Friday, December 14, 2012

1883 Got Fuel?

Every now and then you see the sign, "Got Milk?" It's been a great advertising campaign. So much so that everybody has adopted it for their "gots." Got Corgis?" "Got Honor Students?" I even saw some entrepreneur on the street corner with a cardboard sign the other day that said, "Got Food?"
I think it would be a good Beano lead in. "Got Gas?"
Maybe that's why this article I read recently got me thinking. Apparently a brigade of protestors manned by thousands of European dairy farmers mobbed Brussels not long ago to protest the drop of price supports on milk.
They even had a firehose, with which they blasted milk at riot police, coating their shields and helmets with creamy white fluid. Why? Because it costs $1.96 a gallon to produce milk and you can only sell it for $1.28 wholesale.
Really, I thought? It's only $1.96 a gallon to produce milk wholesale? I thought this because I had just filled my tank with gas for $3.49 a gallon.
The solution is obvious. Someone needs to invent a car that runs on milk. There must be a way. It's loaded with organic stuff, fat from which we could render carbon. Or milk sugars from which we could get alcohol.
What seems more promising as a renewable fuel supply, milk butter or corn? And modern dairies churn the stuff out. I see giant milk trucks on the highways just like gas trucks.
You could have the catalytic cottage cheese conversion unit right in your hybrid GM Cadillactose. Just pull right up to the dairy. "Fill 'er up with 1%, Darrell." Like the drive-thru dairies of old.
Maybe even hook directly to the cow, like those automatic milker machines.
That would be udderly amazing.
America, ya gotta love it.

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