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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (823)	9/24/2005 2:21:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 217713

ElM, as in so many things, a bit of truth is stretched to a faulty conclusion in David Pimental's comments. For nearly quarter of a century I have been listening to the argument, "Producing ethanol uses more fossil fuel than is received". They use "energy balances". Some want to replace money with "energy units", or "carbon credits". There is a serious eco-cult around the oil industry, I think because so much money swirls around the industry and money is what drives most cults it seems to me. Greed and power being the real motivators, but money is a good representative of greed and power. I agree with David Pimental that ethanol from sugar cane is not a good idea. That's because the conversion rate of the total plant energy to vehicle movement is very poor. Better to use the whole biomass in energy production. But that takes a lot more processing. Also, I suppose the nitrogen and minerals from the sugar cane is put back into the soil in the current system, so it can grow a crop again. And it works economically because the people growing and harvesting the cane have nothing better to do so work for low pay. As they get ahead economically, it won't make sense to have high manual labour crops for fuel. That might take a couple of decades. Also, natural resources are irrelevant to QUALCOMM, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and most other companies. The industrial revolution and resource-based industries are so last century. It's the cyberspace era now. The USA doesn't depend on a low population:resources ratio. Look at Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden to see how important natural resources are. They are irrelevant. Look at the problems where there is natural resource wealth and people can get ahead by fighting for a piece of the action; Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, East Timor, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Venzuela. Found wealth is nice, but created value is better. Aztecs find gold at great expense, then hide it in the ground lest somebody steal it. Cyberman creates it and encrypts it. It can't be stolen. OPEC finds it then fights over it. Mqurice