Electric cars have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but a more immediately viable transportation fuel of the future could be liquid derived from coal. Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up the environmentally unfriendly fuel more economical than greener alternatives.

If oil prices rise again, adoption of the new coal-to-liquid technology, reported this week in Science,  could undercut adoption of electric vehicles or next-generation biofuels. And that’s bad news for the fight against climate change.

The new process could cut the energy cost of producing the fuel by 20 percent just by rejiggering the intermediate chemical steps, said co-author Ben Glasser of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. But coal-derived fuel could produce as much as twice as much CO2 as traditional petroleum fuels and at best will emit at least as much of the greenhouse gas.

Well, at least we won’t have to worry about going Mad Max on each other for oil.  

And the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but ffs, I was excited about visiting the Grand Canyon someday while Arizona was still habitable for human life.

Well, the glorious market might solve this for you, though not quite like you think:

Farmer Michael’s feed costs have risen 400 percent in the last twelve months. To make a profit on the beautiful turkeys his family is raising in time for Thanksgiving, he’ll have to charge a hundred bucks a bird. At Momofuku, I’m paying 150 percent more for humanely raised pork belly than I was paying at this time last year. And at the hyperglobal megachains that feed most of America, the only way they’ll be able to keep selling one-dollar hamburgers is to grow their “protein units” in petri dishes, add even more filler to their products, and outright enslave the workers whose backs they’re already breaking to keep costs artificially low.

That’s from this short article. Now, I’m not naiive, and I do realize that other outcomes are possible. For instance, maybe people will start eating way more Cap’N Crunch when they can’t afford to go to Arby’s anymore. That kind of industrial-scale super corn agriculture will still be the most efficient way to grow shit, as this nation’s corn infrastructure is the “pride” of the world, especially with dipshits trying to convince you that growing loads of corn and processing it into fuel is actually an efficient way to produce energy. (Hint: it isn’t.)

So yeah, less meat != healthier. But if you’re going to eat horribly, eating horribly minus the meat probably trumps eating horribly WITH the meat. And maybe people will eat more of the right kinds of plants when all those massive feedlots have to be converted into something.

It’s weird to think about how much of the American Way of Life has been utterly defined by cheap oil. Most people can’t even begin to know how intertwined into everything it is. I know I certainly have no idea, but at least this particular ignorance will be rectified in time, whether I want it to or not.