So, I guess just as the US has become a leading exporter of fossil fuels and independent of foreign sources and just as America is on the cusp of driving windmill cars to save the planet, the Russian petroleum company Rosneft announced the opening of a giant oil field in the Arctic. * Russia, with an estimated 80 billion barrels of known petroleum reserves and potentially more in as yet unknown reserves under Siberia and the submerged continental shelf, currently has more than twice the reserves as the United States. But, take heart, Americans, because windmill cars won’t use petroleum products, not even for lubrication, so American reserves will last centuries, whereas the Russians will probably burn through their oil in, well, centuries.
Ah! That Paris thing, “Accord,” “Agreement,” whatever. Weren’t the Russians among the many signees? I know the Chinese and Indians were. Wonderful news: Didn’t the Chinese just announce they would stop making coal-fired energy plants and go green by the end of a few decades? What, pray tell, was the motivation for the announcement? Could it be altruism? Or stifling pollution from unrestricted burning of coal without scrubbers on the smokestacks? And India? So, remember that India signed the “agreement” with a caveat, that it would “go green” only if other countries pitched in financially and if “going green” would not interfere with its economic growth?
But Americans will drive windmill cars and lubricate them with avocado oil, or butter, or olive oil.
Just had a thought! Why not produce cars with square wheels? True, such vehicles might be good only on icy roads, but, then, global warming is supposed to generate worse winters according to some climate-change experts. And bigger, fiercer storms. That means more powerful winds to drive windmill cars, as long as one wants to travel in the direction of the prevailing winds. Of course, if the windmills provide sufficient power, cars could move magnetically over steel rails. Maglevs for all! We could call lines of such cars “trains.”
But what if the Prevailing Westerlies become so strong that all the cars and trucks with square wheels get pushed to the East Coast every winter with no return winds? What if all the people get pushed eastward and end up on the coast just as the rising seas inundate the coastal plain states, putting, for example, most of Delaware under water? Isn’t sea level supposed to rise to the height of Mt. Ararat?
Boats! Sailboats! They can use winds, and don’t require much lubrication, maybe a little bacon fat on the rigging connections to the masts. And with a good jib sail, they can even move on calmer days, though calmer days ahead without petroleum might send the US into the economic doldrums.
But I’m growing fond of that idea of cars with square wheels. With everyone pushed eastward, the West will become the Wild West again, the bison will proliferate, the grizzlies and elk will roam freely, and the sage brush will sweep over the high plains like brooms to clean off the last vestiges of intrusive, environment-destroying humanity. Yep. Square wheels.
But—and you know there’s always a “but”—what about heating homes during those cold global-warming winters that blast the burgeoning eastern population? Solar panels? Nah. All that increased storminess will have blocking cloud cover. No doubt, windmills will suffice for home energy needs if the turning blades don’t need lubricants.
Anyway, even without sufficient energy for heating from fossil fuels, there are always turkey-feather blankets. We ought to have an excess of turkey feathers, given our annual consumption of the bird that spikes during Thanksgiving. Turkey-feather blankets? Hey, don’t laugh. Apparently, feathers are an ancient solution to cold nights. According to William D. Lipe and others, feather blankets were used at least for a couple of millennia. Lipe and others have one from the thirteenth century. Doesn’t take too many turkeys to make one, either. Maybe ten turkeys. All one needs is some yucca fiber and 11,000 feathers.**
And why not turkey feather upholstery in the square-wheeled cars? Not exactly vegan, but certainly saves the skin of lots of cattle, skin they will need during their prolonged lives under cold winds. Hey, I think I’m onto something here. We can save the planet—except for the turkeys—and lower our cholesterol simultaneously. We’ll do away with plastic bags and, in fact, all plastics made from fossil carbon. We’ll make our windmills from wood and turkey-feather cloth. We’ll use turkey-feather sails on our boats as we sail over an inundated coast.
And the beauty of it all is that we can do all this in record time. We can replace fields of cotton with fields of yucca to produce the cordage we need to bind the feathers into blankets and upholstery. No more need to crop dust with poisonous, anti-boll weevil insecticides. There’s a cascading effect here. Soon, Earth will be the pristine paradise it was before there was any consciousness to recognize that it was a pristine paradise. And the change will start with those square wheels and turkey-feather blankets.
