Pollywogs!

A while back I went on a domain name purchase spree. I snagged a couple domain names which are directly or tangentially related to our business. I find it very strangely fufilling to ’secure’ domain names. I (basically it comes down to ‘renting’) secured eight domain names for the next four years at a cost of I think around $60 if I remember correctly. It seems like such a bargain, I feel like ‘more more more’…so strange…

I found contemplating these feelings didn’t seem to reveal too much, so I did the next best thing, decide to bare that part of my soul online…

You can view my acquisitions here:

http://www.pcspecialties.com
http://www.vacdry.com
http://www.pcsvacdry.com
http://www.pcsvacuumkilns.com
http://www.pcswoodtechnologies.com
http://www.vacuumdrykilns.com
http://www.vacuumkilns.com
http://www.vacuumkiln.com

Someone hacked into my Mambo and Joomla sites (http://www.pcsvacdry.com is an example of Mambo), so I changed some things, locked others down, and hopefully by the end of next week we’ll have an initial ‘new’ site at at least one or two of those domain names for testing purposes.

A while back I recieved an email about closed loop fuel sources (see post about smoking weed with Willie Nelson, below) and that sorta jogged something in my head. I started looking around and found out that Brazil is nearly energy independant, practically free of the need of foriegn oil and nearly free of the need for oil for use in cars in general. HOW did a fucking third-world country do what the Bush administration and the rest of corporate America said isn’t possible here for fifty years or longer?

By growing sugar cane…

You might be aware of the US meme regarding how evil ethanol is in gasoline because they charge the same price but you get less miles per gallon during the winter. They add ethanol because up to a certain percentage modern cars can adapt for it on the fly with no harm (other than a slight reduction in MPG). If a car is designed from the beginning, it can run on anything from straight gas to straight ethanol without a problem. Sound high tech? Ford has had the capability to produce these cars for nearly a hundred years (the idea being that farmers in the middle of nowhere could make their own fuel for their Model T’s, and more recently has produced E85 capable vehicles). Brazil got off their ass and builds locally the same ‘flex fuel’ type of engine. Owners can choose to pull up at a pump and gas up with whatever they like…and while straight ethanol gets slightly less MPG, it ALSO COSTS LESS THAN HALF AS MUCH. That is WITHOUT subsidies or incentives.

Reference:

(flex fuel vehicles) run on gasoline, alcohol or any combination of the two and now represent nearly 20 percent of the new cars sold in Brazil.

Back in the mid 1990s, Brazil ended its ethanol subsidies. Nevertheless, with world oil prices hovering around $55 a barrel, the price of ethanol today is only half that of gasoline. Since its inception, Brazil’s ethanol program has displaced imported oil worth $120 billion. This is comparable to a savings of almost $2 trillion for a U.S.-sized economy.

Over the past three decades Brazil has worked to create a viable alternative to gasoline. With its sugarcane-based fuel, the nation may become energy independent this year.

After nearly three decades of work, Brazil has succeeded where much of the industrialized world has failed: It has developed a cost-effective alternative to gasoline

Thats right. Brazil did it…and we can too. Again, the best part is its a ‘closed loop’, there is no new carbon released into the atmosphere: the sugar cane (or any other plant) captures carbon dioxide and sunlight to create the sugar. You burn that sugar back into the atmosphere, where it is re-captured, wash rinse repeat. Quite unlike digging up billions of tons of carbon which had been saftley squirrled away millions of years ago, and then burning that…

I’m not finished, but thats all for now…