Earlier reading about milk shortages in Venezuela I considered the recent spat of articles about the unsoundness of the idea of turning corn into fuel, simply because it takes rather a lot of energy to make corn, and even more to distill corn alcohol, such that energy out and energy in are wayyy to close to one another for the process to be worthwhile, particularly since that energy in comes somewhat from utilities, and the cheapest way to generate electricity in this country is coal. *breath*

well.

here we gave a means of turning organic matter into hydrogen. Which is the clean fuel that everyone loves. Apparently, one of the things with the highest conversion efficiencies, is lactic acid, which is a by-product of milk going sour. So how about this?

We feed .. whatever to cows. who make milk. we take the milk and let it sour, no need to waste it on starving humans, hey, milk producers want their milk prices to be higher anyway, otherwise the government wouldn't be there, setting price minimums. we take the sour milk and filter out all those contaminants, you know, the parts that aren't lactic acid, and then feed them though the processors. Vola, energy product so horribly inefficient that people will be begging for ethanol. Plus more cows! Pooping more methane. Those capitalists will be begging us to go back to turning perfectly good food into gas. Their losses would be much less!!1



anyway. This lovely bit of sarcasm was going to have graphics, equations, but then I decided I simply didn't care enough to show how stupid an idea it would be. Not to say anything bad about the linked to article, Because they were basically "we can take the things you throw away and make it into something useful." just throwing it out there because really? really? I consider the whole thing pretty funny. Bonus points for ideas a politician might buy (I bet I could sell the milk idea to a few) that is less efficient. Anyone?