Last week I wrote about the greens and fairways on a golf course in the Czech Republic. Jonathan reminded me that golf courses are typically gangrene not green as they need copious amounts of irrigation water, fertilizer, and gasoline to keep them in playable condition. Yes Jonathan I had a momentary case on amnesia as I had written a blog about 18 months ago on the ridiculous notion that the United Arab Emirates should host a professional golf tournament on a course they created in the desert using water from reverse osmosis for irrigation. I have also opined that artificial grass for lawns is a much greener option for homeowners in the USA where the simple act of mowing the lawn with a power mower exceeds the carbon footprint of the manufacture of the synthetic lawn from waste tires.
There is a saying that “all that glitters is not gold” so on the basis of golf courses and mowed grass we should have a saying that “all that is green may be gangrene”. Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the East Coast and the Big Apple will get a massive drenching. This storm has enormous energy and will do damage. The silver lining in the storm clouds is that people will drive less for a few days, the power outages will save some coal, and folks won’t water their lawn for a few weeks. Jonathan had suggested to me a year or so back, that one could fly into the eye of the hurricane and spray ethanol into the eye and the heat removed by the evaporation will cool the eye down and cause hurricane to dissipate. I performed the calculation for Jonathan and I estimated to remove sufficient heat from a hurricane one would need to evaporate approximately 15 billion gallons of ethanol. Therefore my friend’s idea on how to dissipate a hurricane required as much ethanol as we consume in our blended gasoline here in these Ignited States. We use about 13 billion gallons of ethanol a year in our gasoline. I have often opined that corn ethanol is plain stupid and it is a crime against humanity that 40% of corn crop is used for transportation based ethanol. It is quite amazing that to remove the heat in the eye of a single hurricane we would need to use up over 40% of our corn crop in the USA converted into ethanol and evaporated for this purpose. Mother Nature is sure powerful and hurricanes are the embodiment of this power.
I did say I would opine on the fracking of shale to yield natural gas but I simply did not have time to adequately research this so I will opine on this next week. The Washington Monument is closed indefinitely due to the earthquake that struck near DC earlier this week. Maybe Mother Nature is trying to give our leaders a message with an earthquake and now a hurricane. Next week if we have boils or locusts I will know for sure that there is a pattern and I may have to join operation exodus and will get out of Dodge. Did you all know that Locusts are kosher to eat? Perhaps when we reach the Promised Land we will have a diet of fried locusts. There is no doubt in my mind that protein from insects are a future valuable source of protein and that it makes much more sense to farm termites using cellulose rather than converting cellulose to ethanol using billions of dollars from the now shaken and flooded department of entropy. Termites also release methane (natural gas) via their digestion of cellulose. Termites are not kosher and I have no clue why locusts are? Perhaps it is because locusts do not produce natural gas and termites do?