Conservative Donnybrook

The African nation of Nigeria may be taking the lead in sustainable biofuels.  A government body has approved funding to assist farmers in the planting and cultivation of the jatropha tree.  The jatropha tree produces peanut sized seeds that can be refined into oil for use as a bio-fuel.  Jatropha is not a food source, can be grown in arid or moist climates, does not compete with food crops for cultivatable land and may even help turn back some of the desertification plaguing much of Africa.

Should this tree produce as theorized, Nigeria and other African nations may finally have an industry that could pull them out of centuries of economic struggle.  In addition to producing a sustainable and renewable fuel source, the plant could reduce food costs and kick-start an entire continent’s economic engine.  Imagine an Africa where new industries spring up around newly created agricultural zones, where money and jobs pour into a once desolate and starving landscape.  Where all nations can produce wealth through agri-business instead of tribal warfare. 

Maybe I have become overtaken by the far-off possibility of a plant that cures fuel demand, eases poverty and ends starvation.  But if it works and the world takes interest, Africa’s future could be dominated by prosperity instead of strife and that is worth some time and investment.

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The old saying is: “Yeah, but what does that have to do with the price of bananas?”

Well, when it comes to oil, a lot. OPEC’s president says oil could hit $200 per barrel. The problem, of course, is that the price of everything which is shipped (which is pretty much everything other than online services) is affected by the price of oil. I recently reported on a trucker revolt in downtown Indy. Those revolts have been spreading throughout the country. When trucking companies are hit with high oil prices, does anyone think they absorb the cost? Of course, they don’t. That cost gets priced into the goods we buy.

Last year, we hit $100 per barrel for oil and, at that time, the price of unleaded gasoline was nearly $3 per gallon. When (note I did not say if) the price of oil hits $200 per barrel, gas prices will likely be $6 per gallon. I drive a fuel efficient import (made in Marysville, Ohio before anyone gets all kooky and talking about how they bought a Ford, which was built in either Canada or Mexico, tells how I should support American cars) and the other day my 12 gallon tank cost me over $40 to fill up, with $50 bills not far off. Those sorts of bills used to be reserved for the SUV driving populace. Forty dollars used to be my entire budget for gasoline for an entire month. Consider this: semi trucks typically have 300 (some have 325) gallon tanks.  At $4.16 for a gallon of diesel, which is a decent price right now, it would cost the average trucker nearly $1,250.00 to fill ‘er up.

I used to work at the fuel desk at a truck stop (third shift - drank tons of coffee), and it was a gigantic sale when someone spent $300 to fuel their truck. Now that would get them about two truck stops down the road. I understand their angst and realize that if nothing is done, we’ll soon feel their pain.

Diverting grain to be used to create fuel is not the answer. First, it is extremely expensive to accomplish - more than to drill for oil, or buy from the Middle East. And, second, it drives up the cost of almost every food item, which of course impacts poor people, who spend more as a percentage of their income on food, disproportionately.

Surprisingly, Barack Obama, who seems to be clueless whenever he begins to talk about actual policies as opposed to grand ideas like change, is somehow opposed to relieving the consumer from the burden of government taxes on fuel. Hillary, at least, gets it. McCain has been out front on this issue. But even McCain’s plan is a stopgap measure. First, a hiatus on the gas tax would eventually impact our roads, which the tragedy in Minneapolis teaches us are in a deplorable state. But, second, that sort of relief, while welcome, is temporary. The real problem is that demand has far outstripped supply and OPEC refuses to pump more oil.

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This afternoon my wife and I went to see Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. As one reviewer pointed out, one’s opinion of the film is almost guaranteed to be determined by one’s stance on the Evolutionism v. Intelligent Design “debate.”

The point of the film is not whether ID is superior to Evolutionism, but rather that the mere suggestion that ID might provide some explanation as to the origins of life is strictly verboten in academic and scientific circles. Stein introduces his viewers to several scientists who have been drummed out of their positions because they had the audacity to mention Intelligent Design in their research.

One proponent of evolutionism, William Provine, an avowed atheist science historian at Cornell University, objected to the teaching of intelligent design in part on the basis that it’s “BOOOORING. I can’t think of any topic that is more BOOOORING!” Of course, when asked about the origins of life, Provine posited that aliens might have seeded life on this planet, deftly pushing back the question one generation (How did the seed scattering aliens come to exist, Professor Provine?).

Perhaps no single point shows that Stein was not attempting to advocate for the Intelligent Design position than the fact that Stein did not interview Michael Behe, a microbiologist whose book Darwin’s Black Box I found to provide much evidentiary support for intelligent design. Behe’s argument proceeded by examining the simplest of life forms, a single celled creature, and examined it at the microbiological level. At that level there are mechanisms (Behe uses a flagella as one example) that are incredibly complex structurally and functionally such that they could not have evolved happenstance. He coined the term “irreducible complexity”: Take away any of the structure’s complexity and it would cease to function and therefore would not confer an advantage which would be selected for. Indeed, extra baggage which provided no function would put the organism at a disadvantage, which Darwin predicted would ultimately cause its extinction. Critics of Behe have noted that some of the proteins that make up some of these structures that Behe used as examples occur in other contexts within the cell, however, that still fails to account for their combination into a specific structure which is much more complex than the joining of a few proteins randomly.

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Scientists at the University of Western Ontario have discovered that fat makes us - well - fat.  How? 

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is an appetite-stimulating hormone produced by our brains, which is responsible for a lot of our drive to eat. Scientists had previously thought that overweight people simply had more NPY flowing from their heads than they needed. As it turns out, the UWO study found that not only do our brains produce NPY, but our abdominal fat makes it as well.

A vicious cycle, indeed.

Next thing you know, they’ll say thinking turns your brain to mush.

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Here’s a useful reminder that the ubiquitous “medical” advice that we all need to drink eight glasses of water a day to maintain health is basically an urban legend, despite what you may have heard on the Today Show or somesuch. So if you’re still force-feeding yourself Aquafina all day long you can stop, and just return to the timeless wisdom of our ancestors: drink when you’re thirsty! Via Futurepundit.

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