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Norfolk Town's Schools First To Be Heated By Burning Cattle
A "trailblazing" Norfolk town has begun heating many of its buildings - including the schools - by burning oil made from melted-down cow and pig carcasses. The strategy is described as "equal or lower in carbon footprint than natural gas." Should schools have to offer vegetarian heating?
What seriously could go wrong!
Granted, this is idle, but the sensationalist headlines are getting old.
Caus, you know, making oil from slaughter by-products is pretty much the same as "burning cattle for heat"
burn mor chikin
I'm sure PETA will have an orgasmic heart-attack or two for this one.
Should schools have to offer vegetarian heating?
You want to heat your school by burning vegetarians? You people are sick! Sick I tell you! Sick!
Next you'll be telling me that soylent green is people. Yeah, sure, like the government would let that happen.
I see nothing in the article that says they feel this is better than wind or solar power. Instead, it is simply stated that they feel this will reduce their carbon footprint relative to using heating oil or natural gas only. Renewable energy sources aren't mentioned in the article, at all.
So we should bury the refuse instead of utilizing as much as we can?
Clearly, you've been educated beyond your intellect.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Uh, cattle are renewable.
-Peter
It's a wonderful leap forward in green technology. By eliminating the sources of methane gas, the world gets a lot greener.
Once you can get over the sound of all the shrieking cows.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
And I suspect we always will.
And lots of the parts will only be eaten by Anthony Boudain and such and as such we will cow parts to dispose of.
And our heating/power systems are geared to use hydrocarbons.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
I thought biodiesel and such was as green as it gets.
Cold-pressed cow sounds like a renewable source of hydrocarbons.
Someone with carcasses they need to dispose of anyway?
-Peter
Incidentally, so are babies. Which begs the question: why aren't we looking into babies as an alternative source of energy? I'm sure they can be melted down just as easily and I'll bet we can find plenty of willing producers.
...at first, I'd assumed it was a truncated headline, with the word "dung" left off of the end.
That would be nothing new at all, anyway.
Ok. Fine. The article says nothing about traditional renewable resources. Happy?
Indeed, and so are the losers who are against using waste fat for fuel. America has both a fat problem and an energy problem that can be fixed through liposuction and the candle and fuel industry.
Burning fat for heat is traditional. The Inuit have been doing it for millennia.
The carbon in the cows came from plants, which came from CO2 when the plants where doing photosynthesis - so it is carbon neutral.
Burning fat for heat is traditional. The Inuit have been doing it for millennia.
Hmmn, I think America's energy problems are over.
Which begs the question: why aren't we looking into babies as an alternative source of energy?
I saw a movie about that.
as dr. liposuction diesel:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/21/fat-fuel-biodiesel-tech-sciences-cz_pcb_1222fatfuel.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When you consider the energy required to grow a fat pig or cow, how could this ever be practical?
It takes thousands of pounds of feed grain to raise a big pig or cow. Only a small percentage of that energy gets captured as oil or fat.
Then you need to expend more energy to melt out that oil or fat.
I suspect it would be about ten times more efficient if they just burned the feed grain in their furnaces.
"Equal or lower in carbon footprint than natural gas."
Is someone here trying to tell us that prepping farmland, sewing and growing crops on it, feeding it to cattle which then ist slaughtered and/or dies of natural causes and blended into a pulp in order to get oil out of it has a lower carbon footprint than natural gas? And what about turning just the crops into biogas and skipping the cattle all together? Is this cattle-industry PR for the extra-stupid, or what?
Lower carbon footprint ... Give me a f*cking break! Everybody with more that 2 braincells knows that modern livestock agriculture has about the worst eco-balance you can get, apart from maybe burning coal for electricity or something. From entire state-sized patches of rainforest being uprooted each year for argentiniean beefsteak and Mc-Donalds Burgers, south-american soy being shipped halfway across the globe to austria to be fed to their cattle while the people there are starving all the way to long-chained uber-pesticides for chowcrop monocultures that seep into the groundwater and polute the entire foodchain for decades to come, industrial mass livestock is one of the cornerstones of our current enviromental problems and ought to be taxed heavyly worldwide. 30% VAT on every livestock - dead or alive - crossing international borders just to cover the eco-balance is what we really need. I strongly suspect the linked article to be some PR rubbish launched by a meat industry in recession.
Bottom line: Complete and utter bullshit. Mod accordingly and move along.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why not! Babies are already used as cheap alternatives to turkey at Christmas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Senility)
Oh, wait, I thought you said Burning Castle.
Never mind.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Don't be retarded. "Renewable" is of course a relative term. Oil and gas take millions of years to create, so they're not renewable. Cattle take a few years to grow. This qualifies for "renewable". Even trees are considered renewable, and even the fastest-growing timber takes about 20 years to mature.
There's a good reason for this. If you had read the article, they said that proponents of burning animal carcasses admitted that, by itself, it's a very inefficient method of heating, since so much energy has to go into raising these animals to maturity; you end up getting less energy from burning them than you did getting to that point.
