Who Needs Boeing? Washington Has Dead Cats.

I take it all back. We here in Washington are truly fortunate to have Christine Gregoire as our governor. She is a woman with a nose for opportunity. And her bloodhounding skills were never more in evidence than this last week. On the very day that she chose to announce her plans to establish Washington as a center for biofuels production, Spokane’s animal shelter bemoaned the fact that it had too many cats and was forced to euthanize a great many of them. These two news reports would have meant nothing, except that on that very day, CNN reported that a German inventor had developed a process for distilling diesel fuel from dead cats.
America has too little energy. Spokane has too many cats. Some guy in Germany says he that can turn cats into auto fuel. Jackpot! With Gregoire, Washington has all the pieces in place for an economic boom. We can become the Saudi Arabia of dead cats.
According to Spokane County Regional Animal Protection Services director Nancy Hill, "The average life of a cat coming in the shelter is one to seven days. We have way more coming in than going out. I feel like … rerouting traffic to make everyone adopt a cat."
This is where Christian Koch steps out of his Saxony, Germany beer hall and into Washington’s economic future. He says that he can make diesel fuel out of a mixture of household garbage and road-kill cats. "I drive my normal diesel-powered car with this mixture," said Koch. "I have gone 170,000 km (106,000 miles) without a problem."
Do the math. The disparity between the number of cats coming into the shelter and the number going out to adoption that Ms. Hill now bemoans would translate into fill ups and big profits. It needs just a little nudge from the governor.
And, Mr Koch says that he can produce his biofuel for about 30 cents per liter, or about $1.14 per gallon. That represents a considerable saving over the three bucks most of us are paying now.
With Mr. Koch’s ingenuity, Ms. Hill won’t have to reroute traffic to encourage cat adoptions. Traffic will reroute itself if drivers can save money filling their cars’ tanks.
I’m sure a lot of people would happily toss a few cats into the mix to lower their gas bills. I assume that Mr. Koch’s process is not species dependent. On the streets around my house here in Pullman, I could certainly find and contribute a few flattened squirrels to the brew. And, if I were permitted to toss in a few thousand live ones into the cauldron, I could make my fair city a far better place.
Given the sudden influx of problem bears into the Quad Cities area of late, we might be able to fill a few gas tanks with Ursus americanus.
Unfortunately, Ms. Gregoire’s vision gets cloudy when her populist demagoguery gets going on big government high octane. At the very same press conference where she promoted her biofuels initiative, she accused the oil industry of price gouging and threatened them with an investigation. Her short sightedness is that, for biofuels to have the slightest chance of succeeding, the cost of fossil fuels would have to be high. Would she be complaining if the products of her dead cat generators were commanding $3.00 per gallon? Probably not. Especially if the people making gazillions of dollars on biofuel were thanking the governor for her help with generous contributions to her political action committees.
But alas, if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. It seems that German media have the same commitment to accuracy as CBS or the New York Times exhibit in this country. It turns out that the reporter who authored the story about dead cat biofuels made it up. Mr. Kock’s biofuel formula includes no dead cats, or any other animal, although he allows that an occasional toad might have inadvertently fallen into his generator.
Not to worry though. I have no doubt that duplicate and fraudulent King County ballots can make a decent diesel too. I’m sure we have enough of those left over from the 2004 election that, when mixed with Pullman’s squirrels, will generate sufficient energy to keep the lights burning in Washington for a long, long time.