This blog printed on 100% recycled electrons.
Ah, technology...
Computers Save Paper: That Sioux Falls paper reports that the Sioux Falls school board has saved 66,000 sheets of paper by going all-electronic at their meetings in May and June. That's $1200 in two months. Let's see, five members, snappy laptop for each... dang, the paper savings could pay for nice computers for the board members and still save money for the rest of the year. Not bad!
Windmills Go Urban in Harrisburg: With all the wind coming out of Harrisburg, the city wants to capitalize on it: the Harrisburg Planning and Zoning Board wants to update city ordinances to allow the construction of wind turbines within the city limits. Consideration of the rule change comes as the Harrisburg School District waits to see if it gets chosen for a 70-foot turbine through the Wind for Schools program. Public Utilities Commissioner Steve Kolbeck notes that expanding options for wind power in South Dakota towns would be good for stemming brain drain as well: more wind turbines means more jobs for those elcetrical engineers we train at SDSU. Power self-sufficiency, more homegrown smart jobs -- good thinking!
Biofuels Bust Budgets: Our government tells us biofuels contribute just 3% to rising food prices. The World Bank says yeah, right. Professor Blanchard points us toward a damning World Bank report that says "Biofuels have forced global fuel prices up by 75%." The UK Guardian says the report rebuts numerous alternative causality arguments. Increased demand in China and India? Drought in Australia? Nuts. The World Bank report argues that "the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices."
Professor Blanchard sees confirmation that government interference in the market and technological development is bad. The World Bank sees 100 million more people already pushed into poverty by rising food prices.
To review: biofuels leave people poor hungry. Oil from the Canadian tar sands wrecks the environment and South Dakotans land rights. More drilling for oil just means more externalities Exxon and its lawyers can push on the rest of us. Until we get fusion reactors, is anyone ready to just double fuel efficiency standards and consume less energy? (Oh wait, I forgot: buying less means economic collapse. Man -- there ain't no such thing as a free lunch!)
Drinking Liberally Update (11/15/2024)
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In Politics: Nationally: The Election is over and the wrong side won. I
have nothing to contribute to the barrels of ink being used by Pundits to
explain a...
3 days ago
Any idea if Madison schools have applied for the Wind for Schools program? With two school buildings located on the north edge of town where it gets the most wind, it would make sense to add a turbine to power the schools and save some tax money.
ReplyDeleteI know Rutland applied; I don't recall hearing anything from Madison's board on the issue. But a wind turbine or two for each school would be great: energy self-sufficiency, plus opportunity for students to get some practical science experience with wind power.
ReplyDeleteThe increasing price of food is simply the mechanism that has exposed the issue of hunger again. It is not the direct cause. Not my favorite policy think tank, but:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.heritage.org/research/TradeandForeignAid/bg2151.cfm
I tend to agree with them that our agricultural aid has stymied more local sources of production which in the end leads us to hand them fish rather than a net. And more importantly, the current biofuels push is showing just how badly our import restrictions can be for to the world wide food supply. While we are able to massively overproduce our agricultural needs, when a new derivative becomes an economically viable product (biofuels), we restrict import of those higher value goods, drive up the raw materials cost domestically, and in turn burn our huge food surplus which eliminates our capacity to supply food aid which triggers global hunger.
At the end of the day, higher agricultural product prices driven by biofuels are good because it creates a crop any person on the planet can cultivate with a small capital investment. It's our current policies regarding food aid and economic protectionism that is to blame.
BTW-> Nice blog, hope to see you at the lake again sometime.
Okay. Our government says there's been a 3 percent food-price increase supposedly caused by biofuels, and the world bank says it's 75 percent. That is a discrepancy of, ummmm ... 2,500 percent, I think.
ReplyDeleteHarumph. The error dwarfs the data itself. Where's the bug?
I'm no fan of biofuels. I'm all for wind, solar, and other alternatives that will get us away from the idea that we have to burn stuff to get usable energy.
But when I see "dueling statistics" so diverse as this, I can't bring myself to believe either of them. Maybe it's somewhere between ...
Let's attract not only jobs, but innovators, developers, entrepreneurs! "Whether you're from Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Minneapolis, Silicon Valley, Boston, Paris, Moscow, Bombay, or Epsilon Eridani 2, come on out and start a wind and solar ranch in good old Dakota Territory, USA!"
Tony: Good article! Interesting to see an overlap of conservative and liberal views on the reality of the food crisis, the harm from biofuels, and the need for action. And it was a pleasure visiting with you on the 4th!
ReplyDeleteStan: I'm pretty surprised by the discrepancy in those numbers as well. The article Tony submitted mentions another outfit peggin ethanols influence on food price increases at 30%. The Bush Administration has a reputation for getting science wrong, so I'm inclined to give the World Bank a little more credence. But then I'm full of my own unscientific biases... ;-)
stan:
ReplyDeleteThe glaring problem with wind/solar/nuclear/etc. is that the energy they produce is not very portable. Our current "energy crisis" is in the portable energy market, not the static energy market. We have plenty of capacity for that right now and enough coal to last ~1000 years.
Biofuels are one method of creating a portable energy source (which we have some existing infrastructure for) which can address our current need. Ethanol from corn is the current panache because of extreme government subsidies. Drop those and ethanol as a fuel source will die very quickly. Currently, other biofuels such as butanol are being developed which do not suffer from the same problems as ethanol does (expensive to manufacture, net energy loss, huge use of potable water).
The discrepency in the change in food prices due to "biofuels" is probably a US vs. the world survey. While food prices in the US have probably only gone up a small bit, they have probably been driven up in the rest of the world because our food aid dollars can no longer buy subsidised goods and must compete with an in demand product now. Remember that our subsidies have kept food prices around the world artificially low. Now that there is competition in the market place for said products buyers are being faced with dramatically higher prices.
Tony:
ReplyDeleteGood point about the discrepancy in food price changes! I had not thought of that. I missed elephant in the living room. (And a big one, too.)
I have mixed feelings about biofuels, but I believe we should go forward in that direction, as part of our overall strategy to get off of foreign oil.
I think we need to develop all the alternative energy solutions we possibly can, portable or not.