Jatropha jet fuel

Inedible weed may power flights of the future

As 2009 gets underway, it’s encouraging to see the world’s airlines competing for environmental credentials. I wrote last month about Emirates’ claim to have launched the longest green flight, SFO to Dubai. Now Air New Zealand reports that it powered one of the engines of a Boeing 747-400 with oil from jatropha plants. Continental Airlines has a special flight planned for Jan. 7 running partly on jatropha and algae-derived fuel. Virgin Atlantic, United, and Japan...

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“Passive houses” yield aggressive carbon cuts

Super-efficient homes require little heating or cooling.

I’m a little late to this party, but so-called “passive houses” have been lighting up in the blogosphere in the wake of this New York Times article: Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat...

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Necessity is the mother of the smart grid

Prius battery spares ice-bound family from certain death mild discomfort

A recent ice storm left tiny Harvard, Massachusetts without power for four days. The holiday miracle that ensued will amaze and inspire you: John Sweeney, a member of the town’s conservation-minded Heat Advisory Committee, took a characteristically green approach to powering his home during the storm… Sweeney ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan, and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas. “When it looked like we were...

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China delivers first commercially available plug-in hybrid

Like a Chevy Volt, but available now and at half the price

The Chinese firm BYD (Build Your Dream) has leapt dramatically into the electric car market with the introduction of the F3DM, a commercially available plug-in hybrid that can travel for 60 miles without using its gasoline engine. The car retails for about $22,000 in China, well below the projected price of the Chevy Volt, which it closely resembles. Of course, the F3DM isn’t available yet outside China yet, and both Toyota and Chevrolet may beat...

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Longest green flight in the world

Emirates shows how to save fuel and cut carbon

Emirates Airline flight # 225 landed at San Francisco International yesterday afternoon having completed a remarkable nonstop trip from Dubai. The journey aboard a Boeing 777 200-LR (for long-range) covered 8,085 miles and was billed as the longest green flight in the world. Emirates spent three months planning this flight to maximize fuel savings and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Before leaving Dubai, the airline practiced new fuel-saving measures, including: Washing the plane to reduce air...

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Austin gets smart

City announces plan to develop next-generation electricity grid.

The city of Austin, TX recently announced a smart grid project. Smart grids, you may recall, are one of the core elements of the Grand Climate Plan. Although the Austin project isn’t the first such effort in the country, officials hope that the city will be able to move faster than others, because Austin actually owns the local power provider. Right now you may be wondering: what’s a smart grid? Glad you asked. The term...

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Cool technology harnesses energy from hot gas

Is low-temperature waste heat the next big thing?

I am well acquainted with hot air. Jokes about my fellow bloggers aside, I’ve spent much time in small, hot engine rooms while visiting TerraPass projects. Even clean energy generates copious amounts of waste heat. In the future, that lost energy might be put to productive use if efforts to harness low-temperature waste heat are successful. A new “near frictionless” system from Ener-G-Rotors can supposedly generate electricity from gas that’s as cool as 65° C....

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Wind turbines get fancy

Electronics, biomimicry, and design advances improve an already mature technology.

Solar energy sucks up a lot of research attention, partly because solar energy systems still have so much room for improvement. Wind turbines, on the other hand, have been around for over 1,000 years, and although the modern versions are vastly larger and more efficient than their ancient counterparts, the basic concept hasn’t changed much. But the standard blades-on-a-horizontal-axle version of wind energy systems (as opposed to more exotic flavors like kites or blimps) may...

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What makes a building “green”?

One giant conference dedicated to greening up our built world

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Greenbuild 08, a conference and expo dedicated to (quite obviously) green building. The sheer size of this event forced me to pause. The architecture, construction and design industries — and everyone who supplies to them — are certainly committed to reducing their environmental impacts. As well they should be. In North America alone, buildings are responsible for more than 2,200 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions annually....

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Better living through lasers

Wind-sensing light beams could boost windmill output by 10%.

This is cool: A new fiber-optic laser system can measure wind speed and direction up to 1000 meters in front of a wind turbine, giving the massive machines enough precious seconds to proactively adapt to gusts and sudden changes in wind direction. The device…could improve the efficiency of wind turbines and keep them from breaking down. The idea is pretty simple. The current generation of wind turbines measure wind speed and direction via anemometers...

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Under pressure to cut fuel use? Try a hydraulic hybrid

A decidedly low-tech hybrid variant can slash truck emissions.

