123 points

Holy shit, one kilo of butter from 60kg of coal?!

That’s some pretty spenny butter for “agreeable taste”

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28 points

“The Germans preferred Ersatz.”

(Or at least that’s how I remember that quote from Catch-22 when I read it 25 years ago…)

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13 points

Especially when they had problems getting the coal they could mine, where it needed to be used.

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-4 points

They used something else instead…

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5 points

You might be surprised what the material and energetic footprint of dairy is.

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4 points

i wonder how much emissions turning coal to butter creates. Maybe we should turn world’s coal to butter so planetkillhappy bastards cant burn it.

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11 points

Given it seems to generate 59kg of waste product, I don’t think it is going to be that great for the environment

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4 points

Unless the waste product is cheese…

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1 point

That “waste product” isn’t just thrown away.

They’re still hydrocarbons. Which are used in other places or burned for fuel… Which isn’t actually all that great for the environment…

Actually, tossing the waste product in a pit might be better, environmentally speaking.

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2 points

You don’t have to waste the other hydrocarbons when you crack something. You just use em for something else or burn them for power. Though the flare towers in refineries prove me wrong to a degree.

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96 points

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93 points

I know a girl who thinks of ghosts,

She’ll make you breakfast, she’ll make you toast.

But she don’t use butter.

And she don’t use cheese.

She don’t use jelly, or any of these.

She uses Coooooooooaaaaaal

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14 points

I’m dying (from eating carcinogens?) from laughter here! Brilliant!

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3 points

I see you there, Tim Burton =)

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2 points

The Flaming (butt)Lips.

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69 points

it’s funny seeing people struggle to handle the fact that we and our food is primarily made of carbon and hydrogen, which is exactly what coal and other fossil fuels are made of as well.

this, and margarine in general, aren’t some horrid “chemical” product, it’s just carbon and hydrogen (and some other stuff) assembled into fat!

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26 points

The problem with a lot of synthetics it produces molecules that are chirally or structurally different from the target molecules. People forget like WW2 is like 10-15 years after a bunch of people were poisoned by “wonder supplements” like radium. People should be skeptical of a WW2 recipe.

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13 points

Ok, let’s not compare something objectively bad for you like consuming energetic ionizing radiation and a hydrocarbon made from an objectionable fossil fuel.

They’re still trying to make things with coal, like protein, and of course butter and margarine. I could find no references to chirality of molecules in coal “butter”, only that the difficulty in separating out the unwanted things like gasoline make the process inefficient and difficult.

And we’re not done with people consuming stupid things under the auspices of it being healthy for you. Doesn’t matter if it’s “polarized water” or consuming dewormer to ward off covid, people at perfectly happy to do dumb things.

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3 points

separating out the unwanted things like gasoline make the process inefficient and difficult.

🫠

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12 points
*

Nile Red has a lot of videos that show these concepts and the power of chemistry and what you can do with it if you have enough understanding.

https://youtu.be/NIVkBs7oWDI

I wish I had scene videos like these in high school. It would have made chemistry so much less abstract.

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1 point

Yeah, but Germany WWII quality control wasn’t exactly the greatest.

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6 points
*

We eat the same stuff we’re made out of?!

Impossibru!

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6 points

I envy the faith you have in process and quality control, especially knowing these products are produced by the profit seeking capitalist class who definitely do NOT feed it to their own families.

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4 points

Sounds better than Soylent Green. Because that’s made of people

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“I can’t believe it’s coal!”

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3 points

Now with more Carbon!

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