Will coffee save the planet?

Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno may have solved a good chunk of the world’s energy problem, while also giving coffee addicts like myself reason to drink that umpteenth cup of the day. Turns out that coffee is a biofuel and a pretty good one to boot. The Economist, which pushes coffee-as-fuel in an editorial, says “researchers found that coffee biodiesel is comparable to the best biodiesels on the market.”

By now, all the biofuel pessimists like myself are going, “yes, but coffee prices will go through the roof like corn and ethanol.” Not true. The beauty is the oil is in the coffee grounds. People have been putting coffee grounds on plants as fertilizers for hundreds of years and if plants can turn the grounds into fuel, so can we.

It gets even better.