Zane Safrit

Corn Ethanol: Environmentally Disastrous?

Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous.

...The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.

Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple,... using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon. The Clean Energy Scam, Time magazine.

Link from Trends I'm Watching.

The prospect for  grain-based ethanol held such promise. Living in Iowa, the prospect of an industry to bring jobs to the rural communities built around grain production, seemed ideal. But has time's gone on, much of the benefit comes not to the local community but to the corporate owners who, too often, live, and take their profits, outside the state.

But that's not unique here. That business model is consistent around the world from Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, as well as here in Iowa.

Big Ideas for Small Towns

Becky McCray's at it again with her Small Biz Survival resource. She's given away for free 20 Small Business Ideas for Small Towns. It's an ebook she wrote detailing 20 different ways you can make a successful business in a small town.

I know one way that works. And that way is surrounding yourself with smart people like Becky.

So, anyway. Get the book. Read it. Use it. It really doesn't matter who you are, where you are, what size of business you are...there's ideas Becky's offered that will help you grow.

Your community can be energy self-sufficient

In the late 1990s, the town of Freiamt in Germany's Black Forest decided to take the fight against global warming into its own hands...

Today, the Freiamters are proudly self-sufficient. What's more, in 2007 they generated an extra 2.3 million kilowatt-hours beyond the 12 million they consumed. They sold the surplus, enough for an additional 200 homes, back to the national grid. - Newsweek

What's holding my community, our community, your community from doing the same? Or more?

Link from Lunch Over IP. It's one of my favorite blogs on innovation and technology. I've included it in my Typelist of Innovation blogs.

Sacrificing longevity to gain jobs?

Merrill Goozner at Gooznews has a great post titled: As Longevity Declines in Poor Areas. The subtitle is States Raid Tobacco Settlement Money.

He shares a map of the US that graphically displays the changing trends for longevity. It's fascinating if you live in the dark green areas (areas where life expectancy grew faster than the national trends). It's alarming, embittering, if you live in the white to red areas where your life expectance declined with increasing speed as you moved towards dark red.

And as you might expect, the areas in dark red are also the areas marked by:

stagnant wages and rising income inequality, with the hardest hit areas being those left behind what has generally been considered a period of rising prosperity

And then he links to the recent news that Ohio is the first state to seek to undermine its own trust fund established to manage the use of funds received in the Tobacco settlement case. Those funds have been used exclusively for smoking prevention programs.

Why's the governor of Ohio seeking to change the use of those tobacco-settlement funds? To attract jobs.

Mr. Goozner sums up the quandary quite nicely:

So here's what it has come to in the good old U.S.A.: a declining state (sort of like Pennsylvania, where primary voters will be voting today), desperate to attract jobs, takes money away from citizens who are trying to reverse the effects of having no jobs in the first place.

I can't argue with his conclusion. Trying to be a data-based decision-maker, it's hard to ignore the data. It's also hard to understand how a Governor hopes to attract business and jobs to his state with an overall workforce whose life expectancy is declining faster than those workers in other parts of the country. That would translate into higher labor costs either directly if the new jobs offer health insurance as a paid benefit (unlikely, they usually don't) or as a result from loss productivity from workers with a greater number of health-related issues and the associated time off needed. Or is it a perfect match for the employer with state incentives (at the expense of the workers' health) and a depressed economy where wage competition will be minimal.

I don't know. What do you think?

Rural Broadband Access: Lots to Rant About

Becky McCray's ranting about broadband access for rural communities: Broadband access is too important for bad copywriting.

She's right. Her title's right. The points in her post are right.

They're so right, the situation is so...odd, that I had to first stop laughing, then post. You see humor is contrast of opposites, the paradoxes of our time, things that are so different you'd never see them together at any time and when you do, you laugh.

Rural Broadband Access is one of those terms. I giggle when I write it. It's like having Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy the name of an important business resource, vital to the development of a community. Of course, it's not real. And you giggle when you have to talk about it in public.

But I digress. Becky's post has a more complete discussion.