Archive for the 'Alternative Fuel' Category

“The gap between what the science tells us is necessary and what the politics is delivering is still significant” - David Milibrand, Environment Secretary of Britain

Check out this summary of the climate and alternative fuel debate in 2006 in a BBC article by Richard Black called “Climate 2006: Rhetoric up, action down”

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

As discussed before in this blog, alternative energy is not only an economic and environmental issue. Ending our dependence on foreign oil is the best thing we can do for the citizens of oil-rich countries who are ruled by dictators. Thomas Friedman couldn’t said any better than this:

“As long as the monarchs and dictators who run these oil states can get rich by drilling their natural resources - as opposed to drilling the natural talents and energy of their people - they can stay in office forever. They can use oil money to monopolize all the instruments of power - army, police, and intelligence - and never have to introduce real transparency or power sharing. All they have to do is capture and hold the oil tap. They never have to tax their people, so the relationship between ruler and ruled is highly distorted. Without taxation, there is no representation.” - Thomas Friedman from The World is Flat

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

In his book An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice-President Al Gore talked about a well-respected study by Princeton researchers Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala that describes how “humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems for the next half-century.”

Currently, the United States is emitting about 1.8 Gigatons of carbon every year. Mr. Socolow and Mr. Pacala concluded that a “business as usual” approach to policies such as car mileage standards and alternative energy would result in 2.6 Gigatons of annual U.S. carbon emissions by 2050.

Through six different categories of policy changes, the researchers predicted that we could lower annual carbon emissions to roughly 1.0 Gigatons by 2050. This is would be back down to the carbon levels of 1970.

What are these six different categories? They all are affordable and already-existing technologies that in combination would make a gigantic difference.

1. Reduction from more efficient use of electricity in heating and cooling systems, lighting, appliances, and electronic equipment.

2. Reduction from end-use efficiency, meaning that we design buildings and businesses to use far less energy than they currently do.

3. Reduction from increased vehicle efficiency by manufacturing cars that run on less gas and putting more hybrid and fuel-cell on the roads.

4. Reduction from making other changes in transport efficiency, such as designing cities and towns to have better mass transit systems and building heavy trucks that have greater fuel efficiency.

5. Reduction from increased reliance on renewable energy technologies that already exist, such as wind and biofuels.

6. Reduction from the capture and storage of excess carbon from power plants and industrial activities.

Conclusion: We can do this….we have to do this.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

We just got wind of an interesting news tid-bit from The Washington Times that says the California based punk/rock/alternative group Green Day is joining the fight for renewable energy.

The popular band is combining forces with the Natural Resources Defense Council to help educate youngsters about clean, renewable energy resources.

As quoted from WT,

“This campaign is about channeling the power of millions into somethingpositive and powerful,” Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said.”People are sick of our oil addiction and feel like nobody is doinganything about it.”

And you can check out more at www.greendaynrdc.com

technorati tags:Green, Day, Oil, Resource, Renewable, Energy

By the year 2012 the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point wants to be a self-sufficient campus, energy wise. They want to get rid of using coal or oil and move towards renewable energy sources that will power the schools, heating, cooling, lighting etc needs.

Governor Jim Doyle announced the energy solution plan saying that they were “going to find answers to things [they] can apply across the state of Wisconsin.”

The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point already has solar panels to power hot water heaters, and a special “green roof” to provide a more energy efficient insulation means.

I think this is a great idea. By placing this on a school, the University can use itself as a test bed to develope new technology and also use itself as a proving ground so that, if successful, other schools, businesses, and families can follow suit and push America towards a renewable energy economy.

Also included in the renewable by 2012 project are three other UW system Universities. Green Bay, Oshkosh and River Falls.Â

technorati tags:Renewable, Energy, Alternative, Fuel, UW, Stevens, Point

Honda has developed and is launching a new diesel engine thta is as cleac as gasoline fuelled cars.

The technology generates and stores ammonia within a two-layer catalytic converter that turns nitrogen oxide into nitrogen, which is harmless to the worlds pollution problems. The system is said by the company to be a simple, simple system better and cheaper than anything on the market today.

The system is said to come to America within three years as it tries to meet the U.S. On-Board Diagnostic System Reguirements.

You can read more about this new car and Honda vehicles improvements to reducing carbon dioxide globally at cnn.com’s article on the engine.

technorati tags:Honda, Diesel, Engine, Clean, Fuel

As a political blogger, I contribute articles to this blog that explain why we need alternative energy. The reason why this issue is important go far beyond just having cheaper gas. This article is about the reason that is quickly becoming the 800-lb gorilla in the room: global warming. There’s no denying it, the planet is getting hotter and consensus in the scientific community is that carbon dioxide production from human activity is the cause of this warming. Alternative fuels significantly reduce carbon dioxide production and they are a key part of solving this growing climate crisis.

I recently bought the book An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. The book is basically the paper version of the movie that was released in May 2006. The book and movie are based on the Keynote presentation on global warming (Keynote is the Mac version of Powerpoint) that Al Gore has given close to a thousand times. This slideshow is both fascinating and deeply terrifying as the former Vice-President takes you on “a nature walk through the Book of Revelations.”

This book and movie were just stuffed full of compelling information. For example, here’s a summary of one of most interesting parts of this movie and book.

As I mentioned earlier, the scientific community has reached a overwhelming consensus: Global warming is real. Humans are the principal cause. The consequences will be very dangerous. Said Jim Baker, the former head of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration): “There is a better scientific consensus on this issue than any other…with the possible exception of Newton’s Law of Dynamics.”

In a peer-reviewed Science magazine study published by Dr. Naomi Oreskes at the University of California at San Diego, all 928 of the peer-reviewed science journal articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003 were analyzed. Dr. Oreskes and her team choose a large random sample and determined if these papers agreed on the scientific consensus on global warming.

Percentage of articles in doubt as to the cause of global warming: 0%

Then it gets interesting:

Due to well-funded special interest groups, a very coordinated disinformation campaign is being conducted to raise doubt about the “inconvenient truth” of global warming. (Big surprise: these groups happen to receive funding from the oil and coal industry). Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ross Gelbspan wrote a book called Boiling Point and discussed this information campaign. In this book, he describes an internal memo from one of these groups that stated their goal was to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”

Al Gore then proceeded to draw a compelling comparison to the reaction of the tobacco industry in the 1960s when the Surgeon General released a landmark report linking cigarette smoke to lung cancer.

“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” - Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company memo from the 1960s.

Then it gets really interesting:

Similar to the study of the peer-reviewed journal articles, another study was done of the mainstream media coverage of the global warming issue. No formal citation was given for this story, but as avid news reader I have zero doubts about the study’s conclusion.

They studied articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal over 14 years (roughly 1990-2004). They took a 18% sample of the 636 articles and analyzed how they depicted the global warming issue.

Number of articles that gave equal weight to the “scientific articles” (translation: not peer-reviewed) that claim global warming isn’t due to human activity: 53%

53%!!!

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

The name E85 comes from the fact that the fuel is made up of 85% Ethanol and 15% petrol (gas, what is used to power your car, etc).

Ethanol is a form of alcohol that can be derived from places such as corn. The push to use E85 comes at a time when the United States along with the rest of the industrialized world is dependent on oil. Some say a push towards ethanol based fuel will relieve this dependence while boosting the withering farming economy in the US.