Those of you who weren’t impressed by the air-powered car might be more excited by the latest pressure-powered vehicle: the hydraulic hybrid truck. Hydraulic hybrids pair a standard internal combustion engine with a series of tanks holding compressed fluid. The tanks capture energy during braking and deliver it back to the wheels during acceleration. A pressurized tank can’t hold a large amount of energy, but it does offer some compensating advantages: One is that it...

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Surf’s up!

New form of clean energy offers limitless source of headline puns.

A new tide. A coming wave of clean energy. An ocean of opportunity. Forget the sun and wind — tidal energy open up an exciting new trove of headline puns for aspiring clean tech writers. The past week has seen an, ahem, boatload of news regarding wave energy. Most excitingly, the world’s first commercial wave farm went live off the coast of Portugal. The installation has a capacity of 2.25 megawatts and plans to expand...

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Carbon pricing works! Doesn’t! Does!

Sometimes the issue with a particular technology is the technology itself.

In arguing for efficiency mandates, Joe Romm notes the failings of carbon pricing as a solution to climate change: That means a price of $400 a metric ton of carbon (whether achieved through a tax or a cap & trade system) would increase the price of gasoline a mere $1 a gallon. How much efficiency would that drive? Not bloody much! Joe Romm more recently comments on the future of the electric car: If hybrids...

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Tesla takes a hit

Layoffs and delays for electric sedan, but bright prospects for industry.

Tesla Motors, poster child of the clean car revolution that is always just around the corner, recently removed its CEO, announced a round of layoffs, and pushed the delivery date of its all-electric sedan back to 2011. In one sense, this is sad news. A lot of people (myself included) are caught up in Tesla’s story, a kind of david-and-goliath tale of Silicon Valley ingenuity vs. Old Detroit intransigence (never mind that Tesla is backed...

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New wind blowing

Offshore wind’s moment may soon arrive.

Offshore wind is poised to explode: Earlier this year, Delaware became the first state to approve an offshore wind project, a 200-megawatt installation that beat out proposals for coal- and natural gas-fired plants. Rhode Island was next up, with plans for a facility that will supply 15% of the state’s electricity. New Jersey recently followed suit, granting rights for what could be a 346-megawatt facility. Texas, already tops in the U.S. for land-based wind energy,...

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Paris Motor Show reveals industry’s electric obsession

Batteries will eventually end the era of the internal combustion engine.

The recently concluded Paris Motor Show showcased the industry’s newfound obsession with all-electric and electric hybrid vehicles. I am neither a) a car guy, nor b) particularly turned on by Jetsons-inspired concept cars, so I can only offer the most outsider-y thoughts: Thought 1: this is real Electrics are no longer being touted as some sort of green window dressing. And the driving factor isn’t gasoline prices. It’s batteries. “We have just in the past...

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Hot idea: recycling wasted energy

Computers and cacti go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

Bill McKibben once lamented the unsexiness of waste heat recovery, an energy efficiency technique that languishes in obscurity despite its potentially huge environmental benefits. Perhaps this story will capture the public imagination: in a move that will save money and cut carbon emissions, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has begun housing some of its computer servers in the nearby “Arizona Desert Dome,” a conservatory for cacti and other desert plants. Computer servers create...

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Making good on a resolution

My new solar water heater provides low-carbon hot showers.

We had a very exciting evening at my house yesterday. At about 6:30 pm, my husband interrupted my post-run shower to tell me that the our hot water heater’s inlet pipe — the one that fills the water heater from the City’s supply lines — was hot. “You actually put your hand on it?” I said, a bit incredulously. “No, no, on the insulation,” he assured me. “The insulation is just warm, I’m sure...

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Does the air-powered car really work?

Yes, but it only runs on unicorn brea— no wait, it really does work.

Zero Pollution Motors is drumming up press again, with claims that an improved version of its “air-powered car” can travel 848 miles on a single tank of compressed air. The comments in response to the New York Times article run to the skeptical side (“I bet it can fly too”), which seems a little bit ironic, because — unlike the water-powered car — the air-powered car is a perfectly respectable piece of technology. As air...

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Hybrids a rare bright spot for the auto industry

As vehicle sales plummet, drivers still snap up hybrids. What made you buy?

I was struck by the August U.S. car sales reports, and couldn’t help making a quick comparison to the same reports for hybrids. The bottom line: overall car sales through the end of August are tanking in the U.S., down 11.2% from the first 8 months of 2007. Light trucks are the heaviest anchor here, down a phenomenal 22.1% from the same period last year. Hybrids, on the other hand, are a bright spot for...

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Plug in and drive

Shai Agassi says his electric cars can save the world. People are listening.

