Jared Stene
Closer to home, the Pioneer Press has published WSU student leader Jared Stene obituary. Go over and sign the guestbook. There's a brief Stene tribute up at the website for the Minnesota State University Student Association,
which cancelled its December meeting this weekend out of respect for
Jared, who served as the WSU member of its executive board. Hal Kimball, former MSUSA president, has a couple of new posts of memories. Terri
Burke, one of Stene's roommates, contributes a guest post at IDHA, Finding Strength. Jared's Caring Bridge page reports that the Associated Press has picked the story of his passing.
It's all good.
Netroots
A couple of bloggers have reflected on the meaning of Dick Day's run for the border. Spotty looks at how Big Dick joins a posse!,
then contrasts the Strib's treatment of Day's braggadocio (we wish we
would have thought of that word) and the Ritchie email dust-up. Over at
Firedoglake's new digs, Phoenix Woman takes aim in her post Come Saturday Evening: Strib Straps On the Kneepads for the GOP.
Green revolutions
When we visited Washington in June on behalf of the Audubon Society's push for strong conservation measures in the Farm Bill, Congressman Walz talked about research being exploring pond scum as a biofuel stock. Today's New York Times reports Algae Emerges as a Potential Fuel Source and takes us into a University of Minnesota lab:
The 16 big flasks of bubbling bright green liquids in Roger Ruan’s laboratory at the University of Minnesota are part of a new boom in renewable energy research.
Driven by renewed investment as oil prices push $100 a barrel, Dr. Ruan and scores of scientists around the world are racing to turn algae into a commercially viable energy source.
Some algae is as much as 50 percent oil that can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is cutting the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is running more than $20 a gallon.“If you can get algae oils down below $2 a gallon, then you’ll be where you need to be,” said Jennifer Holmgren, director of the renewable fuels unit of UOP, an energy subsidiary of Honeywell International. “And there’s a lot of people who think you can.”
Algae farms wouldn't take up cropland:
If the price of production can be reduced, the advantages of algae include the fact that it grows much faster and in less space than conventional energy crops. An acre of corn can produce about 20 gallons of oil per year, Dr. Ruan said, compared with a possible 15,000 gallons of oil per acre of algae.
An algae farm could be located almost anywhere. It would not require converting cropland from food production to energy production. It could use sea water and could consume pollutants from sewage and power plants.
The debate over Farm Bill also raised the question of subsidies (we'd like to see them capped, but not eliminated). One of the arguments for ending subsidies revolves around the notion without American subsidies to our own farmers, poor farmers in Africa would prosper under free trade. Given the effect of NAFTA on Mexican agriculture, we've had our doubts.
An article in the Times suggests that maybe the equation was bass ackward. Instead, African farmers could use a safety net of their own. In Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts, we read:
. . .Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.
Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.
Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.
“As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”
The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research. . . .
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