Palin Can't Pronounce It; Obama Wins, Navy Blue Goes Green, Goodbye Justice Stevens - Hello ???

I Feel Sorry for Sarah

Okay, most of the time I just feel sorry for Sarah because she doesn't realize how ignorant (if not downright stupid) she is. But this? This was another instance that glared out at me from my television set this past week. Sarah Palin stood in front of a microphone, trying to attack President Obama and his historic (if somewhat weak) arms reduction deal with Russia, but belittling his experiences as a "community organizer" in Chicago as leaving him under-qualified to be making nuclear weapons policy (as if President Obama just dreamed up some "wacky" plan all by himself and dashed off to Moscow to invite President Medvediev to play his silly game). The problem with that criticism is that unlike the well thought out and informed policy of the most powerful nation in the world, implemented with the full support of all the Washington bureaucrats who might possibly have had some legitimate input, Sarah Palin's public self-immolation, cheered on by an adoring crowd of (apparently) even less intelligent fans, included an inability to correctly even pronounce the word "nuclear".

So, Former Governor Palin, the next time you want to show up, unarmed for a battle of wits, at least you can be aware that the word is NOT "noo-que-lar" it is correctly pronounced very much like, "new clear", or more precisely, "neu-clee-ar" with the emphasis on the first syllable, not the second syllable. (To the purists among you, this font doesn't even have the appropriate diacritical marks necessary to correctly diagram the pronunciation of the word "nuclear".)

Navy Gets Advanced Biodiesel Production System

I wasn´t going to mention this story only because I might have more to say about this next week, but Biodiesel Industries and Aerojet have delivered the first biodiesel system to Port Hueneme this week, and the pictures are gorgeous. I am really not fond of looking at pictures of people´s grandchildren (or even children for that matter) but show me a picture of your shiny new biofuel production system, and my eyes light up like a teenage boy when the new issue of Dad´s subscription to Playboy arrives. Media outlets all over the place are using the press release or some other version of this story, including Domestic Fuel´s coverage. I figure I have to give a hearty shout of congratulations to Russ Teall at Biodiesel Industries, and his associates at Aerojet, and the Naval Base Ventura County.

The highly automated system can be remotely monitored and operated to produce from 3 to 10 million gallons of biodiesel annually. Aerojet´s sophisticated instrumentation is a key element that may make it possible to produce a billion gallons a year from a network of these units installed around the world. I would be very pleased to see that aggregate production total very soon.

Hurrah for Maggie !

Okay, I say, "Hurrah for Maggie" in one form of another almost every day because Maggie is my wife´s name. In this case, however, I refer to Maggie L. Fox, the CEO of Alliance for Climate Protection (that´s the organization former Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Albert Gore founded) who issued a statement on March 31, 2010 when President Obama announced the opening of oil lease bidding on selected portions of the continental shelf. She said:

"This plan continues our reliance on dirty fossil fuels – we cannot simply drill our way to energy security. Americans are demanding a clean energy future that goes beyond drilling and incentivizes the technologies that are critical to building a 21st-century clean energy economy. What we need now is presidential leadership that drives comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation that caps harmful carbon pollution, puts America back to work, ends our reliance on foreign oil and keeps us safe."

I think that puts it rather nicely and succinctly, don´t you?

Thank YOU for Growing Jatropha

Whether you know it or not YOU are now growing jatropha for biofuels! Well, the taxpayers bailed out General Motors (with OUR money) in exchange for a majority of the publicly held shares of the company, so you and I own General Motors, and General Motors, under a deal with the US federal Department of Energy is growing jatropha. A couple hundred acres of it. Or rather almost a hundred hectares of it.

Okay, actually Russ Teall is one of the very few people I know who grows jatropha curcas in North America, but I´m not thanking anyone "personally" for adding a little plot of jatropha bushes in the corner of their garden. On the other hand, whether you know it or not YOU are now growing jatropha for biofuels in INDIA. The Times of India is reporting that in and around the city of Ahmedabad, General Motors is managing one small farm growing jatropha, and planting two more larger farms totaling about 83 hectares as part of a plan to attempt to prove the "commercial viability" of jatropha cultivation. A research institute will manage the farms on behalf of General Motors, where carefully selectively bred varieties will be planted.