There’s a lot to chew over in Wired’s profile of Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur engaged in an audacious experiment to electrify an entire nation’s transportation system, and in the process rewrite the automotive industry’s business model. The nation in question is Israel, with Denmark and Hawaii possibly to follow. Agassi’s idea is that electric cars should be sold on a subscription model, like cell phones, with fees used to underwrite a network of intelligent electric...

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Clean energy on the move

More solar, more geothermal: Renewable energy is a small but booming part of the energy mix.

Lots of renewable energy in the news lately: One: California is building two massive solar photovoltaic power plants, together big enough to generate 800 megawatts of power. To get a sense of the scale, consider that the current biggest PV installation in the U.S. has a capacity of 14 megawatts, and the biggest one in the world is a 23-megawatt Spanish installation. The new plant will roughly double the amount of solar PV in the...

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The future of flight

Looking to engineers to save our climate — and our vacations.

We don’t devote a ton of ink here to environmental technofixes, but there is one area where technofixes are urgently needed: airline travel. Plane flight is both hard on the environment and also really wonderful for people, so let’s hope some of the futuristic fuel-efficient designs featured in National Geographic pan out: Image by Georgia Tech/Courtesy NASA The proposed planes come with whizzy features like retractable propellers and electric drive trains for runway taxiing that...

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Old homes get smart

Smart meters and some simple technology can help make any house green.

Smart metering is coming. Within a decade, you’ll know exactly how much every flip of a switch or turn of a knob costs in monthly utility charges. The Times profiles two British seaside towns on the forefront of the low-tech energy efficiency revolution. Take, for example, Hove residents Brenda and Jeffrey Marchant, owners of a typical Victorian house. The Marchants were always energy-thrifty, but instant feedback is a uniquely motivating force. Turn on a computer...

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Corn on the 8th floor, turnips on level 23…

“Pie in the sky” takes on new meaning in a half-baked concept for urban farms.

Image: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The Times has a slideshow of artists’ conceptions of possible designs for “vertical farms,” stacked, self-contained urban biosystems capable of producing food for tens of thousands of city residents. Amazingly, this futuristic concept, born of academia, seems to be getting at least a little bit of traction in the real world. Let’s not pull any punches here: how is this not the dumbest idea ever?...

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When volcanoes attack

Some nice pics reveal the dynamism of forces at play in the earth’s atmosphere.

Surely by now you’ve seen The Big Picture, The Boston Globe’s large-format photo blog. Pretty much every entry is worth a peek. Here’s one on recent volcanic activity. Photo by Cyrus Read/AVO/USGS What does this have to do with climate change? Hm. Well, volcanoes release a lot of CO2, although the amounts are insignificant in comparison to human activities. Or how about this: the climate system and atmosphere have been memorably described as a “great...

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San Francisco goes wireless and real-time to reduce traffic

Check your smartphone to find a parking meter.

When I last wrote about San Francisco’s innovative plan to reduce congestion through market-based pricing of parking spots, I assumed some of the more futuristic features of the system were still a long way off. Well, turns out I was wrong. The city is already installing a network of wireless sensors in the asphalt based on the “smart dust” technology to come out of UC Berkeley. Once in place, battery-operated “bumps” will not only relay...

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Does the “water-powered car” really work?

Yes, but the water has to come from unicorn tears.

Unsurprisingly, inevitably, rising gas prices have brought increased interest in the water-powered car. Is there really a simple technology that can dramatically boost the efficiency of conventional cars or, better yet, allow you to run your car entirely on tap water? No. No, there is not. I don’t want to belabor this topic,1 and as it happens, the available information about various water-powered car schemes is scant enough that they’re generally hard to debunk fully....

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Honda debuts mass produced hydrogen car. So what?

Fuel cells still seem like a long shot, but the the market will decide the winner.

In comments to the post on the Chevy Volt, someone talked up the Honda Clarity, the world’s first mass-produced hydrogren fuel cell car (or maybe just mass-produceable — they’re only making a few hundred of them). Other commenters correctly pointed out that mass-produced hydrogen fuel cell cars still appear to be no closer to reality than jetpacks or time travel. For the full case against the Clarity, check out Joe Romm’s lengthy take-down. Short version:...

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GM’s big bet: the Chevy Volt

GM hopes to shoot the moon with a car that many industry watchers say just isn’t possible.

The Atlantic has a fun piece on GM’s ambitious plan to bring the Volt to market by 2010. I generally don’t go in for overripe tales of corporate heroism, and I definitely don’t go in for economic nationalism, but hell if the story didn’t make me want to hoist up an American flag and blast the Mellencamp from the transistor radio in my ‘68 Chevelle: Because it will have both an electric and a gasoline...

