Australia: One hundred years of drought and flooding rains

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the publication in the London Spectator of My country, the celebrated poem in which the young Dorothea Mackellar evoked striking images of Australia’s ever-variable climate in memorable phrases about this “wilful, lavish land” of “drought and flooding rains”, and of the “flood and fire and famine” for which “she pays us back three-fold”.

Ethanol Is Dream Deferred for Farming Towns Too Late to Biofuel

Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Ford Heights Ethanol LLC applied in June 2006 to build a distillery in the Illinois town that bears its name, promising economic revival to replace abandoned houses and closed stores. Two years later, no work has begun.

For Ford Heights and other agricultural towns, the ``green- collar'' job revolution envisioned by federal biofuel mandates is a dream deferred. Knee-high grass and old tires cover the site as record prices for corn, the main ingredient in ethanol, discourage investment in new plants.

The $20.8 billion industry may have itself to blame. Breakneck construction led to 168 ethanol plants, already producing more than U.S. mandates require for the fuel additive this year. The distilleries buy so much corn -- as much as a third of the U.S. crop this year -- that they have contributed to price increases, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

``I kept saying they're going to kill the golden goose,'' says Jim Jordan, president of Jim Jordan & Associates LP, a Houston fuel-consulting company. ``We have in fact overbuilt. This thing is pretty devastating.''