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Editor's ViewpointMeditations Of A Minnesota Mossback |
Cheques & Balances …Robbing Peter To Pay Paul
It’s been quite a month.
Along with the holiday greeting cards, I think I’ve heard from almost every one of my friends in Nigeria by e-mail.
And, just this morning, I won the lottery in the UK and have been granted the lump sum payout of £5,000,000 if I just contact the claims officer listed below.
Imagine that!
Last week, a friend in Ghana let me know of the results of his 7-month-long meeting with the secretary to the United Nations.
Apparently the UN, in affiliation with World Bank, has set up a fund to benefit victims of e-mail scams to the tune of $750,000 each!
Clearly, my future is set—I just need to let him know where to send the cheque. The e-mail ends with a kind wish for my good health, an apology that my money is overdue, and the words “Making the world a better place.”
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This cold weather we’ve been enjoying, more like the Minnesota of days gone by, has tongues wagging around the world.
Last week, Pravda, the ressurected newspaper from Iron Curtain days, published an article that stated: “The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age.”
The resulting blogs have generated enough heat to compensate, I’m thinking. [In a related, tongue-in-cheek commentary, www.Tallahassee.com published an article entitled “What Caused the Al Gores of the Globe to Go Extinct?”]
The weather prompts me to meditate once again on the subject of biofuels, this time from the standpoint of 50 Bloomington School District students who were apparently stranded in 25-degree-below-zero weather last week because of that nasty predisposition for biofuel to turn to a gel-like substance in cold bus fuel lines.
Fortunately, none of the students left at bus stops or stranded on inoperable buses required medical attention, but school was canceled out of continuing concerns for students’ safety. (According to some of Bloomington’s neighboring school districts, they’re having the same trouble.)
Five minutes aft er I read that article in the Minneapolis- St. Paul Star Tribune, I received a press release from the Minnesota Trucking Association stating that an “unusually high amount of fuel filter plugging” was taking place in large trucks, causing them to stall and creating safety hazards along roadsides—and a source of financial hardship for the truckers and the customers they serve.
The press release states that although some are already attributing the problem to biodiesel in the fuel, “that has not been confirmed.”
The State of Minnesota in 2005 required all on-highway diesel fuel sold in Minnesota to contain 2 percent biofuel, resulting in a mixture known as B2.
A lot of testing was done at the time, much of it summarized in the “Biodiesel Cold Weather Blending Study,” prepared by the Cold Flow Blending Consortium.
There were still some unknowns, even aft er testing was complete, the report admits.
(One example: “… the potential implications of this for users of B2 blends made during cold weather blending are not known.” Appendix J) There’s something wrong here. Any government-mandated technology that places children at risk in cold weather needs at least a second look.
And I find it intriguing that a farm subsidy law—dressed up as public policy to reduce the state’s dependence on foreign oil—should make it necessary for school bus companies to keep their buses in heated bus barns to minimize the problem.
Aren’t we simply robbing Peter to pay Paul?
I’m sure we’ll hear more on this subject soon.
One of the frequent questions that pops into The Citizen’s e-mail box—what’s a mossback? Deb, for one, as she was born in Washington State. She enjoys writing about technology, politics and human nature—and not necessarily in that order.