Articles by Erik Hoffner

Volkswagen’s new entry to the clean diesel fleet

Enough election talk, it's time to put some honest-to-goodness car news in the Gristmill (so this one's for you, JMG!).

Volkswagen is about to unveil a new Golf hybrid, said to feature an all-electric mode at low speed and regenerative braking to compete with the Prius and its ilk. The difference is that this is a diesel-electric hybrid, which VW says will get 69 mpg and exceed Europe's (and California's) tough emissions standards.

The point is somewhat moot, as this internal-combusion-perpetuating monster will not be for sale in the U.S. But is this just another indicator that clean diesel cars are greener than hybrids?

Perhaps. But filling one of these new Golfs with locally produced, organic, fair-trade biodiesel made from waste vegetable oil by a worker-owned biorefinery will certainly help.

Propaganda soft-pedals sonar impacts on marine mammals

The following is a guest post from a friend of mine, Michael Stocker, director of Ocean Conservation Research. —– When it comes to national security interests, I can accept a little obfuscation by our military. But with the recent U.S. Navy press activities on the effects of active sonar on marine life, they are puttin’ […]

Events in Seattle and Portland sure to inspire

Renewable energy installations in remote communities of developing nations encourage indigenous and rural communities to stay put and keep their traditions alive. With remarkably small power systems, these underserved villages can store vaccines in a refrigerator, pump water, light a clinic at night, or contact the outside world.

One of the key grassroots groups doing this work is Green Empowerment, which approaches all of their projects in Central/South America and Southeast Asia through a lens of generating social as well as environmental progress for communities with renewable energy & potable water delivery. GE interviews community members about what their power or water procurement needs are, recommends a system that would be appropriate -- including small hydropower, biomass, wind or solar -- supply the system, and then train a team of community members to plan, install, and maintain that system. That team can then help neighboring communities do the same, while maintaining its own.

GE is bringing two of their inspiring partners, engineer/activists from the Philippines who run NGOs there, to give folks in Seattle this Friday and Portland next Thursday a better sense of the huge possibilities of their shared projects. Highly recommended!

A lighthearted look at biosequestration

A semi-recent issue of High Country News carried a feature on the deep-rock carbon sequestration potential in the northwestern U.S.: it's maybe possible to inject CO2 captured from power plants into the basalt that underlies the region, producing inert calcium carbonate. If so, there's apparently enough basalt to capture centuries of the region's carbon emissions.

It's safe to say the research has its doubters. And carbon sequestration in general deserves the hairy eyeball: even if proven both ecologically and geologically viable and economically feasible, if it leads to the continued destruction of Appalachia and vast tracts of the West for coal, count me out.

Elsewhere, a study's findings added to the body of evidence that shellfish, like clams, oysters, and mussels (oh, and plankton, crustaceans, and corals), will start growing more slowly or dissolving altogether due to anthropogenic ocean acidification (from all of the excess CO2 we produce that goes into oceanic solution), which would dissolve their shells. Fewer/smaller/weaker shellfish would have economic effects, but also much greater impacts on marine life: they're an important food source for everything from fish to whales and birds.

My point? These critters fix carbon ("biosequestration") in their shells, so we could start losing an important piece of the ocean's ability to maintain its natural alkalinity, plus its tendency to sequester carbon, just when they're most needed.

My disinterested and clear-eyed proposal, then, is increased aquaculture of mollusks in bays, sounds, estuaries, sloughs, etc. We're already growing tens of millions of pounds of clams alone each year in the U.S., and unlike most other forms of aquaculture, you don't get the massive energetic losses like with the feeding of fish meal to top-of-the-food-chain finfish.