*https://phys.org/news/2020-11-russian-oil-giant-vast-arctic.html. Accessed Thanksgiving, 2020.
**https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X20303953?via%3Dihub. Accessed Thanksgiving, 2020.
Ah! That Paris thing, “Accord,” “Agreement,” whatever. Weren’t the Russians among the many signees? I know the Chinese and Indians were. Wonderful news: Didn’t the Chinese just announce they would stop making coal-fired energy plants and go green by the end of a few decades? What, pray tell, was the motivation for the announcement? Could it be altruism? Or stifling pollution from unrestricted burning of coal without scrubbers on the smokestacks? And India? So, remember that India signed the “agreement” with a caveat, that it would “go green” only if other countries pitched in financially and if “going green” would not interfere with its economic growth?
But Americans will drive windmill cars and lubricate them with avocado oil, or butter, or olive oil.
Just had a thought! Why not produce cars with square wheels? True, such vehicles might be good only on icy roads, but, then, global warming is supposed to generate worse winters according to some climate-change experts. And bigger, fiercer storms. That means more powerful winds to drive windmill cars, as long as one wants to travel in the direction of the prevailing winds. Of course, if the windmills provide sufficient power, cars could move magnetically over steel rails. Maglevs for all! We could call lines of such cars “trains.”
But what if the Prevailing Westerlies become so strong that all the cars and trucks with square wheels get pushed to the East Coast every winter with no return winds? What if all the people get pushed eastward and end up on the coast just as the rising seas inundate the coastal plain states, putting, for example, most of Delaware under water? Isn’t sea level supposed to rise to the height of Mt. Ararat?
Boats! Sailboats! They can use winds, and don’t require much lubrication, maybe a little bacon fat on the rigging connections to the masts. And with a good jib sail, they can even move on calmer days, though calmer days ahead without petroleum might send the US into the economic doldrums.
But I’m growing fond of that idea of cars with square wheels. With everyone pushed eastward, the West will become the Wild West again, the bison will proliferate, the grizzlies and elk will roam freely, and the sage brush will sweep over the high plains like brooms to clean off the last vestiges of intrusive, environment-destroying humanity. Yep. Square wheels.
But—and you know there’s always a “but”—what about heating homes during those cold global-warming winters that blast the burgeoning eastern population? Solar panels? Nah. All that increased storminess will have blocking cloud cover. No doubt, windmills will suffice for home energy needs if the turning blades don’t need lubricants.
Anyway, even without sufficient energy for heating from fossil fuels, there are always turkey-feather blankets. We ought to have an excess of turkey feathers, given our annual consumption of the bird that spikes during Thanksgiving. Turkey-feather blankets? Hey, don’t laugh. Apparently, feathers are an ancient solution to cold nights. According to William D. Lipe and others, feather blankets were used at least for a couple of millennia. Lipe and others have one from the thirteenth century. Doesn’t take too many turkeys to make one, either. Maybe ten turkeys. All one needs is some yucca fiber and 11,000 feathers.**
And why not turkey feather upholstery in the square-wheeled cars? Not exactly vegan, but certainly saves the skin of lots of cattle, skin they will need during their prolonged lives under cold winds. Hey, I think I’m onto something here. We can save the planet—except for the turkeys—and lower our cholesterol simultaneously. We’ll do away with plastic bags and, in fact, all plastics made from fossil carbon. We’ll make our windmills from wood and turkey-feather cloth. We’ll use turkey-feather sails on our boats as we sail over an inundated coast.
And the beauty of it all is that we can do all this in record time. We can replace fields of cotton with fields of yucca to produce the cordage we need to bind the feathers into blankets and upholstery. No more need to crop dust with poisonous, anti-boll weevil insecticides. There’s a cascading effect here. Soon, Earth will be the pristine paradise it was before there was any consciousness to recognize that it was a pristine paradise. And the change will start with those square wheels and turkey-feather blankets.
*https://phys.org/news/2020-11-russian-oil-giant-vast-arctic.html. Accessed Thanksgiving, 2020.
**https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X20303953?via%3Dihub. Accessed Thanksgiving, 2020.
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