#901 Funnygus

So I was reading this science fiction book not long ago and like most science fiction it had some ideas that were pretty cool. Like on this far-off planet they had used genetic engineering to create or modify trees into fuel trees.
Fuel trees weren’t like ours, where you just burn them, they were composed of enough fuel-making material where they could be rendered into liquid fuel. Which I assume was then burned like gasoline.
They also had trees engineered to make paper leaves to write on directly. Without the expensive pulp and rendering process we use to make paper now. Kind of cool.
I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if nature was more cooperative that way already? And low and behold, the next day I read this article about a fuel-making fungus.
That’s right, there’s this recently discovered fungus that in the process of digesting the stringy plant fiber cellulose, gasses off hydrocarbons. It breathes out vaporous fuel.
Which can then be siphoned off. You could have this stuff growing in factories as they do for baker’s yeast. It eats any cellulose. So it could be fed anything from switch grass to beauty bark. And we’d get oil.
We could actually eat our corn and fuel our cars with the cobs. Goodbye ethanol, hello fun-gas.
Get it? Fun-gas, like fungus...but with gas.
But I’m worried. I read another science fiction novel that speculated on the real fact of the largest organism in our world being a fungus that lives in an Oregon forest. It’s like 2200 acres or something like that.
It posed the question: If a fungus gets big enough, can it be intelligent?
Because, you know, fungi are everywhere. From your toenails to penguin tails. And they seem to grow better in warmer climates.
Now the fungal world is giving us hydrocarbon based fuel.
But if we burn that, don’t we still have to deal with global warming? It’s not drilling for oil that causes climate change, it’s burning it.
So out of the blue appears this wonderful fungus to help us warm the planet...
Hmmm.
America, ya gotta love it.