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Feb. 20th, 2007 12:04 pmI discover that my blog posts invariably require footnoes before they are even posted.
This more or less ensures that even the most enthusiastic reader will never get round to the ones that matter most, since those come at the bottom of the pile of entries.
I composed one this morning with which I was exceptionally pleased, but it covers so much intellectual territory that I think I had better postpone its posting till Ash Wednesday (for the Catholics and liturgical Protestant folks among us; the Orthodox began Great Lent on Monday, and everyone else, believer or unbeliever, is off the hook). I shall post a more Shrove-Tuesday-appropriate, ducky-and-horsy comment. (As in starting out simply and specifically and building up gradually to vast intellectual syntheses.)
Actually, for those of my friends currently marching in every Mardi Gras parade that comes along down in the Big Easy, Shrove Tuesday is a day ill-suited to sequential thought, period.
But there was at least one story in this morning’s Atlanta Journal Constitution that merits further commentary, especially since I do not flatter myself that my blog readership begins the day with a visit to ajc.com.
The story on Georgia’s growing (literally so) role in producing alternative fuels is particularly intriguing. (Hard to find on the print edition page of the AJC website: Look for the all-caps “GEORGIA CASHES IN ON ENERGY CRUNCH.”)
A biodiesel production center (sorry; “biodiesel plant” would just invite more puns from utopyr) opens today in Plains, courtesy of Jimmy Carter’s continuous prodding to get the agricultural sections of Georgia involved in both biodiesel and ethanol manufacture. Georgia not being noted as one of the great corn-growing regions (though we do well enough), the emphasis is on those other vegetable products that make such an excellent replacement for petrochemical products. Biodiesel doesn’t require any petroleum admixture whatsoever.
Whether there would be enough sweetgrass and sugar cane and soybean oil and such-like even if you utilized all the fallow farmland in south Georgia is a separate question; it’s interesting enough to note that there are several companies not just exploring the option but already producing alternative fuels.
Dot-com billionaire Vinod Khosla intends to turn pine trees into ethanol from facilities in Soperton. Renewable pine forests are already a feature of the landscape courtesy of the paper companies, and it would be an unanticipated benefit if Khosla created a pine-tree shortage that made scrap-paper recycling more financially viable than it now is.
And I note from Yahoo’s news page that Australia is completely phasing out incandescent bulbs in favor of energy-efficient fluorescents. The two topics are separate (even if some alternative fuels do burn more cleanly than petroleum products) but it is gratifying to see that things are happening on a major scale with regard to a couple of the reasons for apocalypse now looming ahead of us.
This more or less ensures that even the most enthusiastic reader will never get round to the ones that matter most, since those come at the bottom of the pile of entries.
I composed one this morning with which I was exceptionally pleased, but it covers so much intellectual territory that I think I had better postpone its posting till Ash Wednesday (for the Catholics and liturgical Protestant folks among us; the Orthodox began Great Lent on Monday, and everyone else, believer or unbeliever, is off the hook). I shall post a more Shrove-Tuesday-appropriate, ducky-and-horsy comment. (As in starting out simply and specifically and building up gradually to vast intellectual syntheses.)
Actually, for those of my friends currently marching in every Mardi Gras parade that comes along down in the Big Easy, Shrove Tuesday is a day ill-suited to sequential thought, period.
But there was at least one story in this morning’s Atlanta Journal Constitution that merits further commentary, especially since I do not flatter myself that my blog readership begins the day with a visit to ajc.com.
The story on Georgia’s growing (literally so) role in producing alternative fuels is particularly intriguing. (Hard to find on the print edition page of the AJC website: Look for the all-caps “GEORGIA CASHES IN ON ENERGY CRUNCH.”)
A biodiesel production center (sorry; “biodiesel plant” would just invite more puns from utopyr) opens today in Plains, courtesy of Jimmy Carter’s continuous prodding to get the agricultural sections of Georgia involved in both biodiesel and ethanol manufacture. Georgia not being noted as one of the great corn-growing regions (though we do well enough), the emphasis is on those other vegetable products that make such an excellent replacement for petrochemical products. Biodiesel doesn’t require any petroleum admixture whatsoever.
Whether there would be enough sweetgrass and sugar cane and soybean oil and such-like even if you utilized all the fallow farmland in south Georgia is a separate question; it’s interesting enough to note that there are several companies not just exploring the option but already producing alternative fuels.
Dot-com billionaire Vinod Khosla intends to turn pine trees into ethanol from facilities in Soperton. Renewable pine forests are already a feature of the landscape courtesy of the paper companies, and it would be an unanticipated benefit if Khosla created a pine-tree shortage that made scrap-paper recycling more financially viable than it now is.
And I note from Yahoo’s news page that Australia is completely phasing out incandescent bulbs in favor of energy-efficient fluorescents. The two topics are separate (even if some alternative fuels do burn more cleanly than petroleum products) but it is gratifying to see that things are happening on a major scale with regard to a couple of the reasons for apocalypse now looming ahead of us.