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Put a pig in your tank

Wacky scientists find yet another use for pig poo: turning it into petroleum

Over here on the carbon team we get pretty darn excited to see new and ingenious ways to handle animal waste, so it was with great enthusiasm that we learned about scientists who had successfully (or at least semi-successfully) turned pig poo into crude oil. As with most biofuels (and any other other fuel for that matter), there are positives and negatives to pig fuel. On the plus side, farmers might see a financial return...

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Parking meters get smart

Dynamic curbside pricing is a step toward less congested cities.

Congestion pricing failed to gain approval in New York, but other cities are quietly pushing forward with their own experiments in smart pricing. In particular, San Francisco will soon attack an equally important piece of the transportation puzzle: parking. Parking spots, like roads, are an odd sort of good: their supply is fixed but the demand fluctuates greatly by day and by hour. For most goods, pricing matches supply with demand. But the price for...

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Aussies cultivate ‘burpless’ grass

Moving beyond cleaner cars, researchers look for a cleaner cow.

Researchers in Australia have received funding to develop more digestible feeds for cattle — “burpless” grass, in industry parlance — that result in less methane being produced as they are broken down in cows’ stomach(s). As a recent returnee to the world of eating meat, I cringe when thinking about the impact raising that meat has on the environment. Here on the TerraPass carbon project team we spend quite a bit of time thinking about...

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What is the right global temperature?

The “global warming will be great!” crowd makes an encore appearance.

Tim Haab says George Will raises an interesting question in a recent Washington Post column: The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming “crisis,” concerning which, the assumption is: Although Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject. This strikes me as the opposite of an interesting question. It strikes me as...

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Do-it-yourself clean energy

Chinese farmer assembles solar water heater from hoses, used beer bottles.

Here’s a story that combines three of my favorite things: clean energy, technology for developing countries, and beer. The beer bottles lie on a board in rows, all connected by hoses which allow cold water to flow through them and be heated by the sun. “I invented this for my mother. I wanted her to shower at any time more comfortably,” says Ma Yanjun, a carpenter, of Qiqiao village, Shaanxi Province. If you want to...

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Measuring emissions now federal policy

A small measure to create a federal emissions registry sneaks into the omnibus spending bill.

One of the more useful things that got tacked on to the recent omnibus federal spending bill was the requirement for the EPA to develop a federal registry to track industrial CO2 emissions. Parsing out just how industrial emissions are measured is one of the stepping stones to implementing a cap and trade system. The EPA has 9 months to figure out a plan. Sutherland, Asbill, and Brennan have the gory details (pdf). They...

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$10m for a 100mpg car

Is 100mpg realistic for the mass-market within the next two years?

At this week’s North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) there has been news of a hybrid truck, a hybrid Jeep, and even a hybrid sports car, but none of them comes close to 100mpg. Not yet. The new Dodge Ram (introduced alongside 120 steer, which were marched through Detroit city center) was accompanied by the news that a hybrid version of the truck will be available in 2010. Chrysler’s VP Jim Press told NPR that...

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Learning to love your compact fluorescent

“O.K. for a tattoo parlor” may not be good enough for your living room. Tips for effective and efficient lighting.

Now that new efficiency standards for light bulbs have been signed into law, we can expect two things to happen: compact fluorescents will become a lot more prevalent, and the technology will improve markedly in the next few years. We’ll also see the lighting industry in general shake up quite a bit, as the venerable incandescent dies a rapid death. Future improvements are small solace, though, to the people who hate compact fluorescents today....

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Low-carbon resolutions

Promises you can keep: reducing your carbon footprint — through conservation and offsets — is easy.

When you pop the cork on your locally produced champagne this year, be sure to make at least one low-carbon resolution. Pick one simple change that will lower your carbon footprint, and put it into action. Want to take this a step further? Calculate your total carbon footprint using the tools on our web site, and pledge to knock it down by 5% (or more, if you’re feeling ambitious). Further still? On top of...

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Green food fight

A firestorm erupted on Grist recently over the perennially fraught topic of diet and the environment. In response biodiversivist asks a question I’ve long wondered over as well: what’s so bad about “partial vegetarianism”? I recognize that people have diverse reasons for making their dietary choices, and many view vegetarianism or veganism as first and foremost an animal welfare issue. For these people, I grant, partial vegetarianism might not be a coherent ethical choice....

