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No news is good news.
Paul Ritchie posted in News on March 31st, 2006

Take that any way you like. Is all news bad news? Depends upon which side of the fence you sit. Also depends which fence it happens to be.

Today though, no news is good news for politicians and industrialists and you can take that both ways because there’s both plenty of news and none of it is good for them. Not the traditional industrialists anyway. For those with an eye for adaptation, it’s all good news.

News like this:

While politicians and/or industrialists say that a choice must be made between a healthy job economy and a healthy environment, Americans disagree. In fact, 49.4% of respondents slightly or strongly disagree that low prices and more jobs today are more important than protecting the environment for the future (vs. 15.9% who slightly agree and 5.5% who strongly agree).
(Source: http://www.mrweb.com/drno/news5351.htm)

Where do I sit on all this lefty greenie filibustering?

On the fence of course.

There’s no point harping on about having a clean environment if you can’t put food on the table. There’s also no point harping on about having jobs that make you too sick to work or eat or.. well.. you know.

Wake up, kiddies, there’s no point harping on about anything at all. Look at the problem, come up with a solution and work towards it in whatever way you can. Look for people who think the same as you; they’re out there. Think of homeschooling as just one example.

Now, you can join a rally and bitch at the government with 500,000 other people about anything you want, but the only language politicians (and industrialists) understand is money. When the price of oil hit $40 per barrel, a world wide conspiracy hit the internet. They called it “Don’t fill up day.”

They told us to fill up a day or two before “Don’t fill up day” so we wouldn’t be left high and dry, but the economic impact of hundreds of millions of people not filling up their tanks would ring some pretty serious alarm bells. The pollies and oil execs played it down, but they were scared. How dare consumers actually act in concert as a protest against being screwed on a day-to-day basis. How rude!

Now, I made a brief mention two days ago of a Reuters report which basically said the ethanol industry is pumping out its alternative to fossil fuel as fast as it can and is struggling to keep up with demand.

This is what Reuters said on the 29th:

Concerns about supplies of ethanol, a corn-based additive which refiners will blend into gasoline instead of MTBE to reduce smog, have also helped support markets.

Producers are ramping up ethanol output to meet the growing demand, but the EIA said supplies could be tight during the U.S. summer season, when gasoline demand rises as vacationers take to the road.
(Source: Reuters (The link is 4 lines long, you don’t need the whole thing.)

One day earlier, they had this to say about ethanol production:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. ethanol fuel makers “will be able to adequately supply ethanol to the markets that need it,” an industry trade group said on Tuesday, trumpeting another monthly record in output.

(Source: Reuters 1 day earlier)

I’m a bit unhappy about the figures quoted by Reuters. Someone’s not paying attention. The RFA, according to Reuters, is talking about producing 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol from the 97 operational production facilities. Gallons, not barrels. (A barrel contains 42 gallons.)

As I mentioned last week, motorists slurp through that much oil every fortnight. When the ethanol industry can start producing in terms of billions of barrels, the greenies can celebrate while the rest of us sit back and wonder what we’re supposed to do with trillions of surplus jumbo packets of Corn Flakes.

Ok, I’m getting a tad carried away here. Ethanol is just one of the alternatives to fossil fuel. Hydrogen is still in its infancy but it will, I believe, supercede ethanol because nobody wants every square inch of spare land turned into cornfields - no matter how excited the Amish get.