cars
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A valedictory to Colin Fletcher
For most of us who care about ecology and the environment, there was some personal experience that brought us there. For me, it was wilderness hiking, beginning 30-plus years ago in the Grand Canyon and continuing across the American West. Two books helped instigate my journeys and those of thousands of fellow adventure-seekers and nature-lovers. The Welshman who wrote them, the intrepid and blessedly individualistic Colin Fletcher, died earlier this month, at 85.
I can't recall which I read first -- The Man Who Walked Through Time, in which Fletcher chronicled his 400-mile hike through the Grand Canyon, or his compulsively detailed guide to backpacking, The Complete Walker. That's probably because I read them both repeatedly and obsessively.
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Google.org funds V2G demonstration projects
Sweet mama! Google.org is going to give vehicle-to-grid technology a much-needed boost, to the tune of $10 million. The company is going to modify six cars, a mix of Toyota Priuses and Ford Escape hybrids, with batteries that can draw juice from the grid and feed juice back in. The promise of this technology is […]
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With the right rules in place, it could work
Working Assets is my long-distance phone company. I love it dearly for its combination of business efficiency, social responsibility and progressive politics.
Each month, my phone bill carries alerts that urge me to take action on a specific issue or two. Recent Citizen Actions suggest the gravity of the issues chosen: "Save Our Constitution," "Impeach Dick Cheney," "Close Guantanamo."
This month Working Assets urged me to "Say No to Ethanol."
How did the use of ethanol end up alongside tyranny and torture as an evil to be conquered?
A couple of years ago, I was waiting my turn to speak to a well-attended California conference on alternative fuels. For this gathering, alternative fuels included natural gas, clean diesel, fossil fueled derived hydrogen, coal-fired electricity, as well as wind energy and biofuels. The leadoff speaker, from the California Energy Commission, spoke warmly about all the alternative fuels under discussion. Except one. When it came to ethanol, he visualized his perspective with the metaphor of a giant hypodermic needle from Midwest corn farmers to California drivers. For him and, I suspect, most of California's state government, ethanol belongs in the same category as heroin.
In the late 1990s, the nation discovered that MTBE, a widely used gasoline additive made of natural gas and petroleum-derived isobutylene was polluting ground water. The environmental community largely defended its continued use and vigorously opposed substituting ethanol. One well-respected New England environmental coalition raised the possibility that ethanol blends could cause fetal alcohol syndrome. Fill up your gas tank with 10 percent ethanol and your baby could be alcoholic, their report warned.
In the last few years, the environmental position has shifted from an attack on ethanol from any source to an attack on corn and corn-derived ethanol. The assault on corn comes from so many directions that sometimes the arguments are wildly contradictory. In an article published in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year Michael Pollan, an excellent and insightful writer, argues that cheap corn is the key to the epidemic of obesity. The same month, Foreign Affairs published an article by two distinguished university professors who argued that the use of ethanol has led to a runup in corn prices that threatens to sentence millions more to starvation.
Ethanol is not a perfect fuel. Corn is far from a perfect fuel crop. We should debate their imperfections. But we should also keep in mind the first law of ecology. "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Tapping into any energy source involves tradeoffs.
Yet when it comes to ethanol, and corn, we accept no tradeoffs. In 30 years in the business of alternative energy, I've never encountered the level of animosity generated by ethanol, not even in the debate about nuclear power. When it comes to ethanol, we seem to apply a different standard than we do when we evaluate other fuels.
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Well, sorta
One of the most striking findings from this year's Cascadia Scorecard from Sightline Institute (just released Tuesday, by the way) is that Northwesterners -- or, more properly, the residents of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia -- are using less gasoline. In fact, per person gas consumption on the Northwest's roads and highways has fallen by nearly a tenth since the late 1990s.
To put the recent declines in context: cutting gas consumption by nearly a tenth is equivalent to each driver taking a one-month holiday from driving each year. At this point, the average resident of the U.S. Northwest uses less gas than at any time since 1967.
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Compressed air, not hot air
In contrast to the hot air coming out of Washington and Detroit, India is opting for compressed air. Deets here.
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CTL stupid compared to plug-in hybrids, say experts, people who can read
A couple of heavy-duty energy wonks from Carnegie Mellon have this to say: The House Committee on Energy and Commerce is considering enacting policies to subsidize the production of transportation fuel from coal-to-liquid projects. Tepper School of Business researchers determined plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are a far better and less costly choice. — Generating electricity […]
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Honda ditches Accord hybrid
Honda is ditching the Accord Hybrid because it discovered that … are you sitting down? … people who buy hybrids like good gas mileage.
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Sign the petition!
I opened my inbox the other day and thought I must be dreaming: the venerable progressive organization MoveOn is taking on coal-to-liquids (CTL). This is from an email they sent to their over three million members on Wednesday: In the next few weeks, Congress could vote to DOUBLE the amount of greenhouse gases America produces […]
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