NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE & COMMONS – The Brown Revolution

No, uh, kidding, I really did my scientific homework and wrote this story, and NATURE really did publish it.

Your Majesty, members of the Swedish Academy, fellow Nobel Laureates, Ladies, Gentlemen, and others, including former skeptics and tormentors, while convention and politesse would have me falsely protest my unworthiness to receive these two Nobel Prizes for the same so-called discovery, receiving the Nobel for Biology and for Peace at the same time is hardly conducive to false modesty, nor, after what I have had to endure in ridicule to finally stand here before you, am I in a particularly polite mood.

After all, even after the Brown Revolution has rescued the world economy from its energy crisis and rescued the biosphere from the global warming crisis, that which has saved global civilization and indeed life on earth itself, still cannot fly the public banner of its own true name, and I who championed its cause am still a victim of ridicule in odious cartoons and toilet graffiti and will no doubt be even now denigrated as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Scatology in the popular yellow press.

Very well then! Let my twin Nobels combine under that glorious Brown Banner that I have borne to this victory! Stand and salute the savior of the planet! The noble brown substance that has replaced petroleum and coal to become the basic abundant energy source of our triumphant global civilization!

A hundred and fifty trillion kilos of it produced per annum by man and beast at the very least! Converted to over 45 trillion cubic meters of methane, the energy equivalent of more than the world’s yearly oil production at its long by-gone and unlamented peak! Free food as a by-product! Every year forever as long as the grasses grow and the rivers flow and it flows downhill through the food chain with them!

Captured from every retooled toilet in the world, from every modernized closed-circuit pigpen and cattle feed lot, chicken coop and zoo! The methane brewed out of it with simple solar collectors and panels heating the great stills generating abundant electricity to charge our hydrogen fuel cells cars and trucks, to power our industry, light our homes and our cities!

And this methane not burned in the open air, poisoning it with photochemical smog and raising the temperature of the planet with greenhouse gasses, but confined to sealed closed-loop generators recycling the carbon dioxide from its combustion into carbohydrates to feed the hungry via sunlight, water, and artificial photosynthesis, as the biomass of this planet has always done for just about as long as it has had one.

Oh yes, after having championed its cause and saved the world from its own stupidity at the cost of making myself a laughing stock in the process, the only modesty which I am in any mood to proclaim here today before this august company is that I invented nothing that the biosphere wasn’t doing quite well by itself until industrial civilization turned up its nose at the obviously natural and the naturally obvious and broke the natural cycle.

Sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates via photosynthesis, carbohydrates fueling animal life, animal life releasing carbon dioxide out one end and water and fecal fecundity out the others, and so it goes.

Yet we flushed it down our toilets, we dumped it into the seas, we let it pour into our rivers and pile up in feed-lot lagoons to spread disease and stink, we burned it in the open air and held our noses, we spent billions and billions throwing it away or trying to, and all the while we were wasting the eternally renewable resource that has now at last become the energy source of global civilization, and allowed us to halt the greenhouse warming and feed the starving on People Chow.

Two hundred and fifty trillion kilos of it each year!

The energy equivalent of a peak year’s oil consumption!

Manure! Dung! Crap! Fecal slurry! Night soil! Meadow-muffins! Doody! Poo!

Call it by its hundreds of pallid euphemistic aliases, but call it also what it truly is, the long-despised, mocked, disdained, substance we all produce each and every day of our lives, along with every animal we feed upon and many that we don’t, that has become that which fuels the transformational machineries of the first human civilization to have freed itself from burning non-renewable fossil fuels.

The sovereign substance of our glorious post-petroleum age!

Here in this most hallowed hall of science and culture of our species let us finally speak it plain.

As you have crowned me with the golden wreath of the Nobel Laureate, so do I now crown The Sun King of our glorious Brown Revolution with his true name before you! Honor him! Praise him! Say it openly at long last!

All hail King Shit!

 

END

About NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE & COMMONS

I, Norman Spinrad, are more or less the editor, and/or producer, and the central writer, but if you are reading this, you can be part of the Commons. Anything I write here is pro bono and can be posted and/or printed by anyone, including newspapers, news sites, etc. free of charge but not sold to any third party for money and provided that NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE & COMMONS is credited.

Anyone or any entity may join the Commons simply by requesting to receive Norman Spinrad At Large & Commons by email. Anyone in the Commons can reply to what I write here by email and if I find it Germain I will ask permission to publish it and/or may OK this in advance. Not everything will be printed, I am sort of the editor and sort of the publisher. As editor, I am open to things that I might want to publish that not only may disagree with something I’ve written or feel should start a debate. No one’s email will be revealed except by request.

I am not doing this for payment. I will not pay anyone. That will not change but there may be improvements including those suggested by the Commons. Anyone can and is encouraged to do the same thing themselves.

One web, many spiders

Norman Spinrad
1 rue de la Bucherie
75005 Paris
06-61-97-53-43
normanrspinrad@gmail.com

Source: Auto Draft

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