Grassoline-how grass replaces gas

 

Living in the middle east gives you a really warped perspective about oil. In most countries where oil is cheaper than water, people don’t really care about what happens to oil reserves because they know that they will last a long time. What happens when these sources of black gold dry up? The world will grind to a halt as fossil fuels are the major source of fuel in our world today. Nuclear power is not safe enough, Hydro and solar electricity  can’t be used everywhere. So what then? Scientists I believe have a new miracle source for fuel in the form of Panicum virgatum.  In North America, this so called savior of the fuel world is also called Switchgrass.

You heard me right.

Grass.

Apparently this fast growing, perennial grass can solve our energy problem. It is the chief raw material used to produce a distilled fuel called cellulosic ethanol. Cellulose is a the stuff that plant cells are made of, and the more cellulose a plant can yield the better bio-fuel it becomes. And that is where switchgrass comes in. compared to gasoline, it takes energy to create cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass than to get gasoline form crude oil. Where crude oil has energy ratio of 1: 0.81, switchgrass yields ten times the energy put into it, found researcher Michael Wang of the Argonne National Laboratory.

The process involves breaking  down cellulose into its basic components, adding yeast and waiting for it to ferment into alcohol. After it’s refined, the ethanol produced can be used as fuel. Even better,  lignin – a byproduct created when water is eliminated from cellulose has shown promise for use as a fuel to power ethanol production plants. If lignin can be harnessed, this could make ethanol processing self-sustaining. Also, since Switchgrass is a hardy plant that can survive droughts, is a self-seeding crop which means it can spread on its own. It requires low levels of fertilizers and grows to maturation in three years.

It sounds great, but as all good things do, this too has a slight glitch.  Since the cellulose is broken down using enzymes, the enzymes used to produce ethanol, add to the overall expense. According to researchers in the US, it could come up to 20cents worth of enzymes per gallon. With the increasing population in the world today, one has to wonder about where all this grass is going to be cultivated. What cultivable land switchgrass gets is left over from the main areas of cultivation. In countries like India, and China, where there isn’t enough space for people to live, where oh where are we going to grow grass?

This plan however is feasible in countries of the middle east where vast areas are un inhabited. If they could find a way of establishing this plant in the large deserts of the region, then we can solve both energy and environmental problems. Desert lands could be reclaimed to cultivate the grass and we’d have an alternate source of energy.

The idea is feasible though all the hitches in the development plan for this useful   grass have to be straightened.

 

 

 

Save the Ridley Turtles

It is just despicable how humans seem to think that they’re apart from the rest of the living creatures on this planet. Sure, I support non-vegetariansim, and fur coats, but not blatant disreagard for the planet. As a part of the eco-system, it is the way of nature for a stronger species to take from a weaker species, but there is a system Notice how the lions dont end up eating all the antelopes? and when the lions die and become grass, the anteloped dont eat all the grass at once. They take what they need to survive, not more. and they give back to the system that they take from. Humans on the other hand, take take take and take more than they need. They take much more than what they can give back.

Ratan Tata, is a perfect example. (not that he’s the only one, mind you). He owns industries worth millions all across India, and has enough money for him and his desendants to live succesfully for hundreds of years to come. But, now he has to build a port in Dharma, a place which is one of the few habitats of the endangered Ridely Turtles.  Now i’m sure that the TATA enterprises can do without the extra millions they’re going to make, but for these turtles, the beaches of Gahirmatha, Orissa are the last home of these turtles. If the port is built and they die, they’re entire species will die. yeah .die. Not a very nice thing now that you see it from their point of view huh??  Greenpeace India has been campaignig against the TATA project, for ages now. They started a letter writing campaing, which was followed by a campaing wher they  project images against TATA bulidings, and now they’re on a project lighting candles on the beach to make Ratan Tata feel the heat of the momment. I’ve become a part of these projects, and if u want to as well go here. http://www.greenpeace.org/india/turtles/wal 

Take a stand. Help the turtles.

