Joshua Go

Last week, I went to Guangzhou, China for the 101st China Import and Export Fair (中国进出口商品交易会) . Here's the view from our 18th floor hotel room. We got a better deal on our hotel than most of the other visitors because my father's friend is from Guangzhou. This friend's sister-in-law is a hotel manager. Everything in China just has to be huge. The big heavy machinery was necessarily outside. Here's a forklift company with shiny forklifts. I have no idea what this power company does, but they had a nice booth. Because of the immense size of the fair and all the heavy catalogs I was carrying around, I had to step outside to rest my feet and my shoulders for a bit. This is the place right by the street where people were allowed to step outside for a quick smoke. The following is a large expanse that they were just preparing for the second phase of the trade fair. Inside the complex, there were even more displays, but the booths were far smaller. Here's my father at the ...

For as long as I can remember, I've been excited about environmentally-friendly solutions. For energy, my dream for clean energy centered around solar and wind power. For barren soil, it was composting. For everyday fuel, I thought of renewable sources such as ethanol or hydrogen. Now I'm glad it's becoming more widely adopted; I thought I'd never see the day when such things would actually become economically feasible. There's an ethanol craze sweeping America at the moment, and I hadn't bothered to read much about it until this week's Economist leader, "Castro was right," pointed out that there are two main ways of producing ethanol on an industrial scale: corn and sugar. Ethanol advocates often point to Brazil as a shining example of a large country that uses ethanol on a large scale. Knowing that Brazil is doing fine with massive ethanol deployment made me more excited about having it in the United States, until I found out that their ethanol i...