Gas 2.0

To drive or to fly?  That is the question.  Researchers at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo have predicted that pollution from cars will be the chief global warming agent for the next 100 years.  So the green answer is to fly.

The study carried out by CICERO monitored known pollutants in different transport sectors (air, ground, rail, and shipping), and how the global emissions in the year 2000 affects current global temperature.  The good news is that pollution from aviation is rather short lived, and not directly linked to long term global warming.  According to researcher Jan Fuglestvedt, “air transport has several strong, but short lasting, effects on global temperature.” Read the rest of this entry »

In preparation for the 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference next month, MIT is rolling out a pilot program in Copenhagen that will allow the city’s biking residents to exchange social information and share their relative positioning with each other via the internet using GPS, cell phones, smart tags and a self-organizing system.

The program, called “SmartBiking,” encourages bikers to interact in novel ways including through a Facebook app called “I crossed your path.”

According to Christine Outram, the principal research assistant on the project, the Facebook app creates a “social network for cyclists, allowing them to link up with people they may have ridden past during the day and potentially establish new connections.”

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Former Vice-President Al Gore says we cannot wait until 2050 to curtail our carbon emissions.  In Washington this week Gore made his case for eliminating petroleum from the United States economy by the year 2018.  Is his goal too ambitious?

Editor’s Note: This is Anthony’s first post as a contributor to Gas 2.0. Anthony works on sugar-based biofuels at the Raines Lab of Petroleum Alternatives, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I have a lot of admiration for Al Gore.  I was in the 7th grade when he lost his bid for the presidency, and even then I could feel that something awful was upon us.  Fast forward eight years and we find ourselves in a world where Al Gore is running a campaign to help mankind in a much more focused manner.  Instead of defecting to the private sector, Gore remains a public servant dedicated to the environment.  Recently, he called for the United States to lead the way to stop global warming, and now he is calling for the United States to be off of carbon based fuels by the year 2018.

Gore’s battle cry could not have come at a better time. Read the rest of this entry »

British Columbia will be the first in North America to institute a comprehensive carbon tax on nearly all fossil fuels. It’s a groundbreaking move that could prove the feasibility of taxing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Beginning July 1st, 2008, businesses and residents of British Columbia will be taxed $10 per metric ton of carbon emitted by fuels such as gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel. The tax will increase yearly by $5 per ton to $30 per ton in 2012, at which point the government will reevaluate the tax rate.

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Yesterday the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog put up an excited post about a Los Alamos National Laboratory plan to convert CO₂ into truly greenhouse-neutral synthetic gasoline and ethanol via “an electrochemical process.” Two hours later the blog had to temper its enthusiasm, having noticed that it would take huge amounts of energy, probably from nuclear power, to make it work.

This sort of thoughtless enthusiasm is way too common. At least no investors lost money this time, or, rather, yet.

I don’t want to insult anyone, but I think the real problem is that people don’t understand the chemistry — not even at a freshman level — that’s involved in thinking about what it would take to turn CO₂ into fuel on an industrial scale.

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What if I told you the Federal Government would be paying to experimentally inject 1 million tons of carbon dioxide into the ground under Illinois? And what if I said the CO2 would by supplied by an ethanol plant owned and operated by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)?

You’d say I was crazy, right?

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy awarded $66.7 million to investigate large-scale carbon sequestration programs in Illinois. The money was awarded to the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium, one of seven regional carbon sequestration partnerships funded by the DOE and consisting of private businesses, state entities, and local universities in the Illionois-Kentucky-Indiana geographic region. This is all part of the DOE’s 10-year initiative to establish and commercialize carbon sequestration. Read the rest of this entry »