IIED explosive but not deadly; TiVo doesn't believe in Easter Bunny; Diesel in Your Coffee?

APPARENTLY I DON'T WRITE HEADLINES LIKE I USED TO.

(although I'm trying harder again this week)

MILLENIUM GOALS

Everybody "ought" to have goals. As a practical matter, everybody does. Following the advice to "dream no small dreams", the United Nations had a conference in 2000 from which evolved a set of goals for all mankind. Because they came about at the turn of the century, at the beginning of a new 1000 year period (according to Western calendars at least) they were named the Millennium Goals.

Here is a brief outline of these goals as found on the website of the International Institute for Environmental Development:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Target for 2015: Halve the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and those who suffer from hunger.

2. Achieve universal primary education

Target for 2015: Ensure that all boys and girls complete primary school.

3. Promote gender equality and empower women

Targets for 2005 and 2015: Eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.

4. Reduce child mortality

Target for 2015: Reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under five.

5. Improve maternal health

Target for 2015: Reduce by three-quarters the ratio of women dying in childbirth.

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

Target for 2015: Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and the incidence of malaria and other major diseases

7. Ensure environmental sustainability

o Targets: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources.

o By 2015, reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water.

o By 2020 achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.

8. Develop a global partnership for development

Targets:

o Develop further an open trading and financial system that includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction: nationally and internationally. Address the least developed countries´ special needs, and the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States.

o Deal comprehensively with developing countries´ debt problems.

o Develop decent and productive work for youth.

o In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries.

o In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies: especially information and communications technologies.

The incoming Obama Administration has stated that they will support the UN Millennium Goals. Surprisingly, this commitment to pursuit an essentially anti-poverty strategy is not part of their anti-poverty program, but it is part of "Renewing American Alliances". Frankly I can think of nothing more important to re-establishing the American role in the wider world than to lead by this example.

What the new administration needs to understand, and to convey to the rest of the public (who tend to moan and groan about "our" money being spent outside of the US borders) is that this strategy is the best possible strategy for economic recovery. Yes we need infrastructure upgrades, and the jobs that will create at home, but building up other nations is the surest way to expand export markets, expanding trade in a manner that nets more income year after year than it takes to elevate their standards of living in the first place. Especially if this is NOT done as a "give a man a fish" (charity) mechanism, but in the "teach a man to fish" (free enterprise, profit motive) manner.

In case you didn´t know already, the Millennium Goals were also part of the inspiration for the Gates Foundation (of Bill Gates and Microsoft fame) to fund the development of a vaccine for malaria. With continuing funding from the Gates Foundation, the program to eradicate malaria all over the world is making tremendous progress toward that goal. The company that bio-engineered the vaccine, Amyris, has now moved on into another important pioneering position; developing bio-fuels. From Amyris´ own website, they describe their new technology this way: "Using the Amyris proprietary technology platform, we´re redesigning yeast organisms to act as living factories that can transform sugarcane into hydrocarbon renewable fuels, such as Amyris renewable diesel and jet fuel."

Keep watching for the "Green Shift™" Logo Program we will be announcing soon.

SEASONAL GIFT FROM THE BIODIESEL BOARD

Sponsored by the National Biodiesel Board, a new web site opened that is aimed at educating both the consumers and the distributors of home heating oil as to the benefits of biodiesel as a home heating fuel. The site, Bioheatonline.com is filled with friendly and VERY professional looking video introductions to the details of Biodiesel (and various blends thereof) as a home heating fuel. The opening video is worth the half minute or so just to watch the well crafted symbolism of the slogan "I´m comfortable with that.", the biodiesel version of the classic Yin/Yang symbol (with a golden oil drip/drop), the baby and the little running shoes. Congratulations to all those involved. It really is very well done.

USELESS INFO?

I am not sure if I am just being less creative and imaginative than usual this morning, but after seeing at least a dozen reports that discarded coffee grounds could be a valuable source of biodiesel feedstock, I finally got around to looking at the basic information that is available. A small group in Nevada has reported that they produced java smelling biodiesel from coffee grounds they collected from a "multinational coffeehouse chain". University of Nevada researchers may like to play the long shots. It seems to me, however, that despite the reportedly 16 billion pounds of coffee sold annually, it is used in such small quantities in all but the very largest of restaurants and institutional cafeterias that the chances of being able to produce more fuel than it takes to collect the "feedstock" of coffee grounds would be somewhere between slim and none.

It was interesting that the researchers found that spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20 percent natural oils, and being high in "antioxidants" (according to the report) the oil is less prone to spoilage. "Crops" with 11 to 20 percent oils sound like viable feedstock, until you remember that common coffee (roasted, and NOT YET USED) will wholesale for about $0.50 to US$1.00 per pound so diverting $2000/ton feedstock that is only 20% oil makes the resulting oil cost about $10,000/ton.

Okay, okay, that´s not exactly a valid argument against using the "waste" as a feedstock, but you have really got to come up with some clever method of collecting it to make it worth collecting.

You Can´t keep a good Tai down

Analyst Alvin Tai was quoted by a reporter in a Bloomberg story as saying that palm oil could still be a profitable feedstock even at US$477 a ton, assuming that the Palm Biodiesel itself can sell for US$610 per ton. Palm oil is said in the Bloomberg article to be "used mainly in food", but becomes a viable biofuel feedstock when oil goes above US$80/bbl. The same article quotes Tai as saying that January palm oil is currently selling on the Malaysian Derivatives Exchange for US$449 (in this December 15th 2008 story).