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Climate grab bag: a few steps forward, one step back

A federal judge has dismissed the California suit against automakers for the role of vehicle emissions in global warming. Just last week, automakers lost a similar suit in Vermont. Harvard is building a new science center, and the university has agreed to keep emissions from energy use in the new buildings at 50% below national standards. By itself this isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it alerted me to some of the aggressive...

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California: inflate those tires, and no more party string

11-year-olds must make sacrifice for climate change — no more silly string! California is here to help pave the way. NASA scientist James Hansen is fond of saying that there are no silver bullet solutions to climate change, but rather silver buckshot — lots of little solutions that add up to the change necessary to avoid catastrophe. California has explored this path, with a structured survey to examine what types of small policy changes...

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Science corner: why carbon sequestration isn’t any better than avoided emissions

Update: This post has engendered a fair amount of confusion, for which I am mostly to blame. So let me provide some necessary context. Tree-planting projects are a popular type of carbon offset, but they unfortunately suffer from a large number of quality problems and do not in fact make for very good offsets. However, one recurring argument made in favor of tree-planting projects is that they perform carbon sequestration rather than preventing new...

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Dick Cheney has a point

Nicholas Kristof writes about reducing greenhouse gas emissions: Dick Cheney once scoffed that energy conservation can be a “personal virtue” but is no basis for an energy policy. Growing evidence suggests he had it exactly wrong…the low-hanging fruit on the energy front is curbing demand — meaning more energy conservation. And it’s appalling that our government isn’t leading us on that.” Grist agrees, calling this premise “the baseline understanding that separates those with a...

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More fuel on the food miles fire

Some more studies are emerging that are sure to cause much gnashing of teeth among proponents of eating locally, but stick with me here. I think the bigger picture is less dismaying than it might first appear. The first study, performed by the researchers at Lincoln University in New Zealand, suggests that shipping New Zealand lamb around the world by boat may be significantly better for the environment than buying it from the farm...

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Conservation tip: ban the outdoor heater

Perhaps this should be filed under pet peeves rather than conservation tips, but can we all just agree that those outdoor propane-fired heaters are not a very good idea? It’s energy-intensive enough to heat the inside of a building. Trying to heat the outside of a building is a mug’s game. Although there are certainly bigger problems facing the planet, there is something gratingly direct about these emissions sources. You take a tank of...

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Coal to liquid continues to be the worst idea ever

Democrats in Congress continue to push forward with proposals to heavily subsidize plants for converting coal to liquid fuel, which we previously noted is the worst idea in the universe. The surprisingly varied response to our earlier post demonstrated that we didn’t do enough work to show why coal-to-liquid technology is such a misguided notion. So here it is again, with a bit more analytical heft. One fact that sometimes goes unappreciated is that it...

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Science corner: the natural carbon cycle vs. fossil fuels

We get a steady stream of questions that hinge on a basic confusion over the difference between the natural carbon cycle — the continual uptake and release of carbon dioxide by biological organisms — and the burning of fossil fuels. This post is an attempt to set the record straight. We hope that it achieves the worldwide acclaim of our post on how to turn 6 pounds of carbon into 20 pounds of CO2. I...

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Did you drool when Ed made toast with a bike?

After extensive consumer research, we feel confident that a small segment of TerraPass members are nerds (please, take that as a compliment). So we just had to share this — there is now a nice shareware guide to build your own bike generator. Even better? One B. Whaley on Amazon made the shopping list for one click ordering. Free TerraPass for the first member to submit working photos of one of these....

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Update on Google solar panels: pricing carbon is hard to do

The comment thread on yesterday’s Google post is pretty fascinating, and I’d like to address some of the excellent points made. First, several commenters called us out for our glib comparison of California’s $90/tonne subsidy to the $10/tonne price of a TerraPass. Part of the reason TerraPass is so cheap, some pointed out, is because we piggyback on subsidies that are already in place for wind energy and other carbon reduction projects. There is definitely...

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The lazy man’s guide to the home energy diet

I have mixed feelings about the article the Times is running today about how to put your home on an energy diet without lifting a finger. The angle is simple: the author intends to knock 1,000 lbs of CO2 off his annual home energy usage without sacrificing anything or even putting in any real effort. On the one hand, the tone of the article couldn’t be more offputting. There’s only so much of the “environmentalists...

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More on technology leapfrogging: using LEDs to light up the developing world

The MightyLight is waterproof, portable, and solar-powered. Just after writing my previous post on the Indian wind turbine manufacturer Suzlon, I noticed that the Economist also recently ran a series of articles on the topic of technology leapfrogging (subscription required) that touch on the consumption, rather than the production, side of the energy equation. Leapfrogging describes the sudden progress of a developing country that skips over several generations of a technology to jump straight...