Jatropha only grows in a relatively narrow climatic range (Russ Teall´s plants on the hillsides of Southern California are a little unusual), which is why this GM experiment is taking place in India, but the plants themselves are inedible as is the oil from their seeds/nuts so they are used as hedgerows to divide fields and keep animals from wandering into the crops. Even rather small quantities of jatropha will make a person or an animal quite ill if eaten, but stories about deaths are exaggerations because you get too sick too quickly to eat enough to kill you, according to those who use the plant for "medicinal" purposes to cause vomiting or evacuation of the bowels.

The fact that jatropha oil has nearly no other uses than for the creation of biodiesel should limit price inflation in a way that has not constrained world prices of edible oils which have, so far, been the main feedstocks for biodiesel production. Canola, or rape seed are the favorites in Europe, while North Americans tend to use soy oil in addition to camelina and other more experimental crops. The state of Hawai´I tried to ban importation of jatropha claiming it was an uncontrollable weed, but jatropha is neither particularly invasive because the seed pods are so heavy (and inedible) nor is it "useless" which is the true definition that differentiates "weeds" from "crops".

What "Good ol´ Days"?

Young people almost instantly tire of hearing parents and grandparents talk about the "good old days" of their youth, and I think it is justifiably so. It really was uphill to the Middle School I attended, and I really did walk 1 mile to school in the morning, 1 mile home for lunch, 1 mile back to school for the afternoon, and a mile home after school. On a few occasions I rode my bicycle, but the "uphill" part made that difficult so I didn´t enjoy it, although the downhill mile home after school too about 5 minutes as opposed to the 15 – 20 minute walk.

In some ways I do look upon that as "good old days" because I was far more physically fit than I am today, I even made it onto the school track and field team in 3 events. Yes, a lot of those days I trudged through snow and slipped on ice, but it wasn´t "uphill both ways" the way that some grandparents seem to remember it. But it is also a matter of perspective.

My point, after way too long of a detour to get here is that from the viewpoint of most American observers, the flourishing of democracy and democratic institutions after the fall of the Soviet Union were the very height of Russian history. The problem is that viewed within the old Soviet bloc, the economy was in deep trouble so that many people worked for months without pay. The result was that they were yearning for the "good old days" when you only had to stand in line for 12 hours to get a loaf of bread to eat. Russia´s Mr. Putin, a former KGB officer, may have put his iron fist in the gloved hand by which he ruled the Russian parliament, but partly simply because of their good fortune to be net exporters of petroleum, the Russians did get back on sound economic footings again.

However Charlie Rose on PBS asked Russian Ambassador to the United Nations if he would acknowledge that, "Democracy is not what it used to be in Russia." Ambassador Churkin deftly replied, "Democracy is not what it used to be. Full stop." ["Full stop" is the British way of saying "period", as the punctuation mark.]

What Ambassador Churkin said is unquestionably true, in many ways. I remember American friends (and plenty of Canadians too) decades ago as I was growing up, claiming that "there are no elections in the USSR." More than once people tried to insult me as a communist or Soviet sympathizer because I tried to explain to them that just because it was a one party electoral system, did not mean that they did not hold elections among the approved candidates. As a friend and colleague once told me, if you don´t have purple hair, it doesn´t upset you to have people shrieking that you have purple hair, you realize that they are idiots, as long as you are not colorblind yourself.

Well guess what? The Republican party decided that the perfect Vice Presidential candidate was a woman from Alaska who was too dumb to think of a good answer to the reporter´s question, "What magazines do you read?" Do YOU think it was because she was the most qualified for the job, or because she was a good party member with a certain loyal following who could be counted upon to support her during (and after) the election? So the bottom line is that during all those years when most Americans (and most Canadians too, for that matter) had come to believe that there were no elections in "Russia" (which was what most people still called all of the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics (or more conventionally the U.S.S.R. - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)) was the fact that in America, we had two bunches of idiots choosing which loyal party idiot would be put up as the party candidate (and most others, with no party behind them to support them, fell by the wayside), because they would always rather have "our" likable boob that someone else´s reform-minded guy who would make waves about how "things-got-done-around-here."

The problem with "democracy" is that it never was "what it used to be."

