One of the paramount questions facing mankind, I am told by many in politics and the media, is “What’s the ‘fuel of the future?’”

Of course, the question is only valid if you’re idiotic enough to believe that there really should be one fuel of the future and that we need to avoid all others as somehow being less ideal than the mythical perfect fuel of the future. Clearly, energy --being absolutely essential to all human endeavors more substantial than staring at a rock-- is one place where we need robustness, diversity and surplus.

But, if you accept the question, and run through a list of possible candidates that could replace oil and coal as the mainstays of our economies, you will rapidly conclude that there are only two current possibilities that could supply the necessary scale – nuclear and natural gas. Strangely, however, these two are the least popular of all choices in the public discussion.

For some reason they just aren’t as sexy as Solar, Wind, and Biofuel, the Holy Trinity of “sustainability” --which is code for technologies sustainable only by multi-billion dollar subsidies and a contraction of per capita energy usage to Bushmen-of-the-Kalahari levels.

After some pretty rigorous study of the so-called sustainable energies, however, I think I’ve identified the key elements that explain their appeal and I would like to recommend a few ways in which this appeal might be transferred to more practical technologies. Since I get paid by the article, and not the word, I’ll leave nuclear for another pay period and focus today on natural gas:

5 easy steps that natural gas could take to increase its appeal as a green, sustainable and certifiably alternative energy.

1. Increase price by 30,000%. This should make natural gas seem a lot more like solar, the Father Figure in the alternative energy trinity. There’s a lot of research that shows that high price is used as an indicator of quality by consumers, and that simply charging people more will make them value a product more. I know this research is accurate because it cost a lot to conduct.
2. Try randomly turning off the supply of gas for hours or days. This will make gas seem more like wind power (i.e. the Holy Spirit). Unreliability may seem counterintuitive as a business strategy, but I assure you that some really expensive (and exclusive) University has proven that scarcity adds a lot of value to a product. Reliable power is so mundane, so affordable, so… twentieth century. The future belongs to power that understands “flex time.” You don’t have to work regular hours any more. And brownouts give one time to think about nature.
3. Emphasize the “natural” in natural gas. As anyone who has ever been in a health food store can tell you, “natural” is an undeniably good thing. Nothing is a bigger guarantee of health and safety than a substance being “all natural” – you know, just like cobra venom and the AIDS virus. Plus, being natural is so much like Biofuel, the first-born son of the Sustainable Holy Father, Solar. My advice is to actually change the name from “natural gas” to “all-natural, gas.” Just think how cool that would sound if Peter Coyote said it in a commercial.
4. Flatten some land. People like energy made from plants – that’s the whole appeal of biofuels. The problem with all-natural, gas is that people can’t see the plants that made it, since they died out several million years ago. The solution is to take a page out of ethanol’s playbook and go find some prime people-feeding farmland – the state of Iowa should do nicely- and just squash it into a really inefficient production facility. We could turn the whole thing into a swamp, plant some dinosaur-era plants and put up a big sign that says “Sunshine Energy Corporation: all-natural, gas production facility. Watch us grow tomorrow’s green jobs today!” Sure, it would be expensive and you might need a few million years before the first harvest, but nobody said saving us from expensive, inconvenient oil was going to be cheap or easy! Besides, I have the expense thing covered…
5. Leech off the taxpayer. We all know that really good business ideas just don’t pay for themselves. No, they require massive taxpayer subsidies --like alternative energy. Natural gas actually makes money and that is so private sector. If natural gas is such a good idea, why didn’t the government think of it? Clearly, gas needs a helping hand from Congress. If people pay for natural gas through an opaque system of subsidies, earmarks, tax breaks, regulations, tariffs and kickbacks, then they can be certain that it’s an affordable fuel of the future.

Together, these five easy steps would be a great start to turning gas into a properly subsidized, unreliable, expensive and land-intensive alternative energy that we can all be proud of. All it would need then is a celebrity advocate. Celebrities are the perfect people to determine energy policy. Perhaps we can convince Lady Gaga that gas is somehow a gay fuel (alternative energy, alternative lifestyle, it shouldn’t be too hard to connect those dots in her mind). Once that happens… stand back! Ed Begley, Jr. will want to re-convert his grill from rabbit droppings back to all-natural, gas.