Image Credit: Talking Points Memo

RIP, Energy Bill: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he didn’t have the votes to pass a climate-change bill that puts a price on greenhouse gases. With that statement one of Obama’s major campaign promises crashed to earth, along with hopes for slowing global warming or using cleantech to jump-start the U.S. economy. In place of a real energy bill is an “energy bill” that gives homeowners efficiency rebates and regulates deepwater oil drilling. But with a midterm election in the offing and more Republicans likely heading to Congress, the notion of cap-and-trade is, well, cap-and-dead.

BP Plugs the Spew in Gulf, Boardroom: Having capped its oil spill for what might be for good, BP replaced its foot-in-mouth CEO Tony Hayward with Robert Dudley, an American who says he’ll make safety his top goal. Meanwhile, while no one was paying attention, Obama became the first president to take a stab at managing the oceans.

NYC Water’s Hot, McDonald’s Not: When it comes to local sourcing, in New York City tap water we trust. McDonald’s, not so much.

LEAF is Cheaper, Volt Goes Farther. Who Wins? General Motors finally named a price for the Chevy Volt: $41,000, or about $8K more than its electric rival, the Nissan LEAF. In its defense, Chevy argues that the Volt can go 340 miles with its “extended range” gas engine, while the LEAF’s battery dies after 100 miles. Who will go the distance with buyers? Time will tell.

Image Credit: NASA

Blow, Google, Blow: The king of search officially became a utility as it arranged to mainline 114 megawatts of power from an Iowa windfarm. Also this week, the Alta Wind Energy Center in the California foothills announced it had secured the funds to grow to 1,550 gigawatts and so become the largest windfarm in the world.

Take the NASA Quiz: This week, NASA unveiled snazzy maps that reveal the answers to two not-so-trivial questions: Where are the tallest trees in the world, and where are the biggest dead zones in the ocean? Let’s tackle the second question first. The U.S. East Coast and Northern Europe have the largest dead zones, victims of too much chemical fertilizer leaking off the farms. The tallest trees (which sequester the most carbon) are in Southeast Asia and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

What Matters This Week: A Price for the Volt, but None for Carbon is a post from: The Ferris Files

Image Credit: defencetalk.com

On Wednesday I have an interview at the Pentagon with Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, who is in charge of a hugely ambitious program to green the Navy. What should I ask her?

Though I have my own questions, I’d like to know yours. Reply by either sending me an email or, even better, making a comment on this post.

I first saw Ms. Pfannenstiel (pronounced “fan-in-steel”) when she gave a presentation at a 25×25 conference last month. She spoke about the Navy’s  plans to transform its relationship to energy and fuel — especially ambitious considering the Navy’s vast size and reach. The U.S. Navy is bigger than the next 13 navies combined, and is the second-largest consumer of energy in the U.S. government.  Any organization that uses 30 million barrels of oil a year has the chance to exert enormous influence over its contractors, suppliers and competitors.

The stakes are high: 30 military installations are at risk from rising sea levels, and the Navy risks lives and spends vast resources protecting the flow of oil from volatile countries to the U.S., and to supply the military’s planes, ships and bases around the world. Also, higher-ups have realized that renewable energy and efficiency can save the Navy a boatload of money.

Pfannenstiel didn’t rise through the ranks, but won her appointment in March after a long career with Pacific Gas & Electric in California. Her boss, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, is one of the most zealous advocates in the armed forces for reducing energy use and deploying renewable energy.

The Navy's ambitious energy-reduction goals.

His marching orders for the Navy are detailed in this slide below from Pfannenstiel’s presentation. To recap, Mabus wants to have a green strike group in local operations by the end of this year and deployed by 2016; reduce use of petroleum in vehicles by 50 percent by 2015; have half of all shore-based operations powered from renewable sources by 2020, and in that same year have 50 percent of the Navy’s installations be carbon neutral.

To emphasize just how Herculean this task is, compare the Navy’s goals to those of California, where Pfannenstiel served as chair of the state Energy Commission. California’s legislature is struggling to agree on a goal for utilities to gather just 33 percent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020.

Laughable or laudable? What more do you want to know? Hit me back.

Help Me Interview the Navy’s Energy Czar is a post from: The Ferris Files

Lessons from the Deep:

Forests Get Breathing Room: Indonesia’s government agreed to halt the cutting of its rainforests for two years in exchange for $1 billion in ransom. Norway made the offer because Indonesia holds hostage some of the largest remaining rainforests; what’s left around the world might keep more CO2 from the atmosphere than all the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes combined.