That is sad. The reality of democracy is that large decisions of great importance are made by political leaders, and in particular those "large" decisions have very large financial implications. Those with the greatest financial stake in the economy´s status quo tend to have the money to sway the politics the way they need to be swayed in order to tilt outcomes of these great decisions in their favor. On the whole President Eisenhower, the first president I remember seeing in the news personally, is not spoken of as a great president by most observers. Indeed, today it seems almost shocking that the war hero of WWII would be the one to warn the country of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex" gaining too great an influence, especially because he was also of the Republican stripe as well. There were overtones in that sentiment against the strength of the "Southern Democrats" in the era, but I also believe that President Eisenhower was a loyal soldier, and a loyal Republican (capital "R") who was guided by the backroom boys who worked for those same economic interests that had reaped the rich harvest of war machine profits (supplying arms, one should remember, to BOTH sides during much of both WWI and WWII) and therefore strongly influenced to promote the domestic military buildup "necessary" to meet the "threat" of an ever more powerful Soviet Union, the communists and their nuclear arsenal.

All of this reminds me of the recent movie, Men Who Stare at Goats in which they (truthfully) reveal that the US military heard the false rumor that the Soviet Union was creating "psychic warriors", at which point we immediate launched a "counter offensive" of pseudo-science that was mostly zany, wacko, batsh*t, antics some of which were probably stranger that what was shown in the movie.

The practical view, then, is, at least from my perspective, that the "little guy" role in politics has been pretty minor for most of the last 200 hundred years. It was mostly a self-deluding bit-part role, based mainly on imagining that their act of voting really made a difference in the outcome of elections or even the overall arc of the political narrative. The major economic players, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, utility companies (especially monopolies), civil engineering firms and the like influenced the media, who, in their turn manipulated public opinion and thus pre-determined all but the finer points and details of the election story before it "officially" transpired. That is how it was, at least until (then) Senator Obama discovered how to tap directly into the financial power of the masses though effective, internet-centric communications. He´s not a bad speech writer, either.

According to Jon Meacham editor of the magazine, Newsweek and a presidential biographer American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (among his many accomplishments, which include a Pulitzer Prize for the Jackson book) says President Barack Obama considers himself first a writer, then a former law professor and politician. Let us all sincerely hope that he writes several more good speeches this year, especially on the topics of banking reforms, green energy, and explaining the benefits of the healthcare insurance reform act just passed.

What´s in the Future?

This topic is almost a second "refrain" from the same song just sung above. That is, the big news of the week in Washington was the Nuclear Arms Reduction agreement reached with Russian President Medvediev as signed by President Obama. Well, I sincerely hope that it remains the most important news of the week, and even the most important news of the month. Sadly although the agreement to reduce the stockpile of nuclear warheads (and missiles to deliver them) is wonderful news, even possibly representing a whole new level of peaceful goodwill and cooperation between our two countries (with just enough paranoia that the older folks who can´t get past the image of Russia described in the prior segment will not see it as a total betrayal). However, also in light of the previous discussion it was mere hours after that signing that the suggestion came out in the press that certain interests are urging the mounting of "conventional" explosive warheads on these same missiles with a more "flexible" delivery system of destruction to a wider variety of "targets" around the world. Was that Ike rolling over in his grave yet again? Plus ça change, plus c´est le même chose.

But also in Russia near the town of Smolensk, the Polish President´s plane crashed in heavy fog, killing all aboard. The body of Polish President Lech Kaczynski has been return to Warsaw, Poland, where his twin brother Jaroslav was awaiting it´s arrival. The list of key officials who also perished in the crash reads like the setup of a (fictional) Tom Clancy spy novel. CNN reports that fatalities included, Kaczynski, his wife, and "Aleksander Szczyglo, the head of the National Security Office; Jerzy Szmajdzinski, the deputy parliament speaker; Andrzej Kremer, the deputy foreign minister; and Gen. Franciszek Gagor, the army chief of staff," as well as National Polish Bank President Slawomir Skrzypek. CNN also reports that Russian officials vigorously deny any fault or responsibility, and that the air traffic controllers attempted to divert the plane to land somewhere else to avoid the dense fog conditions. Reportedly the President´s pilot ignored the warnings (or was ordered to ignore the warnings, we don´t yet know) which resulted in crashing into the woods about 2 kilometers from the end of the runway.

One does not need to have Tom Clancy´s imagination to conjure up a scenario in which Russian conservatives wished to issue a covert but ominous warning to President Medvediev and for that matter any Eastern European government that might be thinking about becoming a home for an American "anti-ballistic missile shield" battery. At the same time this elevates the prominence of the Polish Defense Minister who survived because he was not aboard the ill-fated flight, which could shift political power within Poland as well. Elections must be held within 60 days to replace the President (according to CNN).

