avoid food inflation is eat cheap, and when food becomes too expensive to eat, diet.
Besides, do you know what they do with food that does not get sold by the expiration date? They chuck it. How much food that never gets eaten is mind boggling. It would never get distributed to the hungry.
During the depression, food prices dropped since food quantity was greater than people could afford to buy. Rather than provide subsidies to the farmers to produce the food and sell it at the low market price, FDR gave them 100 million in subsidies to reduce the food supply. Crops rotted in the field. Hogs were butchered and left rot. Farmers got paid. But only the rich farmers got the subsidies. This created food shortages, and some estimates indicate as many as 1 million or more Americans died of starvation. The fat ones survived.
History repeats. Eat up while you can. We will all be on a diet soon.
This explains the seemingly sudden shift to a small percentage of obese people in this country to the now very low percentage of normal to underweight ones. Maybe that plan has been in the works for a long time.
Also explains the big push now to abolish birth control. Get those females pregnant, keep them pregnant - then pop those babies out and start fattening them up!
And here we've always thought it was aliens from space we had to worry about coming and using us like cattle.
I'm laughing so hard I've wet myself.
Well, to put this wonderful "solution" into perspective...
The US consumed 20.52 million of barrels of oil per day in 2006. At that rate, all the excess fat of our "obesity epidemic" would fuel the US for 3.4 hours.
Yeah, it might be a fun poke at fat people (as if they weren't the last group you can publicly ridicule), but don't think this is anything other than that.
Well... okay. But what about the mad cow idea?
I am going on a diet today right this second, not another donut for me. I am also going to destroy my liver with cheap wine. I will even stop sleeping in case they come in the night. People are just the animal at the top of the food chain for now.
An SUV just pulled up the drive, maybe suck that double cheese burger out of me so they can drive around more. I am worried sick, and that makes me eat more. Help they are after me................................
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.
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