Deforestation = Poor U.S. Farmers? Meanwhile, a report made a persuasive argument that deforestation in the tropics leads to economic ruin for U.S. foresters and farmers. By rapidly clearing land, tropical nations flood the market and undercut Americans’ prices for soybeans, beef, timber, vegetable oil, among others.

GM Retreats from Indian Rival: General Motors pulled out of a partnership with REVA, an Indian electric car company in India, after REVA was acquired by the Indian conglomerate of Mahindra & Mahindra, a major Indian manufacturer that has set its sights on the United States.

Nissan and Zipcar Grow: Nissan broke ground on its battery factory in Smyrna, Tennessee and said it will make 200,000 electric batteries a year. Zipcar announced plans for a $75 million IPO to fuel its own growth in the car sharing, despite competition from rental companies like Hertz and Enterprise.

That’s a Lot of Plug Points: Matter Network’s own John Gartner made headlines with his estimate that in five years, the world will need 4.7 million new charge points for electric cars. A few days later a coalition announced that 4,600 would be installed in nine U.S. cities by Coulomb Technologies and bankrolled with $37 million in government funds. Too bad China provides far more stimulus than the American government does.

Tough to Be a Small Fish: As the big boys jostled, HybridCars pointed out how smaller electric-car companies like Fisker, Coda, Aptera and Tesla have no margin for error as they try to compete.

image credit: picasaweb.google.com/mikelo

Veni, Vidi, Veggie: In the New York Review of Books, Michael Pollan took a look at five books that collectively point to a tying together of what’s loosely known as the “food movement” — urban agriculture, farmland preservation, food labeling, the organic movement, to name a few — into something more than the sum of their parts.

No Free Ride for Factory Farms: The EPA announced that factory farms — exposed in Pollan’s own book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — would be identified and their animal waste’s impact on waterways measured. As a result, thousands of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, are likely to face new regulations.

Innovations of the Week: Cornell students figure out how to harness electricity from small wind; scientists grow  BPA-free plastic from the atmospheric scourge of CO2.

The Weekly: Deep Ignorance in the Deep Ocean is a post from: The Ferris Files

Image credit: National Geographic

Another Bad Week, Or a Really Good One? Good news grows as slow as a tree, but bad news flows like a broken oil main. That seems to be the lesson from this week as BP, the U.S. government and an armada of ships and volunteers tried but mostly failed to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Though BP had some success at slowing the spigot, oil is pooling in the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta and resides at unmeasured quantities in the deeps. There it has joined the Loop Current with a probable next stop in Florida.

Meanwhile, 1,500 miles north, an equally momentous event drew little attention: an agreement to curtail or end logging on 72 million acres of Canada’s boreal forest, an area roughly the size of France. An unlikely consortium of logging companies and Greenpeace agreed to halt the chainsaws altogether for three years in an area as big as Montana, and to develop a sustainable-forestry program for the remainder. The accord might be the forerunner to permanent protection for an area that encompasses two-thirds of Canada’s logging concessions.

The Week’s Best Green Ideas: This week, GreenTech TV took a look at how Rush University Medical Center has become one of the greenest hospitals in the country. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

At Cleantechies, Chuck Colgan told California building owners, brokers and managers how to prepare for AB 1103, a California law that asks for 12 months of energy-consumption records when a building is sold, re-leased or financed.

Triple Pundit produced a field guide to the three organizations that can help a company develop a framework for its  energy use: The Climate Registry, the US EPA Climate Leaders program, and the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Also, the U.S. Green Building Council told President Obama how his administration can make America’s buildings far more efficient without asking permission from those squirrelly congressmen.

Too Hot? Bring Your Own Water. Last month was the warmest April in recorded history, according to the United Nations. If you’d like to contemplate this alarming news from the shores of Walden Pond, carry your own hydration — the city of Concord has become the first in the country to ban plastic water bottles.

Will Nissan Leaf You Out? Pre-orders for the hit Japanese electric car reached 13,000 this week, a thousand more than Nissan planned to make. If you’d rather not crash the dealership, wait ’till next year and rent one from Hertz.

Quiet Excitement: At Infineon Raceway in California, the TTXGP race pitted electric motorcycles against each other in the first — and the quietest — race of its kind.

Price Check, Aisle Nine: At the Lightfair International convention in Las Vegas, Sylvania, Toshiba and Philips debuted their new LED bulbs for use in home lamps. Each bulb, as well as General Electric’s, will retail by early 2011 or sooner, for $40 to $60.  Also, at the National Hardware Show, Honeywell announced that its $6,500 home wind turbine would arrive at Ace Hardware stores by August.

