The BBC has posted an interesting perspective on the ethanol industry in Brazil. Here’s the key to the article:
More than 80% of new cars now sold in Brazil are equipped to use ethanol as well as gasoline. Both fuels are available almost everywhere, and since ethanol can cost about a third less than petrol per litre at the moment (though the mileage is not quite as good), the home grown fuel is more popular than the foreign import.
Mileage not quite as good, eh? Here’s an idea, mix that ethanol with waste vegetable oil and put it into a diesel engine and watch your average mileage double. I think people get too hung up on a purist vision of the next energy source. Even the biodiesel folks I often meet are “100% veg” this and “pure-bio” that. Let’s face it, the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet (to support biomass energy creation and distribution) and the engines aren’t sophisticated enough yet (to run on multiple forms of energy), so let’s find a best-fit blend that can significantly reduce dependance on insecure sources of energy without wasting any more time. It’s a game to find a new set of trade-offs to replace the old ones, which are no longer sustainable, without falling into another trap of over-consolidation or unsustainability.
Why diesel? Because it was designed from the start to adapt to any form of oil: vegetable, animal, or even mineral. If you marry that together with an electric, hydrogen, or other engine you get a wide variety of options and a far more competitive market.
Curiosity got the better of me and so I held up a bright light to my badge. The internal antennae were readily apparent. RFID it is, I guess. Then I simply peeled the two layers apart to reveal the metal inside. Note the fake smartcard print on the face:
A total of six little lines run around the edges of the badge and end up connecting to a strip just below the Taj image on the right. A tiny slice or pin-prick through these lines would kill the tag without any obvious damage. I wasn’t particularly careful because, well, I was feeling impatient and a bit cavalier. A clean job can be accomplished by sliding a razor gently and repeatedly along the edge of the badge and peeling up the label on the back, then lightly slicing the metal lines, then gluing the label back in place and applying pressure. Of course my badge rarely worked anyway and I refused to take it out of it’s little plastic pouch (when it wasn’t in my pocket) so this is hardly a burning issue. In fact, after several attempts to read my badge on the first day HP actually asked me to type my info into their system by hand…had I been more patient, and the card more reliable, I would have first tried to read the thing and see how the data was stored. Maybe next year.
I also noted that someone left themselves logged into the badge station in the afternoon when there was just one bored guard standing around. That seemed especially sloppy to me and made me wonder if anyone had ducked behind the desk to print their own badges on the sly.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta [MEND] has given oil companies and their employees until midnight on Friday night to leave the region.
It recently blew up two oil pipelines, held four foreign oil workers hostage and sabotaged two major oilfields.
The group wants greater control of the oil wealth produced on their land.
The warning came as militants and the army exchanged fire after a government helicopter gunship attacked barges allegedly used by smugglers to transport stolen crude oil.
This seems to be the nature of artifically high concentratons and control of “natural” resources, which I wrote about here. The rebels are apparently smuggling oil out in exchange for weapons in Eastern Europe. The economic considerations are obvious and bring to mind the massive impact biofuel could have on both weapon exports and the related fight for control of petroleum.
The Budapest Business Journal has reported an interesting twist in an election race:
A statement published on the web page of the party’s parliamentary group said that the documents had been obtained from a site “accessible with a user name and password available to anyone.”
For some reason the South African Mail and Guardian has posted this version of the story:
Hungary’s main opposition party, Fidesz, said on Thursday that it had made a “serious mistake” in hacking into the server of the governing Socialist party ahead of the April general elections.
Anyone else wonder if the user:password was fidesz:fidesz?
