Saving the World

Julie was bored. She wondered if anyone else who had signed the Official Secrets Act had such a boring job. Today she'd had one request for an archive and had found that in seconds, so the rest of the day she'd spent playing Candy Crush, tidying the shelves and flicking through the top secret files from the 50's and 60's, that were so secret the Department of Energy had not released them under the 30 year rule.
Julie wondered why they were so secret; they were mostly crackpot inventions, information about places were oil was searched for and not found and other things just as thrilling. There certainly wasn't any that proof aliens existed or that they’d found gas on the moon or anything that might have actually have changed the world.

The clock ticked to 11.30, god, how could time go so slowly? Julie opened another file and started reading, it was another crackpot idea,from Jeff Tozzer, one of many crazy scientist in the 1950s who sent hundreds of patents to the DoE.  Of all the crackpot ideas that she’d read, Tozzer’s were the best. He’d invented a washing machine powered by cats, and a way of using snails to create electricity. She wished the mad old scientist had invented a machine to make time go quicker on days like today.
This one was probably the maddest idea that she'd read; it was for a machine that could turn snot into bio fuel that could be used instead of coal and oil. Most folders were two pages long, the proposal and the standard thank you very much but reply, but this file had more. She turned the page to see a letter with the unmistakable logo of a big oil company. She read it with some amazement. Then Julie went back and looked at the proposal again. The letter from the fuel giant had completely changed her opinion of the proposal. According to the oil company this proposal ‘threatened the very future of the oil industry' the Minster was then instructed to take 'every possible step' to ensure this proposal ‘never saw the light of day again’.
The next page was another letter to Tozzer offering him £300 for the exclusive rights to the Snot Masher, and a promise that if it ever came to be made, he would be a consultant on the project. And that was that. 

This was incredible, thought Julie, surely in the 21st century when alternative power sources were being sought this would be perfect, this could save the world. Was it time to resurrect the Snot Masher? She could take this  show it to the minister or take it to one of the bio-fuel companies, or Friends of the Earth; this 1950s invention could save the 21^st Century.
But Julie had a problem, if she made this document public, she would break the Official Secrets Act landing her in all sorts of trouble, and presumably ministers were still in the pocket of oil companies who would still want this buried.  So how could she get news of this out into the public domain? Julie didn't like it, but it looked like her only option was to forget all about the Snot Masher.
But Julie couldn't forget about it, this was a way to save the planet, the planet needed the Snot Masher. Julie had a plan. She thought that she might just have found a way to get around the Official Secrets Act. This proposal was from 1958; that was 57 years ago. Nobody would remember it; Mr Tozzer would probably be dead. She could 'lose' this file, and then claim that she had invented the Snot Masher 2100.

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