A Tweet that Really Matters: Populations of 150 North American bird species are plummeting as their habitat is destroyed. Could one source of their salvation reside as an app on your phone?

The Weekly: Oil Spreads, Forest Are Spared, and Green Ideas Sprout is a post from: The Ferris Files

Hear Ye, O Haters of Styrofoam:

Us vs. the Volcano: Boxes and people lurched back into the troposphere this week as the Eyjafjoell volcano stopped spewing and gave planes the chance to fly again from European airports. Eyjafjoell issued 150,000 to 30,000 tons of CO2 per day — as much as a small European country — but its carbon footprint was offset by all those canceled flights. Anxious eyes remained on the skies for another eruption, or perhaps an interruption of another kind. After all, the U.S. military fears massive oil shortages by 2015.

Solar on the Go: Seiko unveiled a series of wristwatches powered by photovoltaic panels built into the face. After getting a full suntan the timepiece will keep on ticking for about six months, at a price of $215 to $283. This summer, Samsonite will roll out a line of luggage embedded with solar panels that transmit enough juice to power mobile devices.

This Time We Mean It: Energy Star, the international standard for energy-efficient appliances, has been stung suckered of late by manufacturers that lied about their specs. As of 2011, makers of fridges, washers and water heaters will need to submit to independent testing in order to win the coveted EnergyStar label.

Hypermiling with the Kids: Meld a hybrid with a minivan, and you get sippy-cup stains that no baking soda will remove. No, wait! You get the Toyota Prius minivan, which reports say will go on sale in Japan in 2011 (no word yet on offerings in the U.S.) . Chevy might not be too far behind, with rumors that it will announce a hybrid Volt minivan in Beijing next week.

In Other Car News: On Tuesday, Nissan began taking reservations for the all-electric Leaf, which goes on sale in December.

In a survey, 78 percent of people said they expect that cars of the future will be plug-ins or hybrids. Over half said they expect to own one in their lifetimes.  That’s good news for Smart, the teeny-tiny little child of Daimler, which said that it will roll out diesel, hybrid and electric versions in the next few years.

Ford announced plans for a driver interface that gives real-time fuel-economy coaching and opened a developer network, a la the iPhone. Fisker assigned itself the role of ambassador to the heartland, arranging a tour of its $87,000 plug-in Karma sportster to places that rarely think outside the gas tank, like Neena, Wisconsin and Plano, Texas.

The Moneymaking Roof: Recurrent Energy of San Francisco and partner BlueWatt will install 50 megawatts of rooftop solar on commercial and industrial roofs all over France. Meanwhile, SunPower Corp and Empire Power Systems are collaborating to make the largest rooftop solar system ever in Arizona, an 850,000-square-foot building in Phoenix that houses vast refrigerators and freezers.

In other news, Molycorp Minerals filed for a $350,000 IPO to fund the reopening of a California mine and a restart for the U.S. rare-earth mining industry. Underneath Mountain Pass, Calif., are elements like neodymium that are crucial to wind turbines and electric-car batteries, supplies of which are dominated by China.

Gadget Watch: An Italian designer creates a 3-D printer that could make buildings out of sand; the Navy crafts a microbe that would enable a submersible powered by mud; and while we’re at it, the military wants an all-terrain hybrid flying car.

The Weekly: UPS Hates Styrofoam, Prius Plans a Minivan is a post from: The Ferris Files

This week, G.E. unveiled an eco-equivalent to the 40-watt incandescent bulb — a 9-watt LED that will go on sale late this year or early next. Days later, Philips announced its own entry, a 12-watt LED meant to replace the plain ol’ 60-watt bulb.  Both will sell for $40 or $50 and could last 17 years — long enough that your mattress will give out before your bulbs do.

Not Exactly Glacial: Usually global warming occurs at pace that’s hard to detect, but that changed on Sunday for the people of Carhuaz, Peru. A massive block of the Hualcan glacier broke off and tumbled into a lake, creating a 75-foot-tall tsunami that killed three.

Signals from a Hurting Planet: In Canada, the 895-square-mile ice cap on Devon Island in Baffin Bay is shrinking and calving glaciers. One in six species of mangrove faces the threat of extinction as shorelines are developed and fished, especially in Central America. And NASA released satellite photos of that reveal that Semiara Island in the Philippines is being steadily destroyed by a coal-mining operation.

