Ed Ring

SOLVING INDIA'S ENERGY, WATER, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES TO CREATE A GREEN, PROSPEROUS FUTURE To ensure India will have adequate energy and water supplies in the future... The first step is to predict where India's population will level off. Assume India's population is going to peak at around 1.3 billion people. This may be somewhat underestimating reality, but everything that follows can be proportionately increased based on higher population projections. Next, determine how many units of energy (expressed in millions of BTUs per year), and how many cubic meters of water per year, on average, are required to sustain the lifestyle for a citizen of a fully...

Calling an e-flex vehicle a "series hybrid" is not accurate, according to Larry Burns, Vice President of Research and Development for General Motors, and he's right. Larry Burns GM's VP R&D and Planning Photo: General Motors In order to see why GM's revolutionary new Chevy "Volt" automobile design is different from typical hybrids, the "series" designation is helpful, but that's all.  Hybrids to-date, by this reckoning, are parallel hybrids, since the gasoline and the electric motors are both connected to the drive train.  In the Volt, the gasoline engine only powers an onboard electric generator, and only a powerful electric motor actually turns the wheels. At a...

Here are questions regarding the notion of anthropogenic CO2 causing runaway global warming that all who opine might find worth personally investigating: Aerosol forcing in motion - atmospheric CO2 molecules boil off the upper atmosphere and are self limiting - the impact of increasing atmospheric CO2 is non-linear, we've already seen most of the warming effect - global warming is caused more by sunspot and cosmic ray activity, as well as earth's many orbital cycles (ex:  when earth's orbit is more circular, the planet is hotter) - recent measured temperature change just below the "CO2 belt" in the upper stratosphere is down, not up, contradicting fundamental...

It is an article of faith among environmentalists that recycling is superior to landfills as a way to process municipal waste.  But reality does not always conform to articles of faith, especially when it comes to environmentalism.  We've reported on this before, read "Recycling Myths." First of all, contrary to popular belief, there is plenty of available landfill inventory.  The US is pouring about 270 million tons per year into landfills, compared to approximately 70 million tons of waste that is being recycled each year.  And right now, if every landfill operator in the USA did nothing to increase their landfill capacity, there is enough landfill space to absorb all of America's garbage for the next 40 years.  Many landfill operators have over 200 years of available landfill inventory. Secondly, landfills are ultra safe.  In the 1989 "Resource Conservation and Recovery Act,"...

It should come as no surprise that India, a nation of over a billion people with one of the most advanced high technology sectors on earth, would be jumping big-time into the photovoltaic game.  After all, photovoltaic energy, right now, is probably the most viable clean renewable energy technology candidate in the world to replace conventional energy sources. In the coming electric age, where our cars run on electricity, and electricity provides power for abundant fresh water via desalinization - where electricity powers the pumps that move water north from the Ubangi River to refill Lake Chad, or south from the Ob-Irtysh River to refill the Aral Sea, photovoltaics may well become the skin of every rooftop in the world. Just last Monday, March 5th, one of the largest companies in India, Moser Baer, announced a partnership with one of the blue chip giants of California's Silicon Valley, Applied Materials, to build the...

One of the coolest visions for solar energy we've ever seen comes from the "Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation" website (http://www.trecers.net/).  They want to build an ultra high-efficiency DC (direct current) power grid across the deserts of the middle east and africa upwards throughout Europe including offshore windfarms.  Here's the heart of their plan, taken from their concept page (http://www.trecers.net/concept.html): Photo: Trans-Mediterranian Energy Cooperation U.K. "Satellite-based studies by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have shown that, using less than 0.3% of the entire desert areas of the MENA region, Solar Thermal Power Plants can generate enough electricity to supply current demands in EU-MENA, and anticipated increases in those...

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due in complete form in a few months, but the "Summary for Policymakers" was released last week.  The general consensus from environmental activists, along with the media and nearly all politicians can be summed up as this:  "The 'question mark' has been removed; fossil fuels are causing global warming." Corn for Ethanol - uncritical support for biofuel may win the Iowa primary, but may also destroy the planet via deforestation There are many questions raised by this report and the reactions to it.  For example, why don't any commentators note that the report has pretty much dismissed the danger of sea level...

Biofuel today is produced, overwhelmingly, from oil palms and sugar cane, and overwhelmingly, these plantations stand where tropical rainforest recently stood.  Over a year ago, a well-documented essay entitled "Worse Than Fossil Fuel," was published in the London Guardian by George Monbiot, an environmental activist and professor at Oxford-Brookes University in the U.K.  In this article, Monbiot states "Between 1985 and 2000 the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia. In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia." One square mile is equivalent to 250 hectares.  So using these figures, in just two countries, deforestation for biofuel will result in the loss of at least 100,000 square miles...

To our knowledge the biggest operator in the USA of commercial scale plants that create fuel from animal waste is Changing World Technologies, headquartered in West Hempstead, New York.  This company has a plant in Carthage, Missouri, that in April 2006 produced 6,000 barrels of diesel fuel.  The plant uses turkey offal as the feedstock, in a joint venture with Conagra's massive Butterball turkey processing plant. Today I had the opportunity to talk with Brian Appel, Chairman of Changing World Technologies, and I asked him whether or not this plant was continuing to produce at that volume.  Appel declined to provide recent production figures but confirmed that the plant was operating normally and that 6,000 barrels per month was less than full capacity.  The Carthage facility is a commercial scale pilot plant producing fuel from waste, and it is the largest of its kind currently in the United...

WHAT GREEN INVESTMENTS SHOULD BE MADE WITH WHAT PROMISES TO BE THE GREATEST GOVERNMENT WINDFALL IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION? What is the best case scenario possible, if all the nations of the world unite to assess CO2 consumption taxes in order to curtail CO2 emissions? Bear in mind that eliminating pollution is a reason for global warming, and if we suddenly turn clean all the coal plants of the world, circa 2006, we're likely to ignite increasing warming by curtailing the remaining "parasol" of industrial soot that cools the world. So how will we clean our air and curtail CO2 emissions, and how will we apply a CO2 tax? The worst thing governments can do is...