Hey. Have you heard of oil? Like, do you actually know what the fuck oil is? It was embarrassingly recently that I learned that oil that comes from the ground is decomposed organic material—a.k.a. dead bacteria, plants, and animals whose corpses happened to have never been eaten. It’s definitely not some naturally occurring chemical that happens to be stuck in the ground as I had once assumed.

Every time you get in a car or fly in a plane, what is it you’re burning? The cadavers of canaries, the bark of Birches, among other formerly frolicking, one-time sunbathing beings. It’s a wonder we vegans agree to use air travel and plastic at all.

So, given that oil is made up of dead plants and animals [edit: okay, I’m being informed it’s almost all dead bacteria {edit: but I’m also being told that bacteria are people, too}], I wondered how much fuel would, say, an uneaten goat produce a million years hence? I looked it up, did the rough math, and was pretty shocked to discover that a 70-pound goat would produce only a half-teaspoon of gasoline!

It’s just because living things have been dying for so very long that we have so many of their bodies to burn liquefied corpses to incinerate. In a fuel-efficient car that gets you 30 miles to the gallon, the gas from a goat drives you only 30 yards. That’s the length of a tennis court! All the fauna and flora in the San Diego Zoo distill to around a quarter tank of gas! That’s so fucked up, if I may say so myself.

A more honest mpg, in my view, would be “meters per goat,” with the conversion conveniently being that twenty-five miles per gallon equals twenty-five meters per goat.