Pinch Us, We Must Be Dreaming: A few years ago, could you imagine reading any of the following news items, much less in the space of one week? Sony commits to zero carbon and zero waste by 2050; Verizon adds 1,600 alternative-fuel cars to its fleet and plans a generation of eco-friendly set-top boxes; Korean conglomerate LG invests $18 billion to cut its emissions by 40 percent and develop energy-efficient businesses; and PepsiCo devotes $18 million to buy biomass boilers and solar panels to power the making of Tostitos and Dr. Pepper.

Cleantech Biz Update: Strong performance by solar and energy-efficiency companies helped push the Dow over 11,000 for the first time since the economic collapse of 2008, the New York Times reported. But with public subsidies coming to an end, the cleantech rally might not last. In other news, Cereplast, the creator of bio-based plastics, got listed on the NASDAQ.

Critical Mass-achusetts: The state of Massachusetts tapped smart-grid company EnerNOC to bring sophisticated energy tools to 17 million square feet of government real estate, including offices, hospitals, colleges and prisons. Savings might amount to $10 million a year. Meanwhile, the state’s own FloDesign Wind Turbine Corp. won a series of state loans and investments and will set up a new R&D facility.

Not Your Grandfather’s Hindenburg: Why not ship our goods on giant solar blimps?

Corn-as-Fuel Loses Its Luster: America’s love affair with ethanol from Midwestern corn took another blow this week with a report warning that dedicating much of America’s breadbasket to fuel might be disastrous in the event of a food shortage. Meanwhile, alternative fuels like cellulosic ethanol and algae gained traction.

Brazil Woos Your Gas Tank: Brazil waged a U.S. public-relations blitz to persuade the United States to lower tariffs that lock out ethanol made from Brazilian sugarcane. Sugarcane ethanol is widespread in Brazil, with a lower carbon footprint than our own corn ethanol and achieving affordable prices without much government support.

Gadget Watch: Researchers at Stanford figured out how to draw electrical current from a single cell of algae; marine scientists created a perpetual-motion robot powered by changes in the ocean’s temperature; and the round-the-world solar plane clocked its longest flight ever at 87 minutes. Next up: a night flight.

The Weekly: Light Bulbs that Last Forever, Glaciers that Don’t, Solar Planes that Try is a post from: The Ferris Files

Top News:

On Saturday, Apple’s long-awaited iPad emerged to great fanfare, and with it some schwag and a initial smattering of green apps.

Wising Up to the Smart Grid: After years of talk and speculation, several big U.S. companies revealed that the smart grid lies at the center of their business plans. At the New York Auto Show, Ford and Microsoft announced energy-management software designed for the thousands of people who will plug in their electric cars or hybrids at home.  Connecticut Light & Power applied for permission to scrap its flat-rate price structure in favor of one that penalizes customers for overloading the grid. Under the proposal, Connecticut electricity would be ten times cheaper at night than it would be in the middle of the day, when the A/C units are cranking.

Also, Google spearheaded a lobbying effort, joined by Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Comcast and other firms poised to make a mint from the smart grid. In a letter to President Obama, they asked for the government to “democratize access to energy” by tilting regulations in favor of energy networking.

Do the Right Thing: Starbucks, in an effort to make all of its cups recyclable or reusable by 2015, asked coffee-drinkers everywhere to crowdsource the solution. Target announced it would place recycling centers at the entrances to each of its 1,740 stores, and the board at Intel voted to make “corporate responsibility and sustainability performance” part of its corporate charter.

Meanwhile, the foodmaking giant ConAgra, maker of Chef Boyardee and Orville Redenbacher and a longtime laggard in acknowledging global warming, promised to make big cuts to its carbon emissions, water use, solid waste and packaging by 2015.

Traffic Jam in the Luxury Lane: So many carmakers are preparing high-end hybrids that dealerships in Palo Alto and Ann Arbor might get a little crowded. Hyundai said it would produce a six-speed, powerful Sonata Hybrid Bluedrive in 2011. Nissan’s luxe brand, Infiniti, announced the M35 Hybrid, while Mercedes hinted that its entire S class line of large sedans may go hybrid. Auto dealers reacted with dismay, worried that their customers would rather drive fast than save a few bucks on gas.

Troubled Waters: China’s neighbors questioned if China’s dam-building binge might be contributing to the biggest drop in water levels on the Mekong River in decades. In the U.S., researchers discovered that waterways from the Colorado River to the Potomac are steadily getting warmer, especially near cities, with unknown impacts on river health.

The Latest Inspiring Inventions: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory created an LED with a green tint — not the ethic, but the actual color — and opened up whole new uses for the brave little bulb. Marine scientists got a better look at tiny sea life with high-definition audio, and the propellerheads at MIT made a leap forward in lithium-air batteries.

