Reducing Our Dependance on Petrol, One Whale at a Time

What was old is new again . . .

Put a whale in your tank.

'Big Bad Oil' had a grand run, but the tide seems to be a turnin'.  It seems some industrious seamen are creating 'biodiesel' from natural, organic, renewable whale oil.  For some reason, regular diesel does not count as "bio", perhaps because of age, so some fresh bio needs to be added to comply with marketing rules, or some such.

Back a decade or so ago, folks thought I was joking, or just plain mean (depending where on the envirowacko scale they were) when I suggested using whale oil to help end America's petrol addiction.  Well, here you go, fresh from The Guardian:
Whale oil to fuel whaling ships is a gruesome and surreal proposition

It is a fantastically surreal propostion. An Icelandic whaler, Kristján Loftsson, is powering his whaling ships using "biofuel" composed of 80% diesel – and 20% whale oil. Loftsson claims the oil is additionally friendly to the environment as it is rendered out of whale blubber using heat from Iceland's volcanic vents.

It is even more organic than first blush, with the geothermal aspect added in.

You see, back in the old days people used whale oil for their lanterns, hurricane lamps, and the like.  Then, before you could say Moby-Dick, Big Bad Oil came rolling in with their drilling rigs and started selling kerosine much cheaper than whale oil.  It was a slow process, those Big Bad Oil types are sneaky that way.  They disguised their original business as brine drilling operations.  They complained about running into oil by accident and called it undesirable.  Then, when nobody was looking, they put most of the whaling ships out of business with their predatory kerosine pricing.

1902 Electric

In the above article, I say go whale all the way, by golly!  Whales are renewable.  They sequester carbon, so when they breed and multiply they gather more carbon, which can then be burnt in the whaling ships or any other ships that wish to cozy up alongside and fill-up with a healthy dose of freshly rendered biofuel.  Whales are the switch-grass of the sea.

It does not have to stop there.  Back when The Rough Rider was riding around in an electric car, not much different than the cars the environmentalists want every to be riding in now, the seagoing industry was using other forms of biofuel.  More from the article:

It's not the first time animal fat has been used to feed the whale hunt: 20th-century whaling operations in the Southern Ocean made similar use of penguins, throwing the oil-rich animals on fires as living kindling.

Imagine one of these running on whale oil!

Of course, polar bears, sea lions, and seals could be used for the same thing.  Me thinks these folks are just not thinking outside of the box enough.  Perhaps the B. Hussein Obama administration needs a spiffy report on these ideas so some federal funding could kick-start this lost art of environmental stewardship, for the good of mankind.

It does not have to stop at the shoreline either!  In the old days, trains ran on wood, then coal, and finally diesel fuel.  For some reason, Big Bad Oil beat the whalers to the train fuel market.

With the proper breeding and harvesting, every piece of heavy equipment on the planet could be running on clean, renewable, organic whale oil in a decade.