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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?
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.
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.
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.
Burning fat for heat is traditional. The Inuit have been doing it for millennia.
Burning fat for heat is traditional. The Inuit have been doing it for millennia.
Hmmn, I think America's energy problems are over.
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
"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
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.
Don't be stupid. People aren't raising pigs and cows just to burn them; they're raising them for food. The carcasses are a by-product that would be wasted otherwise.
Of course, it'd be more efficient if people just ate feed grain directly instead of feeding it to cows and then eating the cows (and burning their carcasses). However, people don't like feed grain very much, whereas cows are quite tasty.