Meanwhile, a dose of reality in the story also reports that oil was trading after hours at US$47.49 after recently reaching a 4-year low of US$40.50 on December 5, 2008.

The local reflection of those prices is glaringly in evidenced here with gasoline price competition at pump now dipping to US$1.57 per gallon in most filling stations, and as low as US$1.49 in one of the no-name-brand discounters´ opposite a US$1.51 from his competitor across the street. What is, to say the least, unusual, is that diesel #2 is still sitting at US$2.49, almost a dollar per gallon higher than gasoline.

Maybe I am harder to please than some other people but even as a person who is looking to make biodiesel, the whole dollar difference in the price of diesel to gasoline makes me nervous as a consumer and as a professional involved in the field. What does this huge gap mean? I am not going to immediately jump on (or even start) a bandwagon to suggest that it may be a sort of conspiracy on the part of large multi-national oil companies to lull the American public into complacency with respect to "greening up" our energy use in response to climate change. But, still, that vast difference is a little scary.

CANADIANS PUSH FOR HIGHER RENEWABLE CONTENT

The government of the Canadian Province of British Columbia has published new regulations requiring 5% renewable fuels content in BOTH gasoline and diesel fuels sold in the province by 2010. In a story on the Marketwatch website (from the Market Wire news service) this is part of a far more ambition set of goals that call for a reduction of green house gases to 33% BELOW those measured as a baseline in 2007. They want to achieve that target no later than the year 2020.

Many towns and school districts in British Columbia have already gotten on board with civic bus lines or school buses on a biodiesel diet, though in most cases the percentage of biodiesel blend is still a mild B5 or B10. And remember too that the common standard in American gasoline is about 10% methanol to reduce pollutants released from regular unleaded gas. It still is a long way to go, but congratulations to B.C. for at least taking this step on what, presumably, is the right road.

POLITICS OR ENTERTAINMENT

When it isn´t deadly serious in the literal sense, politics on television can be highly entertaining. This week´s Sunday shows were surprisingly so. On This Week with George Stephanopolous, George interviewed Senator John McCain. The good news is that "the old John McCain" is BACK, and ON TRACK. This is the John McCain of yesteryear with whom my wife, Maggie, and I became enchanted enough to consider voting for him in the earlier stages of the Presidential election campaign. He was full of bi-partisan (post-partisan, might one dare to hope?) spirit and support for the incoming Obama Administration and its policies. George kept pointing out that Senator McCain and President-elect Barack Obama were in accord on issues that had been highly contentious during the campaign, Iraq and Afghanistan being the two main issues. It was a pleasure to see THAT John McCain again.

Meanwhile over on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS had a whole hour with former Secretary of State Colin Powell. He was pleased to praise incoming Secretary of State designate Senator Hilary Clinton (as was, during the prior week, former Queen Noor of Jordan, [an American, born in NYC with the maiden name of Lisa Najeeb Halaby] who said that she had witnessed Senator Clinton´s passion when they had worked with her husband King Hussein of Jordan [father of the delightful current King Abdullah of Jordan], and said that she expected she would be a great Secretary of State).

ENTERTAINMENT TIP

All this week (Dec 15 – 19th , 2008) CSPAN2 has a series of programs about "The Whitehouse" and its occupants. We caught a bit of it last night and it was an interesting tour and history lesson all in one. According to the segment we saw, the Gerald Ford family was the least affected by the change of living in "the people´s house" at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They even showed a bit of a home movie of Susan Ford´s "Prom Night" party somewhere in the mansion. I did not remember from my tour of the Whitehouse long ago that the third floor that is now the private residence section was really a renovation and expansion of the "attic". The construction photos of that renovation were one´s I trust that I have seen before but long forgotten.

We actually tried to set up to tape, er, I´m sorry, I MEAN set up to TiVo some of the other episodes later this week, but TiVo didn´t even acknowledge that there was a channel 124 (where CSPAN2 is located on Cox Cable here in the Phoenix/Glendale area of Arizona), and that´s not a channel we normally monitor either (reruns have started for December and we were prowling about in the Cox Cable channel guide last night).

Ah, but the author giveth and the author taketh awayeth. Cox Cable guide also listed a CNN program (promo´d during the Fareed Zakaria show) entitled Planet in Peril at eight o´clock, even though the promo had indicated 8PM EST. Being as we are on Arizona wonky time (all the time) we expected so see it at 6PM, but NOoooo! Cox Cable channel guide showed it appearing at 8PM locally when we checked the listings at 5:30PM Arizona time (actually it´s the same as Mountain Standard Time during the non-daylight savings time of the year). It wasn´t until later in the evening that we decided to TiVo the other White House programs (and couldn´t because TiVo doesn´t believe in the Easter Bunny or Channel 124) that we were wandering through the channel guide again, only to discover that Cox NOW (at about 8:15PM) showed the Planet in Peril had, in fact, actually already been broadcast at 8PM EST (which was of course, also 6PM AZ Time). Since the program was 2 hours long, we had just missed the entire thing by 15 minutes. Sometimes on some stations (and networks) you get the east coast primetime schedule retransmitted 3 hours later for the west coast primetime time zone. Not in this case though.

Notice, however, that it was NEVER "broadcast ….ed". BROADCAST is the word, noun and verb, past, present and future tenses all-in-one, no need to EVER spell it any other way.

Love and warm wishes,

Stafford "Doc" Williamson

http://daochienergy.com/