A1A South

Today Instapundit linked to a story from Motor Trend Magazine about GM investing heavily in a company producing ethanol from cellulose:

Today at the North American International Auto Show, GM announced it has taken a non-controlling equity interest in biology-based renewable energy firm Coskata Inc. The greater-Chicago-based company simultaneously announced that it has developed a proprietary process for converting renewable carbon-rich materials ranging from cornstalks and woodchips to old tires and city trash into clean-burning ethanol at a cost of roughly $1/gallon. A pilot operation will be up and running at Coskata’s headquarters in Warrenville, IL by the end of January, 2008, and a 40,000-gallon commercial demonstration facility under construction at an as yet undisclosed location will go online by the end of the year. General Motors will purchase much of the ethanol produced by this plant for use in the test vehicles at its Milford, MI proving ground. And plans are in the works for a 100-million-gallon/year facility to be up and running by 2011.

GM’s interest is primarily in making ethanol more widely available to increase the popularity of the many models it sells with flex-fuel capability (by 2012, half of GM’s North American production will be flex-fuel capable). The company is also investing extensively in university research and in other firms pursuing different methods of cellulosic ethanol production. GM research suggests that by 2030, one-third of transportation fuel needs can be met by biofuels.

If breaking down cellulose can produce fuel at $1/gallon, the dog fennels of Florida may become an endangered species.  I can hardly wait!  Finally, a home-grown source of fuel from the scourge of the pasture.  These damn things can grow 12 feet tall with woody stems and are a right pain in the you-know-where to get rid of.  They grow up under and through fence lines where mowing isn’t done and one tiny little sprig will be multiple big, woody stalks in a few weeks’ time. 

Now, if you do happen to have a neighbor in a newly-built McMansion that is real finicky about his/her lawn and property values (those aggravating people are afflicting more and more of us), a tall privacy fence of dog fennels hiding the tractor parts, spare engines, and junk vehicles will maybe help keep the nagging to a minimum.

If not, perhaps you can explain that you’re trying to develop a fast-growing source of cellulose to produce ethanol fuel and offer to sell carbon offsets to assuage their conspicuous consumption, ask if they are trying to destroy the ecosystem with the nitrogenous runoff from the lawn, and start babbling on about Stopping Global Warming.  

Jakarta - A 32-year-old Indonesian woman has died of bird flu, the health ministry said in a statement Monday, bringing the toll to 95 in the nation worst hit by the H5N1 virus.

“The patient died at home on January 10,” the ministry’s bird flu information centre said, adding that two laboratory tests had since confirmed that she was infected with the bird flu virus.

Two such positive tests are required before Indonesia officially reports a death from H5N1, which has become endemic in the archipelago nation.

The woman, identified only by her initials TM, came from Tangerang, a satellite city of Jakarta, the centre said. She is the city’s sixth bird flu victim since October.

Fear the H5N1 virus may mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans
She had been taken to hospital on January 9 with a fever, difficulty breathing and pneumonia, but her family “ignored the advice of the hospital doctor to continue hospitalisation”, the centre said.

The woman’s family kept chickens in their backyard, it added.

Humans are typically infected with bird flu by direct contact with infected poultry, but experts fear the H5N1 virus may mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans.

Scientists fear that such a development would likely spark a global pandemic with a potential death toll of millions, and the World Bank has said such a scenario could cost up to two trillion dollars.

The concern stems from past influenza pandemics. A flu pandemic in 1918, just after the end of World War I, killed 20 million people worldwide.

The head of the world’s top agency for animal health said last week however in Paris that the virus had so far proved remarkably stable, which minimised the risk of mutation.

Source:

I’m comforted by the remarkably stable status of the virus. I bet the dead lady would be, too. I sure hope somebody was able to inform her of that before her demise.

Well, there you go.  I just knew that stew would come in handy.  We have a severe weather advisory out as the temperature has done dropped down into the 50s and will dip into the 30s tonight.  There might even be a frost.