Researchers hoping to ease America’s oil addiction are turning sawdust and wood chips into bio-oil, a thick black liquid that could become a green substitute for many petroleum products.
Bio-oil can be made from almost any organic material, including agricultural and forest waste like corn stalks and scraps of bark. Converting the raw biomass into bio-oil yields a product that is easy to transport and can be processed into higher-value fuels and chemicals.
“It is technically feasible to use biomass for the production of all the materials that we currently produce from petroleum,” said professor Robert C. Brown, director of the Office of Biorenewables Programs at Iowa State University.
Daily Archives: March 19, 2006
New Rand Healthcare Study
1. We get only 55 percent of recommended medical attention [TC: hey, didn’t an earlier Rand study show us that more care doesn’t translate into better health care outcomes?]
2. “Those with annual family incomes over $50,000 had quality scores that were just 3.5 percentage points higher than those with incomes less than $15,000….insurance status had no real effect on quality.”
This should make everyone uncomfortable, but most of all those who think that access to health insurance is a panacea. Here is the press release, the piece is in The New England Journal of Medicine. Am I supposed to believe the following?:
AMT: Without a Fix, A Time Bomb
Avram Lank updates us on the latest Washington machinations over the Alternative Minimum Tax:
Inflation is the basic reason the AMT is spreading.
Many parts of the tax code are indexed for inflation, including brackets and personal exemptions. However, the AMT exemption is not. So over the years, as everyday people had larger, inflation-driven exemptions under the regular tax code, the gap narrowed between what they owed under it vs. what they owed under the AMT.
Congress addressed the narrowing gap by temporarily raising the AMT exemption in 2001 and 2003. But the last temporary fix expired in 2005, so many more people will feel its sting this year.