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Branson puts bucks into branded ethanol?

According to GreenCarCongress, Sir Richard Branson will invest $60M in Vinod Khosla’s bioethanol venture, Cilion. We are marketing nerds, and so we were intrigued by the investment of one of the world’s best marketers in a fuel business. Is there something more to the business of ethanol than finetuning the manufacturing process? Are Branson and Khosla trying to create a branded sustainable fuel experience? One thing that excites us tremendously about working with big brands...

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Can you afford not to install geothermal power for your home?

Some people were surprised by the expense — about $20,000 — to install geothermal heating in their homes. I have a slightly different take. For $20,000, can you afford not to tap into geothermal energy? Says one commenter: For 15k - 30k it sure seems like there would be higher-impact things you could do to reduce your footprint. Find a friend who drives 20 miles to work every day in an SUV and buy them...

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Overcooked myths: microwave ovens and home energy use

The roving finger of home energy blame finds another target in today’s New York Times. The microwave oven is portrayed as the biggest guzzler of home energy in a confusing table of bar charts and percentages. It’s true that newer technologies with always-on or standby functions are increasing the demand for home electricity, but we must remember that these aren’t all simply adding to the demand — sometimes they’re replacing it. The microwave is a...

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Please stand by while we destroy the planet

While we’re on the subjects of the British and television, let us draw attention to an energy review for the British Government which last month took aim at one of those great convenience innovations of the late 20th century: the TV standby mode. Imagine the scene. You get back from a long hard day (fish and chips in hand, presumably), fix yourself a cup of tea, flop down onto the couch, push the red button...

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Public health alert: watching TV can lead to blackouts

The cause of the blackouts that swept America during the recent heatwave seems obvious. Demand for electricity soars when roasting residents crank their air conditioners, stretching the grid beyond capacity. But at least in Los Angeles, residents can also blame their TVs. Keep in mind that heatwaves aren’t entirely unpredictable events. Utilities know they’re going to get hit with a surge in demand at some point during the summer, and they try to plan accordingly....

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Tesla electric roadster launches

SONY Pictures may now have to plan a sequel to this summer’s movie Who Killed the Electric Car? (see previous review). Tesla Motors launched their electric roadster in Santa Monica this week. The Roadster tops out at 130 mph and beats the pants of most sports cars by reaching 0-60mph in about 4 seconds. The cool kids at AutoBlogGreen have the full story, including tons of pics and a test ride review....

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The bicycling paradox revisited

Last week we reported on some research from UPenn professor Karl Ulrich, who also happens to the founder of TerraPass, that came to the contrarian conclusion that bicycles offer little benefit to the environment. The nub of the argument is that bicycle riders are healthier than non-cyclists, and their increased longevity places a drain on energy resources that largely cancels out the gas savings from cycling. The post sent little ripples through the blogosphere,* jumping...

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Running our cars on coal: it seemed like a good idea at the time

Concerned that your car isn’t spewing enough heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Here’s an idea: power your commute with coal. The coal in the ground in Illinois alone has more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. The technology to turn that coal into fuel for cars, homes and factories is proven. And at current prices, that process could be at the vanguard of a big, new industry. Such promise has attracted entrepreneurs...

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Al Gore at TED: How to live a carbon neutral life

For those of you that were still searching for a pen at the end of An Inconvenient Truth, the nice folks at TED have posted Al Gore’s post-slideshow talk. There are some good tips in here, including the mantra we like which is “reduce what you can, offset the rest” as well as a perspective for business leaders. Alternatively, you can see Al and Bender from Futurama hamming it up in a hilarious spot...

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Audi Diesel wins LeMans, changes perceptions?

Why are diesels currently less than 1% of the vehicles sold in the US and about 40% of the vehicles sold in the EU? One oft-cited reason is the horrible memories we all have of choking as the neighborhood diesel noisily and slowly clanked by. All that may be changing. This weekend, the Audi A10 became the first diesel powered car to win the 24hr LeMans race. With a particulate filter installed, mind you. Events...

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How will China meet its energy goal?

A group of Stanford students spent their recent spring break in China, examining the issues of economic growth and energy demand. The students used TerraPass to offset the emissions from their trip. In this guest post, Kathleen Livelli provides impressions and photos from the trip. China’s goal is to quadruple GDP by 2020 while only doubling energy use. This is an ambitious leap in efficiency, but how will China get there? And is it enough?...

