An Immodest Proposal

Yesterday (Saturday, April 4) afternoon I dropped by a "sign making party" that was being held in advance of the upcoming (April 15) Albuquerque Tea Party protest. During this visit, I was assured that anyone who brought a can of "pork" and beans to the protest would be able to donate that particular food item to a local food bank. This bit of information, quite naturally, set your humble correspondent's devious mind into motion. Soon, with the assistance of my trusty TI-30 calculator, I devised a temporary solution the problems of hunger and energy production.

Since modesty is definitely not among my few remaining virtues, I will call this my Immodest Proposal (with a sincere apology to Jonathan Swift). The trick will be seeing if I phrase this "delicately," yet still make my point.

My Immodest Proposal is based upon the following facts, and a bit of simple mathematics.

1) It is well-documented that pork and beans will, in a vast majority of cases, produce significant amounts of "intestinal gas" consisting of almost pure methane (CH₄).

2) This methane-rich intestinal gas, as documented in every fraternity house at one time or another, is easily ignited. Furthermore, when methane is ignited the following reaction occurs:

CH₄ + 2O₂ → CO₂ + 2H₂O + 890 kJ/mol

Since Congress and the incumbent administration are tossing money around in units of billions of dollars it would be quite easy to appropriate funds to purchase $1 billion worth of pork and beans which, assuming a (wholesale) price of $1/pound, would equal 1billion pounds of beans. If there are ~300 million residents (regardless of citizenship status) of the United States, this works out to about 3.2 pounds of pork and beans per resident.

Congress could then enact a law requiring or, failing that, the president would issue an Executive Order, requiring that every resident of the country consume the federally-mandated amount of pork and beans at a pre-arranged time.

Assuming that each resident will subsequently produce a total volume of 200cc of methane-rich intestinal gas, this will yield 60 billion cc of gas which would enter the atmosphere at an estimated velocity of 5 to 7 meters/second.

According to Bernoulli's Law of Gases, the newly-produced gas must displace an equal volume of atmosphere. Consistent with the Laws of Conservation of Mass and Kinetic Energy, the resulting displacement would produce sustained wind currents of ~25-30 km/sec (with localized gusts of 50 km/sec) lasting up to 4 hours. This would be sufficient to drive every windmill electrical generating station in the continental United States to full capacity and immediately add an additional 2.3 billion kilowatt/hours of electricity to the nation's power grid. It would also be sufficient to propel unsecured objects up to the mass of Barney Frank or Ted Kennedy into a low-Earth orbit.

In the Immodest Proposal there would be very few, if any, detrimental effects on the biosphere.

From #2, above, plus some basic chemistry and mathematics, it is known that 1 molecular mass unit of methane weighs ~16.042 g and thus has a density (at Standard Temperature and Pressure) of 0.717 kg/m³. Therefore, converting volumes and deriving mass, this yields

60 × 10⁹ cc / 1 × 10⁶ = 6 × 10⁴ m³ × 0.717 kg/m³ = ~ 45,000 kg CH₄

Given the potential benefits to society as a whole, this is a truly negligible amount of methane! So trivial, in fact, that even if burned it would not be sufficient to power even a small, conventional, coal-fired generating station for longer than a few minutes.

I call on my fellow citizens to contact those legislators that have as yet avoided impeachment to urge their support for this most worthy proposal and to demand that federal funding of this project be immediately forthcoming.