Olives As Energy

Breitbart.com reported yesterday that Spain is experimenting with olives as an energy source. From the article, I learned things about both Spain and olives that I never knew before.

First, Spain is the world's largest producer of olives. I didn't know. I would have thought Italy or Greece or Israel, but no. Spain.

Second, olives have cores, and those cores can be turned into the olive equivalent of Presto-logs and burned in specially adapted furnaces. Who knew?

Finally (I knew this already, but the re-confirmation of it is always awe-inspiring), environmentalists are gibberish-speaking, party-pooping hard-liners who want civilization to work its way backwards (or at the very least halt all forward progress), until technology mirrors that of the cave men. OK, maybe not that bad. Maybe only the hunter-gatherers. But still...

More than 300 buildings in Madrid now run on energy extracted from olive cores, raising hopes that olives -- of which Spain is the world's largest producer -- will become an alternative source of cheap power.

But ecologists have questioned the merits of the scheme.

What more do ecologists want? Here's what the head of Calardon, the company producing the olive-core fuel, has to say about it:

"The energy is 100 percent non-polluting, a kilo (2.2 pounds) of burnt olive cores, in reality wood compressed in a natural fashion, emits the same quantity of carbon gas as they would if you just left them to rot," insists Cabello.

This sounds good to me. If you let the olive cores rot and burn other fuels, you produce more carbon gas (and other byproducts) than if you burn the olive cores instead. But right now, the olive-as-fuel use is miniscule compared to the use of standard fuels.

And ecologists say that must remain the case as they fear the process has flaws that would clearly emerge if the process were to become more widespread.

In that case, energy cultures would become "intensive, which would presuppose a high utilisation of fuel-derived fertiliser, utilisation of high fuel consumption machines and, in that case, the energy balance is no longer positive," explains Sara Pizzinato from Greenpeace.

Pizzinato says that "the carbon gas emitted to produce this energy must not be greater than that which it is then going to emit and that the energy generated by this combustible (product) must be superior to the energy utilised in creating this combustible."

I have no idea what Pizzinato is saying. I wish she spoke English instead of Greenpeace. I think she means that if we encourage burning olive cores, the next thing we'll know is that technology will advance instead of regress, and we'll need even more olive cores to burn, and then we'd be even further from cave man technology, and that would be Really Bad.

Excessive use of the biomass burned on a large scale could have effects that would be in inverse proportion to those banked on in environmental terms.

It could lead to a drop in the quality of the land, desertification and climate change, ecologists warn.

Again, I'm baffled. No matter what people do, the ecologists (is "environmentalist" a bad word now?) predict that it will lead to a drop in the quality of land, desertification and climate change. How does planting more olive trees lead to desertification? I thought that was caused by deforestation. But more olive groves would be reforestation, not deforestation. And maybe the climate change that comes from olive-core burning will be global cooling, and it can offset global warming and save the planet. It's as good a guess as any.

These ecologists, especially Greenpeace ecologists, don't like anything. We can't burn oil or coal or natural gas, because (besides being ugly and destroying the land) these produce too much carbon dioxide, which increases the size of the ozone hole, which allows too much ultraviolet light to get through our atmosphere, which sunburns us to a crisp. This is bad.

We can't use nuclear (or even nuke-yoo-lar) power, because even though it doesn't produce carbon dioxide, it leaves radioactive byproducts that are really dangerous but that the environmeltalists won't let us process to make them less dangerous. This is bad.

We can't use wind power, because all those spinning blades might hurt some birds that fly around them, and because they might mess up Ted Kennedy's view from Martha's Vineyard. This is bad.

We can't use geothermal power, because the geothermal areas in our country are also areas of natural beauty, and we don't want to make them ugly. This is bad.

And now we can't use biomass, like olive cores, because it "would presuppose a high utilisation of fuel-derived fertiliser" or "the carbon gas emitted to produce this energy must not be greater than that which it is then going to emit" or it "would be in inverse proportion to those banked on in environmental terms." Whatever any of that means beyond: This is bad.