Category Archives: Economics

Biofuels

This looks like a pretty big breakthrough:

Just how fast are Rice’s single-celled chemical factories? On a cell-per-cell basis, the bacteria produced the butanol, a biofuel that can be substituted for gasoline in most engines, about 10 times faster than any previously reported organism.

“That’s really not even a fair comparison because the other organisms used an expensive, enriched feedstock, and we used the cheapest thing you can imagine, just glucose and mineral salts,” said Ramon Gonzalez, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and lead co-author of the Nature study.

Gonzalez’s laboratory is in a race with hundreds of labs around the world to find green methods for producing chemicals like butanol that have historically come from petroleum.

“We call these ‘drop-in’ fuels and chemicals, because their structure and properties are very similar, sometimes identical, to petroleum-based products,” he said. “That means they can be ‘dropped in,’ or substituted, for products that are produced today by the petrochemical industry.”

I wonder what the catch is, if any?

[Update a while later]

The man-made miracle of oil from sand. And as Glenn Reynolds points out, it’s “ethical oil,” not “conflict oil.” And we’re a lot farther from “peak oil” than many want to think.

Stories like this make baby Algore, their lord and savior, weep bitter tears.

Music To My Ears

Al Gore is ranting in frustration that no one buys his climate BS any more.

[Mid-morning update]

Climate skepticism isn’t a fringe phenomenon:

CC. To what extent did you feel like you were standing alone in resisting the man-made climate change theory back in the 1990s?

“It was difficult. I knew that many of my colleagues at the Association of State Climatologists agreed with me. But many of them wouldn’t say anything because they were worried about losing their jobs or just plain having their professional lives made difficult. Frankly there’s a lot more money supporting the other side. Things would be easier if you just go along with them.”

CC. “You’d say that now there’s a lot more money supporting the man-made climate change side of the issue than there is on the side of the skeptics?

“Oh yes, it’s been that way for a long time.”

Yes, though you’d never hear it above the din of the screams about oil money.

[Update late morning]

Climate Depot responds to Gore’s rant.

[Bumped]

Can A Capitalist Market Economy…?

support a socialist welfare state?

Not for long.

[Update a few minutes later]

“…everyone knows that when you’re using your MasterCard to pay your Visa bill, it’s the person who doesn’t want the limit raised who’s the real source of the problem.”

Yeah, let’s blame the Tea Party.

[Update Monday morning]

Greece could have used a Tea Party, no?

Hey, they blamed the Tea Party for Jared Loughner, too. They always blame the Tea Party, because they don’t like the Tea Party, and they want Americans to dislike it, too, so they can continue with business as usual until the last possible moment. And if Greece had had a Tea Party, all the apparatchiks would have called it crazy and destructive too, because it would have threatened their short-term interests, which, as has become clear, is all apparatchiks think about…

Well, not all, but certainly it’s the highest priority. To hell with the grandkids.

Plus, “Tea Party Downgrade”? They can’t possibly sell that:

Let’s take a walk down memory lane. What did the Democrats do with respect to federal debt during the four years they controlled both Houses of Congress? Here is a summary of the deficits the Democrats racked up during that time:

FY 2008 — $460 billion
FY 2009 — $1,410 billion ($1.4 trillion)
FY 2010 — $1,300 billion ($1.3 trillion)
FY 2011 — $1,600 (estimated) ($1.6 trillion)

Of the $14.5 trillion national debt, nearly $4.8 trillion–one-third of the total – was incurred during that four-year period when the Congress was exclusively controlled by the Democrats. Moreover, and equally important, during that time the Democrats did nothing to assure the markets that they have a long-term plan to deal with the country’s burgeoning debt. On the contrary, for more than two years the Congressional Democrats have refused to adopt or even to propose a budget! If you are looking for the reason why rating agencies have lost faith in the ability of our government to get its spending and debt under control, you need look no farther.

But they will remain desperate to continue looking, or blame it on the only people who are actually interested in really reducing the deficit. Because the view in the mirror is far too ugly.

[Bumped]

[Update a while later]

“If the car is speeding off a cliff & you blame the passenger for wrestling with the wheel & trying to hit the brakes, #youmightbealiberal.”

The Core Of The Problem

It is a fundamental difference over the role and purpose of government:

Somewhat surprisingly, Mr. Cantor was in fact prepared to bargain on about $20 billion in higher taxes on “the shiny balls of the millionaires, billionaires, jet owners and oil companies” that Mr. Obama so often mentioned in public. “If they wanted to be able to claim the win on that,” Mr. Cantor says, he wanted net revenue neutrality in return, by lowering the corporate income tax rate or perhaps enacting an even larger tax reform. In effect, he was calling Mr. Obama’s bluff on “cheap politics.”

In private, however, the debate always returned to the status of the top marginal rate for individuals earning over $200,000 and $250,000 for couples—aka the Bush tax cuts for people who do not own private aircraft. Mr. Cantor argued that some large portion of the income that flows through the top bracket comes from “pass-through entities”—that is, businesses—and “to me, that strikes at the core of what I believe should be the policy, and that is to provide incentives for entrepreneurs to grow.”

By contrast, he says, “Never was there ever an underlying economic argument” from Democrats. “It was all about social justice. Honestly, one of them said to me, ‘Some people just make too much money.'”

We need at least one more election to remove enough of the Marxists from government to turn things around.

[Evening update]

Obama won’t escape part of the blame for the downgrade:

Defenders of Obama will attempt to pin the blame on his predecessor, President Bush, and on intransigent Tea Party radicals in the current Congress. But that would leave out the part in between. For his first two years in office, Obama’s party controlled both chambers of Congress – for part of that period, he had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. During that time period, he and his fellow Democrats could have passed his supposedly ideal, long-term, deficit-reduction package — one that represented a “balanced approach” between spending cuts and tax increases. It also could have delayed the deficit reduction for several years, so it wouldn’t have affected the current weak economy or the “investments” he considers crucial. Forget about actually accomplishing serious deficit reduction — he didn’t even attempt it.

Of course he didn’t. Despite all his demagoguery over the last few weeks, he’s never favored a “balanced approach,” if that meant cutting anything other than defense. He, and his Marxist attitude (along with that of the rest of his party) is certainly one of the main perps.