Starting with a CBC story yesterday, there’s been a minor flap here on PEI about biofuel development.

It seems that the Green Party of PEI had several representatives at the announcement of a proposed ethanol plant in Georgetown, and that they raised several issues, including the potential of air and water pollution from the plant, and the notion that “producing ethanol takes more energy than is derived from the product.” Provincial Green Party leader Sharon Labchuk characterized ethanol production as a “huge hoax.”

On tonight’s [[Compass]] there was a follow-up story, with an interview with Ms. Labchuk, in which the reporter asked about the opposition in light of the following statement in the party’s 2006 national election platform:

Green Party MPs will work to: Employ incentives to increase the percentage of ethanol content in gasoline and the availability of other biofuels.

Ms. Labchuk, appearing quite uncomfortable, defended the apparent inconsistency by suggesting that the platform was only in force during the election, and has “no official standing outside of the election period.”

However at its 2006 Convention, the Green Party passed many resolutions, including the following regarding biofuels:

• A follow-up to the 5% biofuel content target of 2010. The GPC will promote 10% biofuel content by 2015 and 20% by 2020.
• GST and other taxes will be collected from consumers only on the percentage of non-renewable resource fuel. The biofuel portion will be tax-exempt.
• Shift government supported research away from GMO biotechnology towards organic food production and efficient biofuel crop development.

Presumably these resolutions, made only a month ago, are still reflective of the party’s views. And while they don’t specifically mention support of ethanol, they don’t come out against it either. And given that ethanol is so prominent in the world “alternative fuels,” this amounts to at least tacit support.

Now I’m no stranger to inconsistency myself, but I figure if you’re going to wrap yourself up into party politics, the least you can do is to get your story straight. It’s hard enough convincing everyone that we need to worry about our energy use without muddying the waters; indeed water-muddying is one of the favourite tools of Big Oil when they want to convince us the purported “half-bakedness” of alternative energy sources.

What do other federal parties think about ethanol?

The NDP has a policy to “[r]equire that at least 5 per cent of the gasoline supply consist of ethanol by 2008, and move to meet a goal of 10 per cent by 2010.”

In May the Liberal opposition said that “[i]ncreasing the use of ethanol may be a way to boost the use of renewable fuels and stimulate rural economies, but, as a stand alone measure, it will not have a significant impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions” but also reported that “the [former] Liberal government made significant direct investments in the expansion of ethanol production in Canada.”

The ruling Conservatives says that it “believes in promotion of alternative energy (such as wind, solar, geothermal) and transitional fuels (such as biodiesel, ethanol, natural gas) to help develop hydrogen as a fuel.”

Ethanol, in other words, has a lot of supporters, on both sides of the aisle. I have no idea whether it’s a viable, sustainable component of our future fuel mix; indeed I share Ms. Labchuk’s suspicions that it in fact takes more energy to produce ethanol than the fuel itself provides.

Which is all to say that when standing up against ethanol it’s probably a good idea to have the facts straight, the media under your control, and to check with the party platform to see if you’re in sync. Otherwise, you just come off looking confused, and the ethanol train keeps on rolling.

A bonus episode of The 3LA Podcast tonight wherein I take a stab at explaining why the airport code for Charlottetown is YYG.

Today’s episode of The 3LA Podcast: ZIP, a brief tour through the US ZIP code.

Six years ago tonight [[Catherine]] and I walked over to the The Town & Country. We split an order of nachos. We walked over to the video store on Grafton St. and rented Message in a Bottle, the Kevin Costner movie, and then walked home and watched it.

We went to bed early, as Catherine was due to have labour induced the next morning — our as-yet-unnamed baby was two weeks late, and we’d waited as long as our OB/GYN advised was reasonable.

Throughout the night, Catherine had little contractions — I still have sheet of paper I wrote the times on — but nothing wild and closely spaced enough to suggest real labour was coming on.

Sunday morning we went to the hospital, and while I will spare you the details, the rest of the day, culminating in a “we’ve got to do this right now” C-section, was rather stressful all-round. We’ve lost track of the real value, but both Catherine and I remember him having a negative APGAR (which is not technically allowed).

We spent the next several days with Oliver in the NICU, hooked up to various machines and holding our breath to see how he would emerge from his sudden entry. By Tuesday it was clear that all systems had, as if by magic, powered up to normal. The tubes came out, the machines got turned off, and we finally got to hold Oliver in our arms.