However, the animals' primary use is for food, not heat. The carcasses burned are just a leftover waste product normally, so burning them for heat makes sense because otherwise the carcasses would just be trash.
Babies, unlike farm animals, aren't normally used for food. So, applying the logic above, it wouldn't make economic sense to raise them just to burn them.
I hope this answers your question.
our current civilization has become an increasingly brutal civilization
You're not very familiar with the history of the human race are you?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I used to live in Norfolk, Virginia, and I never thought they would have resorted to this.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
the brutality in history is disorganized and comparably small by percentage.
today its mass manufactured, standardized, spanning the globe.
Read radical news here
What a modest proposal
Yeah, I read the article, I know renewable energy sources aren't mentioned. That was kind of my point. If they want to reduce their carbon footprint, they should look in another direction. Seriously, just on a practical level, the energy it takes to grow the animals has to offset any 'savings' gained.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Tell that to Alexander the Great. Attila. $ROMAN_EMPEROR. Genghis Khan. The European colonial powers. General Sherman.
Even a century ago (just before the outbreak of WW I), nobody thought much of minimizing the impact of war on civilians. No one cared about collateral damage. The term didn't even exist. Go back another 50 years and it was still widely considered a normal part of war to wage it upon civilians as well as military personnel. The enemy was the enemy.
Fast forward to WW II and you find a lot of that again. WW II was a lot more brutal than WW I. WW II was in many respects an anomaly in the midst of a general trend toward less brutal war. In both the European and Pacific theaters, targeting civilians was common on all sides,
The general trend has been toward fighting war with kid gloves on. For example, in WW II, not one brick would have been left piled on another in a place like Fallujah. It would have been bombed flat, along with any civilians who didn't leave.
Without arguing for brutality from a moral standpoint, it's pretty clear that the way we fight wars these days has a lot to do with the difficulty of achieving the objective of a war. When you're fighting a war, "Screw public opinion, screw the enemy, and screw any civilian who gets in the way" is a far more effective way to win it. Or as Machiavelli would put, it's a lot better to have people fear you than love you. Fear lasts. Love doesn't.
War - and humanity - are definitely less brutal now than in the past. There are exceptions, of course. Islam, which has practiced conversion at swordpoint since the day of Mohammed, has, if anything, become more brutal. Saladin treated prisoners and civilians in accordance with Islamic standards of hospitality. Not so for bin Laden and Wahabis in general. They'd just as soon not take prisoners, and when they do, they'll like as not wind up dead, unless maybe they convert to Islam and switch sides.
A Modest Proposal indeed!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Agreed. Apparently most of these posters have never heard why baleen oil from whales was so sought after...
Since most vegetarians are skinny and frail, I don't think they'd burn long enough to really be efficient
Clearly we must burn dead people instead.
Oh wait, that's already very common and well accepted.
Sam ty sig.
And after you melt the cow can you cast it into a new cow?
Babies, unlike farm animals, aren't normally used for food. So, applying the logic above, it wouldn't make economic sense to raise them just to burn them.
I'd be voting for you, should we elect a /. advocate for, say, free software. Just to hear your arguments. In fact, I tried getting into your rhetoric mood to come up with a few possible examples. And failed. Horribly so.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
We need a god of evolution to make cows which burn better. Someone contact Ponder Stibbons.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
That is a truly offal idea.
I know, I know, this is Slashdot, but you really need to read articles before commenting on them, because /. article summaries, are, as a rule, always incorrect in some important detail (yes, hopeless, I admit, and I also admit to making the same mistake in the past, but. . .).
From the fine article:
Nobody is suggesting that it makes sense to raise livestock exclusively for fuel use. What they are proposing is using the millions of gallons of waste fat and oil created as a byproduct of food and leather production worldwide, every year, as a fuel source. This is, really, a very ancient idea. Almost all peoples around the world (except those few ethnic groups, such as Hindus, that may have been almost exclusively vegetarian) used the fats and oils from the animals they used for food and hide, as a source of light and heat - whale blubber, bison fat, caribou fat, etc. have been rendered into lamp oils and candles for thousands of years.
But, it's true that this is not really a 'solution', because there is not enough waste oil to provide all of the heat that is necessary for buildings in cold climates the world 'round. However, it does make sense to use those waste products to the extent that they can be, to heat some buildings.
i said that the civilization grew increasingly more brutal, and you actually spoke against this but actually supported it ?
that being said, brutality context here is not limited to wars and brutality in between mankind.
Read radical news here
Now there's a modest proposal.
Sounds like a modest proposal.
freeze dry in liquid nitrogen, use the resulting powder as fertilizer. wrote a diary a few years back:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/11/6/0016/23536
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
That school is SO metal!!
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No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
We use a vastly greater amount of fuel to burn (cremate) dead bodies than they would provide as a fuel source.
And it's been that way since bodies were first put on funeral pyres.