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Coming soon: the end of the world as we know it

We turn our attention briefly away from the CEI controversy to a more pleasant topic: the imminent destruction of civilization. Columnist Dan Neil jumps into the peak oil story with a set of hair-rising predictions from James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.” According to Niel, Kunstler makes Al Gore look like a “candy-assed optimist” on issues related to fossil fuel usage. Kunstler isn’t worried so...

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Conservation tip: power your lawnmower with milk and bananas

One of the lovable cranks who writes to TerraPass recently suggested that perhaps we should be paying him, because his thriving lawn is pulling so much carbon out of the air. We gently explained the difference between the natural carbon cycle and manmade emissions from fossil fuels. But perhaps we should have been more blunt: American lawns are an environmental disaster. Nearly 50,000 square miles of America is covered in lawn. Perhaps an even larger...

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Measuring the effect of citizen action on climate change

Every reporter seems to hit us with the following question: “How can one person’s action really make a difference on climate change”. Usually we refer to recycling and the vision that if as many people were as concientous about their carbon emissions as their soda cans, our greenhouse gas emissions would look a lot different. To prove our point, we took a stab at the math behind a recent Yahoo! earth day promotion. The promotion...

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Greenpeace founder goes nuclear

Patrick Moore, who as a co-founder of Greenpeace began his environmental career protesting nuclear energy, now feels that nuclear power is the key to fighting climate change: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can’t replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants....

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Demand Response 101: Efficiency Pools of Power

Above you’ll see a fairly typical demand curve for electricity over the course of a day, in this case for a room in a Japanese building. What drives utility planners nuts is the fact that energy production is very hard to change quickly, but energy demand fluctuates wildly during the day. The result is overbuilding and overconsumption of resources in order to support the peaks, along with the greater pollution that comes with such...

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Is sustainability at a tipping point?

We noted earlier that the tides seem to be finally turning against the so-called energy realists who envision an oil-soaked future for America. Looking at the bigger picture, will 2005 be viewed as the tipping point for clean energy? Several commentators think so. Over at GreenBiz, Gil Friend surveys some anecdotal evidence that suggests sustainability is reaching the mainstream. Among the factors he cites are public efforts by corporations such as Starbucks, Whole Foods,...

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“Energy is the albatross of U.S. national security”

Though not always a huge fan of Thomas Friedman, I’m buying what he’s selling when it comes to U.S. energy policy. Recently he ripped into the so-called energy realists, those who maintain that dependence on imported oil is the closest thing our economy has to a natural law. Alternative energy may someday be able to supplant fossil fuels, the realists concede, probably around the same time that we colonize Mars. Fortunately, some cracks are...

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US wind energy boom

Good news about alternative energy development is always welcome, and I was happy to read that 2005 was a banner year for wind power. The US installed more new wind energy generating capacity than any other country (2400 megawatts, or enough for up to 3.5 million homes annually), and, while we still trail in our total capacity, we’re quickly catching up. Wind energy is one of the main types of projects supported by your TerraPass....

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Conservation tip: remove your roof rack

Improve your gas mileage by 10% instantly, without modifying your car or driving habits! If I saw that in the subject line of an email, it’d get deposited, unread, in my junk folder along with the impotence-related drug ads and mortgage plugs that take up a sizable fraction of my inbox. It just so happens, however, that the claim above is true, and the result of one of the easiest things you can do to...

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Dog poop power

The concept of converting poop into energy is not new, and it’s one that TerraPass has done much to support. That said, when I read that San Francisco was studying the possibility of processing poop from its canine population, I almost laughed out loud, until I read that almost four percent of the city’s trash was pet waste. That was a bit sobering, considering SF has close to a million human residents generating trash. It...

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Conservation tip: Idle engines are the devil’s tools

Should we all be turning off our engines at stoplights? Driving up to Lake Tahoe last weekend, I pulled off for gas in Auburn. I turned off my engine at the stoplight, which earned me a curious glance from my passenger and the comment “Don’t you know that turning your engine off at lights causes more pollution and engine damage than just letting it idle?” Not only did I not know that, I suspected he...

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Fighting climate change with cold cathode compact fluorescents

Our trusted advisors Karl and George both have off-grid cabins, where every watt they can eke out of their solar panels makes the difference between reading by headlamp and being a bit more civilized. So, naturally the weekend email thread was on the latest and greatest compact fluorescent (CF) technology, so-called cold-cathode bulbs. George was particularly excited about the bulb pictured here, a 5W 300 lumens (about 40W equivalent), available for a cool $10 each....

