Articles by Biodiversivist

Forests may prevent more CO2 emissions than the equivalent acreage of biofuels

The latest proposal to include airlines in European emissions trading schemes will have predictable results:

"If the idea of emissions trading is to make energy intensive activities more expensive, then there will be some impact on ticket prices," said Andy Kershaw, Climate Change Manager at BA.

For obvious reasons, consumers will always end up footing the bill when businesses pay the true cost of protecting the environment. That reality is not hard for most of us environmentalists to understand. It costs to protect the environment.

Another zero-carbon power plant experiment contemplated

"$1 billion hydrogen power plant in works" reads the headline on MSNBC this morning. My headline, though more accurate, is somehow less exciting. Let me summarize the article for you. It is essentially your run-of-the-mill zero-carbon coal plant experiment, where you burn gases released from pressurized coal, except they are substituting petroleum coke for coal, like a lot of power plants already do. They are counting on government assistance, are planning on using this pressurized CO2 to force more oil out of nearby wells, won't know if they can do it until 2008, and should be making electricity by 2011 if they decide to go through with it.

Palm oil, that is

Any environmentalists out there who think biofuels cannot follow the same path as the petrochemical industry are deluding themselves. Biofuels have just as much, possibly more, potential to destroy our ecosytems than today's oil industry. A large percentage of biofuels being produced today are being grown on lands (the Amazon, Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia) that were rainforest carbon sinks just a few decades ago. In contrast, petroleum is pumped out of holes in the ground. The ecological damage caused by oil spills, and of course global warming, are well documented, and finding ways to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the air have to be found, but think a minute.

Exactly what is Kyoto trying to do? Is it trying to stop global warming or is it trying to stop ecological devastation? To be precise: It is trying to stop ecological devastation by stopping global warming. So, logically, any scheme to reduce CO2 that causes ecological degradation is self-defeating and should be made illegal. From the Epoch Times:

In the dim yet recent past Malaysia and Indonesia joined the Kyoto Protocol buoyed by their massive carbon credits in lieu of rainforest. The special waiver in the deal is that if palm oil forests replace rainforest, their Kyoto obligations remain the same.

In other words, it is acceptable under Kyoto to destroy rainforests to grow biofuels.

New batteries make a plug-in hybrid commercially viable

Announcements of technological breakthroughs that are going to save the planet are a dime a dozen. The true test is commercial success on the free market. By "free market" I mean no tax money to support its continued existence, and by "save the planet" I mean something that does not feed the planet to our cars. We are going to see a commercial application of this new technology in just a few months. You can find more details here.

I promised on my last post to look into plug-in electric car design from an engineer's perspective. City government's promising to use our tax dollars to buy plug-in electric cars as an incentive to mass produce them would be pointless if the technology needed to produce a viable car did not exist.

I will summarize my findings by showing what new battery technology would do to the General Motors EV-1, the subject of the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?