Not even mouth-puckering lemonade sours my disposition more than a dog owner who looks the other way while his pampered pooch leaves a couple of steaming calling cards on the public walkway. While nobody relishes having to scrape that stuff off his/her sneakers, there are even more significant implications to the pet poop problem.

Question: What do the large yellow and red signs on our beaches have to do with dog detritus in inland parks or residential areas?

Answer: Maximum meltdown comes with the rains. Caution signs spin out the whole sorry story: "Warning: Contaminated water. Urban runoff storm-drain water may cause illness."

Although Ventura County water-quality testers were kept pretty busy during the showery season, even now, with nary a nimbus in view, bacteria levels can still exceed state health-based limits at county beaches. Each gram of doggie doo contains 23 million fecal coliform colonies, and a plethora of scientific studies rate canines as either the third or fourth most significant contributors to E. coli contamination.

Even for those who conscientiously attend to doodie duty, much of the Bowser brownie bounty is currently scooped into nonbiodegradable plastic bags and dumped in the garbage. In essence, pet owners have been dispatching ton after ton of plastic-wrapped time capsules containing, of all things, the family fleabag's stool samples. How will future archeologists interpret this data?

Further, what happens when these bilious baggies reach the landfill? They sit there and mummify (a process which can take decades) but more importantly, fossilized scat takes up valuable space.

Ventura County residents have been attempting to divert more than 50 percent (at 1986 levels) of their trash from landfills by implementing composting, reuse or recycling programs. The diversion rate in Bay Area cities, including densely populated San Francisco and Oakland, tops 60 percent.

But that's not good enough for some dog-eat-dog Northern California environmentalists committed to putting local landfills out of business.

Their goal? Diverting 100 percent (that's right, 100 percent) by 2020.

When the doggedly green Bay Area powers-that-be decided to hound animal waste, which currently constitutes 4 percent (the same as disposable diapers) of residential refuse, Norcal Waste came up with the ultimate pie-in-the-sky (or rather, pie-on-the-sidewalk) plan.

It proposed that the Bay Area be the first in the nation to employ doggy No. 2 as a renewable energy source. Not only are Fido feces the ideal waste because of the protein-rich chow that owners purchase in 50-pound bags but there is also a whopping 6,500 tons of it generated by the 120,000 dogs that reside in the Bay Area.

Northern California's production and combustion of methane gas proposal works like this: A combination of degradable material, dog poop and food scraps are fed into an anaerobic digester that uses bacteria to convert organic waste into methane gas. Methane gas, in turn, can be used to heat homes, cook meals and generate electricity.

In addition, the two-week digestion process produces another valuable byproduct, namely, compost for agriculture. According to Northern California officials, 80 tons of material (the average California sends about 5 pounds of trash to a landfill daily) could produce enough energy to electrify a thousand homes.

Furthermore, the notion of poop power is not so far-fetched. Several European nations, some developing countries and a smattering of American dairy farmers have been converting animal waste into energy for more than two decades. The Ventura County Regional Sanitation District, right here at home, presently uses the methane gas created by rotting refuse to generate 200 percent of the landfill's power needs

Fernando Berton of the California Integrated Waste Management Board insists that with a few technological tweaks, methane digesters could be used in residences within a few years. He told the San Francisco Chronicle: "You've got solar panels on homes. Why not home-based anaerobic digestion processes?"

When I checked with Kathy Jenks of Ventura County Animal regulation, she estimated that there were between 120,000 and 160,000 dogs in Ventura County. However, although we are talking about the same number as the Bay Area, unlike the mutts of our mostly apartment-dwelling neighbors to the north, Ventura County curs don't usually befoul city streets during their canine constitutionals. They leave their daily deposits right in their own block-walled backyards.

Still, the solid waste of our critters is discarded as owners see fit. How many of you collect and flush on a regular basis?

Methane digestion may provide a promising solution to improved water quality, waste-diversion goals and the push to find alternative energy sources. Of course, the powered-by-pooches proposal being beta-tested in the Bay Area won't take off elsewhere until it makes sense economically.

Still, doesn't poop power put a whole new interpretation on the old saw, "When life serves you lemons, make lemonade"?

— Beverly Kelley, Ph.D., who writes every other Monday for The Star, is an author ("Reelpolitik" and "Reelpolitik II") and professor in the Communication Department at California Lutheran University. Visit http://beverlykelley.typepad.com/my_weblog/. Her e-mail address is Kelley@clunet.edu.