Will the biodiesel revolution kill people with peanut/soybean allergies?
If you have special requirements, the onus should be on you to work around them, not for other people to accomodate you. My son has a peanut allergy that could kill him. He is eight years old. Apparently, this shouldn’t trouble me enough to make me want to deprive other children of their inalienable right to eat peanuts. If he dies as a result of mistakenly ingesting something that contains peanuts, I just have to tell myself that it’s his fault, because he wasn’t smart enough to work around his problem. Mayor Curley, no offence, but if you ever become ruler of the world, I’m leaving.
Mayor Curley isn’t a cold, detached Stalinist, but he refuses to drive any car that has a passenger side airbag. Because, you know, they didn’t have them when he was a kid. shepd, sometimes people, whatever their age, make mistakes. That’s why many people do not consider it unreasonable to take measures to minimise the consequences of such mistakes. Personally, maybe because I have a personal stake in the matter, I don’t happen to think that it’s unreasonable to stop children eating peanuts during school hours, if the alternative is the accidental (but totally preventable) death of even one child.
I’m in a rush, and haven’t had time to do more than skim other replies, but I don’t think this has been covered yet. Except for very, very low volumes of fuel from recycled food waste, most biodiesels will probably not contain peanut oil. Peanuts are one of the more expensive sources of vegetable oil and almost certainly will not be used on any commercial scale. In fact, most biodiesel products won’t be made from plant oils directly. The blends I’ve seen are mostly made with fuel additives that are refined from plant oils or are synthetic products (derivatives) of the original plant oil, so the proteins that cause the alergies would be left out. Sorry, gotta run. I’ll check back later.
If we’re going to ban peanuts from near-adults (children in middle school have reached the traditional “age of maturity” and really ARE old enough to know not to eat things that will kill them) because just one person might die, well, I can save a lot more lives right now. Enough to make the peanut problem sound like the joke of the week. Ban school buses (heck, any conveyance with people under the age of 18 in it) and we should be able to save at least 10,000 children’s lives a year. Add another 0 and that’s probably how many we could save worldwide yearly. As I said, I understand the necessity to keep people who are a danger to themselves away from dangerous things, but there comes a point in a child’s life where you need to give them responsibilities. Such as the responsibility to not kill themselves. If grades 7+ aren’t that category, I think it’s fair to say the “child” will end up mentally handicapped in the responsibility category due to a lack of education in that field (the ed