Should they be unplugged?

I’ve been on holiday here for the last one month. The country held its parliamentary elections just a few days back…For this tiny little country, this election was a pretty big deal. The state underwent some major resturcturing, as the constituencies were merged to form 5 instead of 25.  But most importantly, this is the second election to be held in kuwait wher women were allowed to vote. Pre-election campaigns saw a lot of high hopes among the women as more than a dozen of them ran for office. However, in a country where there almsost as many women as men, there is not a single woman in the parliament….

For the women of this country who have newly reiceved suffrage rights, its a sad thing that even after two elections there isnt a woman MP.. this year’s elections were very closely contested, and one of teh women did mange to reach 11th place in her district…Assel Al-Awadhi, my personal favorite (tho i dont vote) ended up 11th place just one place shy of a seat in the parliament…and it was a sad thing because a lot of peolpe hoped tht she would make it.

What makes me think is how come, when there are so many women in this country, is it hard for a woman to get a seat in the parliament…If every kuwaiti woman voted for a woman, i think it wud definitely work. Every voter gets to vote for four candidates from their district, and it just kills me to see that none of the women got through.. For a male dominated, partriachal society like kuwait, where women have been hidden away in the corners of their homes for years, it is important that they hold offices of power. Now that women get educated here, they go to collges, some of them work too, but at the end of the day, they’re msotly still seen as child-producing barbie dolls.

Some women who vote for the more islamist kind of candidates claim that they have all the rights they need at home and that they dont need any… Sometimes i think, these people are so happy in their state of ignorance that it would be sad to tell them that the grass is a  lot greener from the outside of the abbaya.  A lot of women in arab countires suffer horrors that may shock us, but a lot of them also like where they are…they like being covered from head to toe, they like staying at home all their lives….It’s like they’re still plugged into a matrix created by a highly patriarchal society…Is it worth unpluggin them ?? Why do most of them take the blue pill that will forever keep them from realising their full potential?

CatWoman in Feminist Theory

So they said the movie sucked. So they said it was written horribly, and it was presented horrbily. Well, they’re right. I personally thought that the film’s bigggest flaw was that it does not decently show the mental changes that Patience goes thrugh as she becomes catwoman. On a psychological level, this movie sucks. The viewer gets no idea of what is goin on in her head. Especially in the scenes where she walks back to her appartment after bein reborn. We just see her staring and lookin dazed, but for those few mintutes, which i think were the most crucial, the viewers are completely cut off from the character. It was frustrating. But. The movie had a terrific ending. As i sat there watching cawoman walk into the night, i realized how profound the movie was in terms of a feminist text.

Feminism is something that was formed as a reaction, to the actions that have been performed upon women over centuries. The first wave of feminisim, in my opinion was really mild.It was perhaps the first whisper of a word that is yet to be said storngly, forcefully enough to makle a change. ‘STOP’. It was just a begining. Now that we are the fourth wave of feminism, it is time for that vocie to get stronger. so now we have political rights, we have money, and we have power. What we need now is to change the course of history.

All the femisim so far was aimed in getting equal rights for women. But if men could dominate over women for centuries, then is it not time for a change in power?

Catwoman as a text, lays foundation for that. Total independence. when Catwoman walks away from a happily ever after realtionship she could have had with the cop, she chooses what millions of women have been scared to choose before. Total Independence. for someone from an ex-third world country, i think this is a concept thats need a lot of addressing.

The essence of catwoman is that she does not need a man ‘hero’ figure to save her, or to make her life complete. She in herself is all she needs. In her letter to Tom Lone, she says that before she died all she wanted was for somone to see that she was special. but after being reborn as catwoman, she realizes that all she neede was for her to see herself as special. she did not need anyone else. That i think should be the final, liberating wave of feminism. That i think is the only good thing about the movie-that it will inspire this line of thought in many female minds.

May the cat live stonger.

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