BARACK OBAMA’S DNC SPEECH SEPTEMBER 7th 2012
He surfed the wave of renewed, brills momentum. Barack Obama‘s DNC speech 2012. View it right here.
What he said:
“Michelle, I love you. The other night, I think the entire country saw just how lucky I am. Malia and Sasha, you make me so proud but don’t get any ideas, you’re still going to class tomorrow. And Joe Biden, thank you for being the best Vice President I could ever hope for.
Madam Chairwoman, delegates, I accept your nomination for President of the United States.
The first time I addressed this convention in 2004, I was a younger man; a Senate candidate from Illinois who spoke about hope – not blind optimism or wishful thinking, but hope in the face of difficulty; hope in the face of uncertainty; that dogged faith in the future which has pushed this nation forward, even when the odds are great; even when the road is long.
Eight years later, that hope has been tested – by the cost of war; by one of the worst economic crises in history; and by political gridlock that’s left us wondering whether it’s still possible to tackle the challenges of our time.
I know that campaigns can seem small, and even silly. Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. And the truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. If you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me – so am I.
But when all is said and done – when you pick up that ballot to vote – you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation. Over the next few years, big decisions will be made in Washington, on jobs and the economy; taxes and deficits; energy and education; war and peace – decisions that will have a huge impact on our lives and our children’s lives for decades to come. (more…)
SAYING NO TO BATTERY CAGED CHICKENS & CHICKEN COLONIES IN SOUTH ISLAND & CHINA’S CHICKEN ENERGY PLAN
Farming is a science. It is capable of producing amazing products. Yet when ethics is missing regarding animal welfare, the sciences derived from farming, are just plain greedy.
While the BBC is going gaga over Beijing, China’s resourceful innovation at turning chicken poo into energy, little has been given to the welfare of the chickens.
300 million chickens are farmed producing half a billion eggs a year in this video clip. The innovation of the science is good, yet the animal welfare is not.
In New Zealand, three brave girls got arrested today. Their message to Mainland Poultry’s new colony was ”say no to battery caged chickens and chicken colonies.” They protested on behalf of Coalition to End Factory Farming.
Deidre Sims who chained herself to a steel tripod in protest said, protesters were “prepared to risk our lives if it helps to prohibit the use of all cruel cage systems in New Zealand”.
Word! Watch both clips above.
Humane farming, animal welfare farming methods desired… for guilt free eggs all the way!
[For MB & Co].
~Posted by Horiwoodblog, Aotearoa New Zealand, Polynesia Asia-Pacific. 25.6.12~
BLACK LIQUOR ENERGY – PINE FOREST ENERGY HUBS – SYNGAS GREEN ENERGY PRODUCTION
[With some of the best bike tracks, Woodhill forest is a mountain biking mecca. Photo credit: Southern Edge].
In a previous post we explored the business of converting pine trees grown in your backyard, into bioenergy fuels.
This is achieved by breaking down the protective shield naturally embedded in wood’s lignin to protect access to carbohydrate wood sugars, that can then be turned into ethanol – a fuel that V8 engines can power on quite happily.
This post picks up from where we left off:
How long might that wait be?
Once upon a pine tree, two Modelling by Infometrics economists named Adolf Stroombergen and Daniel McKissack posited that making biofuels from wood would yield a profitable, market returnable harvest for NZ when certain conditions were in place for this to occur. The factors that needed to be in place were:
- Affordable efficient production techniques were in operation.
- When oil prices rose higher than $150 a barrel.
- When a carbon price became higher than $100 a tonne
- When land diverted from agriculture or trees diverted from regular forestry is within market’s reach to be a financial option for fuel conversion.
The lads said this in 2009, and by the unfortunate black magic of the World Bank’s economic engineers, some nations eating their grandchildren’s economic futures like insane piggies, and the rich of the world deciding to increase their wealth 3 fold during the same period – we are now in these ‘right’ conditions for pine trees to become biofuel.
Indeed, NZ oil prices have jumped 50% in the same period to just under $150 a barrel. Carbon prices have dropped to $8 a tonne on the local market.
Biofuels from wood are almost carbon-neutral. If you sell veges, then buy oil from the revenue and burn it – this mode is carbon-intensive. Lignin makes up 1/4 of the dry weight of pine. A complex compound, consisting of mainly carbon and hydrogen, lignin has a range of potential uses. (more…)
GROWING FORESTS OF BIOENERGY FUEL IN THE BACKYARD
[Photo caption - Woodhill Forest as photographed by GoRentals].