We were so distracted by the utter reality of it all, that we forgot to give “Baby Male Miller” a name until Tuesday. By Wednesday, things had calmed down enough so that I could announce Oliver’s arrival to the world.

Oliver turns 6 years old tomorrow afternoon around 2:30 p.m. As he stands beside me as I type this, he emphatically states “after this day I am six!” It’s all somewhat miraculous to me that this all worked out as wonderfully as it has.

Happy birthday, Oliver.

Today’s episode of The 3LA Podcast pulls apart RSS. In two minutes and fifteen seconds.

All other things being equal, I should be at the SHiFT conference in Lisbon this week. Alas real work, pneumonia, airfares and other forces conspired against me, and so I’m left to look on from afar: here’s Laurent summarizing his talk and here’s a photo by Martin of Thomas giving his.

With luck I’ll be able to rejoin the reboot-SHiFT-LIFT train in Geneva; Laurent (yes, the same Laurent) has just posted a vision for what LIFT07 might look like.

A sure sign that the procrastination gremlins are in full form: another episode of The 3LA Podcast. Today’s subject: PMT.

While I tipped my hat to friend Ann (who has nothing to be ashamed about for not knowing how to use RSS in a sentence) there’s something else at work here: perhaps like you, I get lots of ideas in the shower, or on the way to work, or when I’m falling to sleep at night. Usually these ideas involve creating some sort of grand thing — a newspaper, a hovering rocket ship, a website for father with one child. And usually they go nowhere, as real life overtakes (and I realize that parts for hovering rocket ships would probably be too expensive anyway).

I’m pretty sure that if I carried out all of my crazy shower schemes I would explode or be homeless (although I might be homeless and happy). But it occured to me that the effect of so many ideas not carried out was beginning to be a downer. So I decided to take just one — it happened, perhaps at random, to be exposition on three-letter words — and just do it.

The idea actually started off in the shower as a CBC radio series. Then I realized that to make a CBC radio series I would probably have to write a proposal and send it to someone. And there would be meetings, and studios to book, and scripts to write, and T4s to receive. It all seemed Very Complicated. And so I gave up. Then I realized that if I just went ahead and did it — in an hour or two — I would, at the very least, get it out of my system. Wouldn’t be perfect, might not even be useful. But never underestimate the power of actually doing something.

Who knows — I might keep going.

My friend Ann wrote the other day to ask me about RSS. I wrote her back a little description of what RSS is. This morning she wrote back to thank me, and added:

The latent (or maybe not so) teacher in you is a side you should cultivate.

That’s a nice set of gloves to throw down, and inspired me to whip up a brand new podcast: The 3LA Podcast. The idea is that in each episode I’ll decrypt a new “three letter acronym.” Like RSS. Or GPS. In two minutes or less.

Episode one concerns the three-letter acronym TLA.

You can grab the podcast feed, and learn more, over on 3la.ca.

My archives operative G. tracked down this advertisement for a new Charlottetown bus service in The Patriot, dated February 15, 1938:

The following article about the bus service appears in the same issue:

You don’t have to talk to many people here in [[Charlottetown]] to find out that Ray Murphy, personable owner of Murphy Pharmacies, is a pretty good guy. Tales of his community generosity abound, and if there’s a health-related good cause in this city, it’s likely that Ray’s company is offering it some support.

Which is one of the reasons why I’m happy to read, as CBC is reporting, that our neighbourhood recreation centre, formerly owned by the Roman Catholic Diocese, has recently been purchased by Ray Murphy, with a goal of “turning it back into a building where people will gather for some healthy exercise.”

There’s a scarcity of recreational facilities in Charlottetown’s downtown; flipping through the City of Charlottetown’s recreation brochure you find that there’s a heavy concentration of activities out in the suburbs, but almost nothing south of Euston St. I’ve been searching for an alternative to “calling the cops” when neighbourhood kids with no place to play do dangerous things like “climbing onto the roof of our carriage house” because they’ve got nowhere else to hang out; perhaps the new “Murphy’s Community Centre” can help.

It’s nice to see that a company that’s in the “health business” is visionary enough to know that there’s more to health than prescriptions and shampoo; kudos to Mr. Murphy and his group for taking this bold move. Let us know what we can do to help.