Free Milkshake by Matt Hammond

Elmerstein visited each of the Chairs of the twenty one
standing Senate Committees. To each man he gave a dossier and a two
hour explanation of what was expected of his Department over the
next eighteen months to two years. After that time there would be
an update meeting where progress so far, and the next steps
forward, would be discussed.
    The dossier each Senate Chair received contained a summary of
the meeting which had taken place at the Whitehouse a few weeks
before. It highlighted the United States’ huge appetite for energy,
and forecast the likelihood of dwindling world oil reserves within
forty years.
    It pointed out some startling facts relating to the Military’s
energy consumption to emphasise America’s insatiable thirst for
oil. It was noted that in 25 minutes an F-15 fighter jet burned 625
gallons of fuel, more than an average motorist used in a year. An
aircraft carrier used that much in 7 minutes. In 1989, the US
Military had consumed about 200 million barrels of oil, enough to
run the entire US urban mass transit system for 14
years.
    There was a page devoted to a draft speech the President
intended to make to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change
in Kyoto in December that had been written shortly after the Senate
had voted that the United States should not be a signatory to what
was to become known as the Kyoto Protocol on the basis that it
contained no binding targets or timetable for either developing or
developed nations. In the speech, the President called for all
countries to work together to develop existing and new technologies
which would rid the planet of its addiction to oil.
    The President would propose international co-operation on the
construction of a vast North Atlantic wave farm, an array of wave
energy converters stretching over 500 square miles, 70 miles off
the North West coast of Scotland. The harnessed energy, it had been
calculated, could supply enough power for the five biggest cities
in Western Europe or, more importantly, the major cities of the US
eastern seaboard.
    He proposed international funding for what he had personally
christened the Felin Project, an ambitious plan to construct a ring
of solar panels around the equator - passing through jungles,
deserts and across the oceans - to harness the unlimited power of
the sun at that latitude. Cables radiating out from the belt north
and south would carry the converted power, supplying an estimated
five per cent of the world’s electricity. The final suggestion was
the conversion of vast tracts of agricultural land into fuel
production farms, growing grasses or fast growing trees which could
be converted to fuel. The stumbling block, of course, being this
would mean using land currently in food production.
    But the speech was never made. The Senate Committee Chairmen,
one by one, realized that the President was actually blackmailing
them. He was preparing to offer American technology, scientific
knowledge and financial resources to the world for free unless they
backed his plan, the one technology not mentioned in the speech -
bovine caseinate additive.
    They read on. Sections specific to their own committee’s terms
of reference had been placed in individual dossiers. There were
paragraphs relating to military and trade relations with New
Zealand and policy suggestions over the next ten years designed to
keep relations between the two countries cool, at least at a
political level.
    In the dossier handed to the Chair of the Senate Committee for
Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry was a specific section on the
President’s recommendation that an agreement be reached to allocate
funds for research into the possibility of using crop-related
technology to produce bio-fuel. That was all, no budget allocation,
no further clues as to which university or private company was
currently engaged in research into such a thing. In this way the
agenda remained completely hidden. The individual seeds planted
into each committee