Thor’s Hall

It seems that there was been a lot of discussion about global warming, fact or fiction. I won’t pretend to have all the data for an intelligent discussion here. I would encourage you to get out there and look at the science of this issue, and make your own decisions. There are some interesting points being made across the board.

Of course we should all be aware of the work done by Al Gore on publicizing and championing the issue of Global Warming. Much of this was done in conjunction with the film an “Inconvenient Truth”. Today we learn that, at least some of the documentary film was CGI animation from a Hollywood movie. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

It seems to me that some folks have a different set of principles than I, as if I didn’t already know that.  This just drives it home.

An interesting piece appeared on the BBC earlier this week. It starts out showing Darwnism taking a strange twist, and then proceeds into a very interesting perspective on guns in the United States.

What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.

Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.

Go give the whole article a read. I found it to be an unusual perspective for a European, if you count the UK as Europe.

Ed Morrisey published a piece on Ethanol earlier today. It was interesting to me that I was having a very similar conversation with one of my fellow Kyuki-do practitioners the other night. I think Ed made some outstanding points throughout his article so I won’t rehash them here, just encourage you to go read them at the source.

Recognize for a moment that I have spent a few years in the ethanol industry recently doing some business process, and systems consulting. Many of the practices and the material losses would amaze you.

One point that I think was missed in his article, is the by-products that are produced in corn based ethanol production. Most of the “waste” stream can be converted to other uses, the exception being the water. But, the “beer stream” can be dried and converted to yeast that then goes into animal feed. Both wet and dry solids from the process are used primarily as cattle and pig feed. One of the examples of this relationship can be found in the Aurora Co-op in Nebraska where the corn is hauled in for ethanol production, and the waste solids hauled back to the Co-op as animal feed.

In my thinking, once the demand for ethanol has reached the point that we are no longer using “surplus” corn to support the industry but reaching into the harvest for material that would directly feed humans, something is wrong with the equation. On the flip side of that, I have seen a huge number of corn fields that were just not harvested in previous years because the market for corn was so low. Finding the balance is key.

I do whole heartedly agree that ethanol is not the sole answer to the global energy appetite, and that our enthusiasm is having unintended consequences.