Friday, 6 May 2011

Alternative alternatives

Distilling for Blessed Gaia.
Scottish distilleries in Speyside announce that beginning in 2013 they'll be using residuals from whisky distilling as a sustainable fuel.

It always warms my heart to see innovators finding ways to come up with fuels to meet our growing energy needs–especially sustainable fuels.  In the spirit of helpful helpfulness, I'd like put forward my own small list of sustainable fuels that I've discovered are cheap, efficient, clean if properly used, and abundant enough to last us for the millennia, which is a pretty good definition of "sustainable".  The fuels are:
  • Oil
  • Natural gas
  • Coal
  • Uranium
  • Thorium
With all this, it's curious that Scotland is taking such a retrograde step of going back to the equivalent of peat burning.  Come on, you Hibernians, and join the rest of us in the 21st century.  You helped create the Industrial Revolution, why not enjoy it's benefits?

(Yes, I am being sarcastic.  If the distilleries were presenting this as a practical way to turn rubbish into cash, like the old-fashioned wheeze of feeding spent mash to pigs, I'd have no objections, but this endless stream of "alternatives" that are nothing but expensive, pointless "green" gestures strikes me as pure waste–the unrecyclable kind.)

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