Solving the Overpopulation and Depleted Energy Reserve Problems in One Fell Swoop

I was watching Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days - Off the Grid this afternoon and during the scenes where they were discussing biodiesel and vegetable oil run cars, I had an idle and wicked thought.

The world, according to many, is overpopulated. I've seen people propose mass reduction in population on the planet as a means of reducing our environmental impact.

We are also running out of fossil fuels according to many. Biodiesel is a good idea, but I think people are overlooking a fact that they complain about when it comes to meat and meat eating: how much land is taken up growing grain crops to feed the cattle. So why aren't people yelling about the same thing in reference to vehicles? It's grain, it's pesticides and fertilizers, it's land taken up to grow non-food items.

In keeping with the proud tradition of Soylent Green is People! what would be the ramifications of turning people into fuels for vehicles?

Think about it for a minute: we turn people into fuel, there are less people and less demand for fuel. Eventually the population will fall into line with sustainable fuel sources and we could stop using people in this manner.

The big question is, who do we turn into fuel? People who have already died? Violent criminals? Volunteers?

This is meant to be a very hypothetical discussion for amusement purposes only, so no offense meant, and I hope, none taken.

[edit on 4-6-2007 by MajorMalfunction]

To be fair, I think we should do it by lottery. Figure that because of the large population we need a lot of fuel, so have a computer select, say, five percent of the people to render down to fat. That means that we now need only 95% as much fuel so the next lottery would be for only 4.75% of the people. The population would be down to 90.25% of when we began this program. It wouldn't be too long before we'd have a population so small that we would need very few bodies to render.

Oh, wait a minute. If we need 5% for fuel at the beginning and the population decreases we'd keep needing 5% of that decreased population until we go down to five people, render one, and down to four. Pretty quickly we'd be down to one person.

And I see other problems. Do we count an obese person as two fat values? Do we need to render two kids to equal one adult? Would anorexia be considered a crime because they are preventing anyone from collecting fat from them?

Rather than a lottery, we could have a vote. I'll bet that GWB and Dick Cheney would be great in a diesel engine first time round.

Occam

damn people for fuel? sounds kinda... creepy. interesting idea though, yes, very interesting.

all the controversy would surround how the people are selected, like mentioned before.

i'm thinking people that have already died would be best IF the person agrees to it.. but who's going to agree to be turned into fuel after they die? would you guys? i know i wouldn't

violent criminals could work too, if they are getting the death penalty anyways

creepy yet good idea, MM