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this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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askchapo
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if the U.S. figures out a way to mine methane from bullshit, it'll become self sustainable for an eon.
There's enough obnoxiously juicy farts from congress everytime they speak to keep us afloat anyway.
There are methane digester toilets. Some of them are even well-integrated with buildings.
But even between humans and all lifestock there isn't enough bullshit to fill up the American demand level. And methane wouldn't supply the broad range of hydrocarbons that crude oil supplies for industry.
If we were intelligent and adaptive and forward-thinking, we would retool our industries to run on solar and wind, with biogas to shore up the base rate and fill demand spikes.
I love how the commenter you're replying to is making a joke about America's culture of blatant lying, and you're making a serious analysis of using waste and farts as fuel. God, I love Hexbear sometimes.
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it would help the fertilizer problem though since that's what we need for industrial scale nitrogen fixation
If we're collecting human and livestock waste, we could just as easily use a bunch of the urine as well, and use manure directly instead of capturing the methane and using the methane to power the Haber-Bosch process + supply the central CH~2~ group.
It's much easier to imagine agriculture without oil than it is to imagine heavy industry without oil. Relying on plant/bacteria nitrogen fixation is something we need to pivot back to anyway. Marg Bar America means no longer flooding the landscape with more synthesized urea than it can handle, it means any given region living within its means, ecologically and biogeochemically.
And I'm saying all this as Hexbear's resident composting toilet proselytizer.