Ed Ring

Most of us have heard about the "Hydrogen Highway," that mythical roadway which, along with bullet trains and bridges to nowhere, may actually get built someday at a staggering expense to the taxpayer (to be fair - we're as hopeful as anyone the formidable technological barriers to using hydrogen as a transportation fuel are eventually overcome).  But meanwhile, as of last week, the first ethanol highway in the United States is open for business - I65, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.  Corn ethanol is a viable transportation fuel today, not someday, and implementation of this ethanol highway, the first of many, is an exercise in practicality, not pipe dreams. For...

The evolution of the global energy economy is dependent on transitioning to the "smart grid," a term to describe an upgraded electric power transmission and distribution system that encompasses a broad range of innovations. The smart grid will be mostly invisible, but will impact virtually everything we do, and will facilitate a future where energy will be abundant, clean, and more than ever before, electric. There is possibly no company in the world more in the center of this transformation than GridPoint, located in Arlington, Virginia. Last week I spoke with Karl Lewis, Chief Strategy Officer for GridPoint, who described in detail his company's services. Understanding how GridPoint is...

We have been warning readers about the pension crisis for a few years now.  In a nutshell, the problem is the following:  California public employee unions - which are virtually unregulated despite the fact they operate in the uncompetitive public sector - have pretty much taken over California's state and local governments. In recent years they have negotiated pay and benefit increases so dramatic that the average government worker in California often earns 2-4x what globalized private sector workers earn to do jobs of comparable worth.  This dramatic disparity is largely due to the value of their retirement pensions.  The present value of what someone collects in retirement must be...

The opponents of California's ballot Proposition 7 (read full text of Prop 7) claim it will "cost consumers and taxpayers hundreds of millions per year in higher electric rates - a $300 increase per household per year."  It is hard to get access to the calculations behind these estimates, so we have attempted to come up with estimates of our own. In our recent post "California Proposition 7" we put forward some fundamental assumptions and come up with a total projected cost to install the generating facilities.  We assume that by 2025 Californians will draw 1,000 gigawatt-hours per day, meaning at 50% renewables we'll need 500 gigawatt-hours per day to come from renewable sources.  We therefore project, based on $2.5 billion per...

America's credit crisis should come as no surprise to anyone whose been paying attention.  We discussed this about a year ago in our post "Inflation vs. Deflation," and if you read that post, you will see links to discussions we've had on this topic that go back as far as 1998.  Because this has been brewing for a long, long time.  And the question still remains - inflation or deflation - pick your poison.  Our belief is inflation is a far more palatable option. Back around 2003 I remember debating economic policy with a business reporter for the Wall Street Journal.  I still recall the shock this person displayed when I downplayed the mitigating value of the "current account" when discussing America's...

There is an interesting recent report on IndianAutoBlog entitled "Introducing The Blade Runner."  It describes (with ample concept drawings) an intriguing idea - a bus that operates with two sets of wheels, one for roads and one for rails.  If the bus is operating on roads, the railway wheels retract into the underbody of the vehicle, and vice versa.  The Blade Runner concept is being pioneered by Silvertip Design in the United Kingdom.  It is great to see new ideas, but some commentary is in order.  First of all, anything that helps to move mass transit off of urban rails and back onto roads is a good idea.  Despite persuasive light rail scams that have helped - along with public employee pensions - to pretty much bankrupt...

In 2004 author Michael Crichton published "State of Fear," a novel that he uses as a platform to attempt to debunk global warming alarm.  Whether or not one finds Crichton's arguments compelling generally governs how someone might characterize his views on environmentalists and environmentalism.  But Crichton, in his own way, is himself an environmentalist. Having obtained a transcript of a recent speech by Crichton on environmentalism, what follows is our synopsis of some of the key points he makes: "DDT is not a carcinogen...the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people..." "Second hand smoke is not a health hazard and never was."  "The evidence for...

In our interactive spreadsheet "How Much Electricity for all Commuters? " you can calculate what it would take to replace our combustion-driven automotive fleet with electric vehicles.  The assumptions that the spreadsheet default to (which you can change to anything you wish) indicate that based on 4.0 kilowatt-hours per mile, and 40 miles per day of average driving per vehicle, it would take 10 gigawatt-hours to power 1.0 million electric vehicles.  At ten hours of off-peak charging per night, that would be an additional 1.0 gigawatt of off-peak energy going into the grid per each additional 1.0 million electric vehicles.  But if the winds come and go, and the solar peak is in the middle of the day, where will this energy...

Back in March 2008 we first posted an essay entitled "Rational Environmentalism," where we explicitly stated fifteen principles that we believe summarize our editorial position on what environmentalism should be, versus what environmentalism has become.  We did this because we had just been noticed - perhaps we should consider this an honor, but we don't - by a professional PR firm whose charter is to smear anyone who questions global warming, or the radical policies being advocated to mitigate alleged global warming. This post is to restate those principles, because we want to make certain our position is clear.  We don't consider EcoWorld to be a "greenwashing" website, because greenwashing is the process...

With video archives already available, and open media in full bloom, the recent GoingGreen 2008 conference in Sausalito can now be viewed for free by anyone.  GoingGreen was produced by AlwaysOn, a conference company founded in 2002 by Red Herring founder Tony Perkins, now going into its 7th year of dreaming up and successfully producing terrific, elite events that cater to private sector entrepreneurs and investors.  Up until 2007 AlwaysOn had not done an event in the cleantech sector.  In early 2007 Perkins asked us, EcoWorld, to design a program for GoingGreen, based on our long-standing status as an online environmental publication aimed at an audience of consumers and businesspeople, with a consistently...