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Conservation Tip: Change your car’s air filter

A few of you wrote in to also suggest another gas and pollution saving tip — changing your car’s air filter. Perhaps you’ve seen the accordion-like thing that the Jiffy Lube mechanic always shows to you when you are getting the oil changed. Well, more often than not he is right. A blocked air filter can reduce mileage by 10%! (source:EPA) And every TerraPass member knows that a gallon of gas saved is 20 lbs...

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Peak oil: no silver bullet?

Back to peak oil. Recall that the world is heading toward a peak in the amount of oil it can pump out of the ground on a daily basis. This peak is the seemingly inevitable consequence of the geology of oil fields, and after it arrives we can expect a fairly rude transition to the post-peak world. In the midst of this handwringing over peak oil, a reasonable question to ask is: haven’t we heard...

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The $7.6 Billion dollar tire inflation gauge: Inflate your tires to save money and the environment

Imagine you found a way to fairly effortlessly save $7.6 Billion every year, and reduce 52 billion lbs of CO2. You would be pretty happy right? Well this is what I stumbled upon this morning. I’ll admit to not being so religious about car maintenance, but this morning I was motivated enough to try out a handy little Brookstone Digital tire gauge that I received as a stocking stuffer last year. (MSRP $20). I tested...

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Conservation tip: Kill your screensaver

Business school geeks (like us) know Nicholas Carr as the author of the controversial “IT Doesn’t Matter” article in the Harvard Business Review. In his excellent blog, he sometimes touches on the mostly-unnoticed environmental impact of computer technology. For example, he entertainingly dissects corporations’ Dilbert-like attempts to instill “corporate values” via bloated screensaver apps. What effect these screensavers have on corporate values is unclear, but Carr can put some hard numbers around the environmental consequences....

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Eco-smackdown: GreenPeace and RFK, Jr. tussle over wind farm

Here’s something you don’t see very often. Greenpeace (see campaign) pulls up in a zodiac next to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s sailing ship to protest his opposition to the Cape Wind project. Their banner reads: “Bobby, you’re on the wrong boat. Say yes to Cape Wind” Planned as the second largest offshore wind farm in the world, the 130 turbine farm will be placed just 6 miles off the shallow Nantucket sound. Location is RFK’s main...

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Peak oil: the economics behind the problem

Let’s get back to peak oil. Previously I defined the peak oil phenomenon and discussed some of the science underlying the issue. In this post, I’m going to talk about the economics behind peak oil, the dynamics that underlie worldwide consumption and production of oil. To review where we are so far: at some point in the relatively near future, natural limits to the rate of oil production will cause the daily supply of oil...

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Peak oil: the science behind the problem

Let’s return to the issue of peak oil. In the first post, I explained that fairly soon the world will reach a peak in the amount of oil it can pump out of the ground on a daily basis. Regardless of how much total oil remains in the earth, natural limits exist to how fast we can get the oil out of the ground. Why? Common sense would seem to dictate that, if the oil...

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Peak oil and other things to keep you up at night

At TerraPass, we’re always going on about carbon this and global warming that. But environmental concerns are just part of the case for alternative energy. So today I’m going to kick off a series of posts that more closely examine the issue of peak oil. First, a definition: peak oil refers to the notion that at some point in the future we will reach a peak in the rate at which we can pump oil...

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International Energy Agency: No more Weeknight Drinking!

Headlines abounded Tuesday with the call that the normally conservative International Energy Agency had shifted its tone to cautionary about the supply of oil, the impact of CO2 pollution, and the likelihood that high oil prices are here to stay (see articles from WSJ, CNN etc). Full Report is available here for purchase, or you can read the exec sum for free here) At TerraPass, we hear that many customers buy their TerraPass to support...

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Hybrids in the HOV Lane?

You’ve got to love the feeling. Cruising in a carful of people in the HOV lane and zipping along at 70 (ahem) past a parking lot of single drivers. Several proposals around the nation could change this situation dramatically, by allowing tens of thousands of high-mileage hybrid’s into the HOV lane. Nowhere could this be a more contentious issue than in California, where 30% of hybrids are registered (stat via Green Car Congress). In fact...

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The power of the bicycle

This weekend, I completed the Death Ride for the second year in a row. For the uninitiated, the Death Ride is a grueling 129 mile bicycle tour through the high-sierra landscape of Alpine County, complete with 16,000 ft of climbing. For Lance, this is a normal training day, but for the rest of us mortals, this is a big ride. On the 11.5 hours it took to complete the ride, I spent a little time...

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