Like the beginning of every great science fiction movie, experts claim that they’ve discovered a cure for our fuel-dependency woes that only requires an army of genetically modified bacteria… that eat wheat straw and excrete crude oil. You read that right: scientists have created bugs which are able to snack on woodchips or sugar cane and produce waste in the form of easily malleable oil. Not only are the buggers capable of creating a byproduct which can quickly be refined into fuel for vehicles, but scientists say the process is carbon-negative — it outputs less carbon than is required to produce it. Director of the project — dubbed LS9 — Greg Pal says that barrel prices could run as low as $50, and that the company plans to have a commercial facility producing the crude in 2011.

It’s strange living in a world where you can’t discern fact from fiction.

According to the Energy Information Administration, in 1922, gasoline cost the current-day equivalent of $3.11. Today, according to the EIA, gasoline is selling for about $3.77 per gallon, only about 20 percent more than 86 years ago….

American gasoline is also dirt-cheap compared with gas in other countries. British motorists are currently paying about $8.38 per gallon for gasoline. In Norway, a major oil exporter, drivers are paying $8.73.

—Robert Bryce, “Gasoline Is Cheap“

Every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 46