Via wecansolveit.org:

Last week Al Gore laid down a challenge to the US: generate 100% of all the country’s electricity needs from renewable sources within a decade. At the same time, Bush and his oil friends were pushing to expand off shore drilling for oil and continue the addiction that has made them rich, and made the US into the huge source of pollution it is today. Everybody agrees that even were these new areas opened for drilling, they would not produce a single barrel of oil for at least a decade. And since they would cost a lot of money to develop (leases need to be acquired, exploration & surveying happens, drilling rigs need to be built), what makes this likely to reduce the cost of fossil fuels?

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Here’s an amazing idea, and it came from watching sea otters suffering in the 1989 Valdez oil spill! Phil McCory, a hair stylist in Huntsville, Alabama, noticed while watching reports on the environmental impact of the oil spill that the otters’ dense fur sucked up the oil and held on to it. That got him wondering whether human hair would do the same thing, so he set up an experiment using hair cuttings from his salon, a pair of his wife’s pantyhose and his son’s paddling pool to see whether he could remove oil from water using human hair. Miraculously, it worked, and the OttiMat™ was born.

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