But for more of that, "Plus ça change, plus c´est le même chose," we have got: Justice John Paul Stevens has just announced his retirement in timing that seems to me to be right on the heels of his dissenting opinion on the "cash is free speech" decision by the US Supreme Court which permits corporations to spend, essentially without limit, on political advertising during any federal election campaign. One might conclude that Justice Stevens decided that failing to bring the court to the "right" (which is the "left" in this case) side of the case on corporate campaign contribution limits, that is was time to seek new leadership, other than himself, which might be more effective in persuading other members of the court to see the law with more of the liberal perspective. Stevens himself says his views never really changed much but that the court moved toward the right during his 35 years on the bench, which made it seem like he was moving left. Indeed he was appointed by a Republican president who expected a much more conservative exercise of jurisprudence than the overall record of Justice Stevens would indicate.

On the other hand, anyone hoping that this single appointment of a new face on the bench will significantly change the composition of the court is probably overly optimistic. It is still only one vote. Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts form a hefty bulwark of conservatism on the right, and it will take more than a single vote to overcome the 5 to 4 split enjoyed by the Chief Justice Roberts "team". Indeed because the conservative side of the court is unlikely to have any voluntary retirements in the near future, there may be only one alternative which was used once before to "pack" the court. Expand it to 11 members from the current 9 Justices. It would be a bold move, it would not be easy to do, but it might be the only hope for Democrats and liberals to become the dominant side of the court within the next 10 to 15 years.

It may be a radical move, but the conservative justices on the right also are relatively young. They are unlikely to be contemplating retirement in the near term, and without reckless behavior, death or dismemberment is also fairly unlikely. The expansion of the court might just complicate matters, though. Imagine for a moment that 7 or 8 of the new 11 justice court titled toward one disposition or the other. Imagine then how difficult it might be to bring about change in the judicial perspective of the land. "Trimming the fat" to reduce the number of justices that constitute the court is probably the one thing that would be more difficult than expanding the court in the first place. With an 11 member court it might take generations to change the course being steered by the majority of justices, and then where might we be?

Manitoba Mandate Gets New Spine

Frankly I wish that my subtitle here was a little more accurate. The shift that has happened with the Manitoba, Canada, mandated biodiesel blending has shifted in what I believe seems to be a positive direction, but in the kind of wimpy manner that only Canadian politicians can muster. The sensible part of the change is that a system of "grants" has been implemented to assure that the Canadian province has sufficient production of biodiesel to satisfy the mandated B2 blending of biodiesel for the next 5 years. This system of grants replaces the tax advantages offered under the original mandating legislation. I also have to applaud that it was, at least, a multi-year commitment to the biodiesel industry that government help would be available for at least 5 years, which creates a more stable investment environment than annual renewal of tax credits. Tax credits, of course, are looked upon far more favorably when there is some good likelihood of the industry actually producing profits, or at least managing to navigate their way to a break-even by the end of the year.

There are also loopholes in the legislation (what legislation would be complete without at least one loophole?) that allow for less amounts of biodiesel blending in the Northern reaches of the province, where admittedly it gets pretty cold in winter time, but then so does the capital city of Winnipeg (I know, I´ve been there in winter), so the excuse of extra difficulty in "storage" of biodiesel fuels at low temperatures is, today, a flimsy excuse not to use the biodiesel production practices that virtually eliminate this issue. The Permaflo™ process invented by Perdue University professor Bernie Tao has been mentioned in this column before. With a cloud point of -55 degrees Celcius (-67 degrees Fahrenheit) and created simply by separating saturated from non-saturated molecules, this superior production method should be the solution to the problem, not wimpy loopholes. Testing in Alaska in the winter of 2008-2009, and proving itself all the way to the Arctic Circle, there should be little doubt that Permaflo™ more than meets the challenge.

I certainly hope that Bernie has great success in licensing his process and that such licensing is already or soon to be underway.

Happy Thoughts

I am hopeful that the Permaflo™ processing is sufficiently simple and economical that it can be used on biodiesel everywhere. Dr. Tao´s profile indicates that he is currently working on "aviation fuel" so I am delighted that this process may allow a quantum leap forward in aviation biofuels research.

Love and warm wishes,

Sincerely,

Stafford "Doc" Williamson

http://daochienergy.com