So here’s the deal: Half the ports in New Zealand are stacked with raw logs.This form constitutes half NZ’s wood export medium. No value is added after the hack down from the forrest stage. Still, raw logs earn $1.7 billion.
In liquid resources, NZ shipped off $8 billion of oil and petroleum products ($2b in refined petrol and diesel). The Marsden Point refinery’s capacity has been tanked to the gills for years now.
For every boat that arrives at Marsden, allegedly filled with Singaporean oil refinery cargo – one boat is headed to China, with raw logs. The value adds happen outside of New Zealand.
NZ had net debts of $147 billion or $33,000 per person. It’s a heavy ugly picture. Dumb, stupid, not very bright. We love paying interest on the debt to our banking friends at the tune of $10 billion (5% of the value of all the goods and services the NZ economy produced). Again, it reads like Dumb & Dumber - Jim Carey‘s sequel script.
No longer can NZ rely naively on foreign leaders opinions(most nation’s have their own woes to solve). Clearly, whatever these leaders have been saying anyway has not been working for New Zealand – with this debt remaining unchanged for too long. Different skill sets are needed. Green thinking scientists and creative entrepreneurs may be the ticket to ignite the Kiwi spirit of ingenuity that has always gone hand in hand with NZ’s slightly isolated geographical location. Many green thinking scientists want to do a James Cameron and live here, so that’s not too much of an issue.
What should be done with the 6 million tonnes of raw logs is the next logical step to think about. We are now reaching for the How To Produce Biofuels recipe books, our great grandmas never told us they’d developed. We’re looking at how to reduce imported oil bills, looking at restructuring our transport industry to guzzle up less fossil fuels too. We quite fancy the Madonna song, like a virgin, when it comes to altering our track record of fossil fuels abuse.
Enter Dr Richard Griffiths. Richard tinkers with bioenergy at North Carolina State University. International Paper was once his main boss. Ironically International Paper was a main shareholder in Carter Holt Harvey, the firm the sold off over 35,000+ hectares of NZ owned whenua (land) to Denmark, Liechenstein (total population 35,000), Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong in the last 13 months. I have a hate on for Carter Holt Harvey because they (and Graeme Hart did that) with no value add to NZ except to their own pockets. Ugh, now that kind of selfishness is totally ugly.
Anyway, Richard has involvement with the pulp and paper industry here – because Kiwis are so used to not thinking for ourselves the last 15 years. Thank goodness we have Richard, otherwise we’d forget to do it ourselves.
R&D always suffers in ‘get rich quick nationally owned asset sell offs,’ that are driven by banks who try and run countries and advise governments to sell a nations assets. Thankfully though, because of the fuel shortage in the globe, R&D in “second generation” biofuels has still occurred in the world. 2nd-gen biofuels start with ligno-cellulosic (woody) material – a different organic matter than edible plantlife such as corn or sugar.
Lignin is a problem. Nature ensured the wood’s carbohydrate wasn’t easily accessible. It is protected by a shield. However, lignin can be used to produce ethanol. Biofuel proponents want to break the shield down. Kraft pulp mills have been breaking it down for over a century, separating cellulose from lignin.
Mills come in all ranges of pricings. It all depends on how refined you want the refining of ethanol production to be with what you invest in ethanol producing mill technology. If you built a brand new pulp mill the export price of logs for the mills feedstock – would have to be market competitive to ensure an adequate ethanol production return on R.O.I. Log prices, thus determine ethanol prices.
The option value of wood pulp could improve a mills returns. If lignin useage is done smartly, even more the R.O.I’s prospects. $800 million worth paper is sent out from NZ each year from the pulp. Yet the cellulose content of a log isn’t utilized very well as yet.
Pulp is really long strings of sugars (think sugar cane). It needs to be hydrolysed, fermented then distilled into fuel ethanol. Cars can use ethanol to run.
More on this rather geeky ‘scientific process’ (that sounds more like beer brewing than forresty to energy conversion) in a bit.
Biofuel is so important because many countries freeze in winter and need biofuel to have lifegiving warmth in large cities of the world. It’s just not a transport industry situation.
News source: Brian Fallow.
[Photo caption - This Low NOx gasburner runs on an array of biofuel. Hamworthy Combustion has proven experience in firing Solid, Liquid (more…)