The Weekly: Obama Drills, the Grid Lobby Powers Up, ConAgra Sees the Light is a post from: The Ferris Files

In India, every power outlet is governed by its own switch, and those switches are monitored with a careful eye. I was sternly instructed to turn switches off when I was done with them. If I vacated the bedroom without turning off the switch to the overhead light and the ceiling fan, I would get an immediate reprimand from the family cook. When I visited the aunt’s place across the hall and wanted to use the Internet, I had to start up the computer from dead because it had been switched to “Off” at the wall. No standby appliances vampiring electricity here.

This thrift extended even to the apartment gym, where I arrived with water bottle and towel to find the lights off and every cardio machine dark. To work out on the treadmill I switched its outlet on. When I finished I turned it off, as the sign next to the the machine instructed.

To contend with Chennai’s broiling heat, it isn’t as simple as pushing a thermostat button and pumping an entire big room or building full of cold air. Instead I turned on the A/C unit by the treadmill, and when I was done with the treadmill I switched it off. Then I headed to the dumbbell area and activated its resident A/C unit. None of this felt like any sort of imposition.

Somehow Indians have an instinct toward electricity conservation. Maybe it has to do with the country’s roots: Like many Indians, Anjali’s family is just three generations removed from its ancestral village, where one tended to the rice paddies and the bullock. Life was too hard to let anything go to waste.

Whatever the reason, it was refreshing to take a break from America’s thoughtless, wasteful use of power and to know that, halfway around the world, a billion people have found another way.

How India Puts Itself on a Power Diet is a post from: The Ferris Files

Bubble, Bubble, Methane is Trouble:

Now a Word from Our Other Gases: It was a promising week in the world of fuels. A Colorado startup revealed a solar concentrator that can vaporize biomass and make high-yield synthetic fuels. British scientists explored enzymes in the gut of a boat-eating bug that could break down straw or waste wood. Meanwhile, a California newbie called Transonic Combustion claims to have invented a fuel-injection system that could boost mileage of plain old gas by 50 percent. The company registered 64 miles to the gallon in recent test drives.

As if that wasn’t enough, Brazil’s 10 millionth vehicle powered by sugarcane ethanol hit the road. Also, the world’s largest shipping company,  Maersk, said it would try to cut its CO2 output by 20 percent in the next seven years by blending its heavy engine oil with biofuels.

And the Winners in the Common-Sense Category Are…: Rooftop solar water heaters are spreading like dandelion seeds in China and Europe; if worldwide growth projections hold true, in the next decade they could save the energy equivalent of 690 coal-fired power plants. Hurrah also for the efficient cookstove, a simple and inexpensive contraption that can stamp out soot, reduce the melting of glaciers, and help women and children live longer in the developing world.

Electric Batteries Cheap; Charging Stations Out? Prices for electric-car batteries are dropping so fast that an electric car might not cost as much as the bean-counters thought.  Also, a study finds that most electric-car drivers get around fine by charging at home; does this mean electric-car charging stations are a big waste of money?

Now Get Out of Here: With the Greek economy in meltdown, there’s never been a better time to buy an island. If it sinks underwater in a few years because of global warming, then make like the Maldives and build your own.

The Weekly: Methane from the Deep, Biofuel from the Sun is a post from: The Ferris Files

Photo Credit: http://camworld.org

The Unstoppable….Solar Lobby?!? A skirmish this week in Arizona revealed that the solar industry, while still adolescent, is developing some political brawn. A bill in the state legislature proposed expanding the definition of “renewable” to include nuclear power, a move that would have allowed the state’s lone nuclear plant to fulfill Arizona’s mandate to receive 15% of its electricity from renewables. Solar companies howled, including Suntech Power Holdings, which threatened to cancel its first U.S. factory in Arizona. Days later, the proposal was retired.

Walmart to Suppliers: Be Green or Else Walmart announced a goal of cutting 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain by the end of 2015. By using its unparalleled purchasing leverage, Walmart intends to force greener behavior from its vendors, like it or not. Suppliers may reduce carbon by focusing on raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, customer use, or end-of-life disposal.

Meanwhile, Ben & Jerry’s goes 100 percent fair trade.

If You Pollute It, We Will Come The Environmental Protection Agency said it would explore building renewable-energy projects on polluted industrial “brownfields” sites, many of which are well-supplied with power transmission to feed the grid. Also, Chevron announced plans to build a concentrating photovoltaic solar plant on the tailings of a molybdenum mine it owns in New Mexico.

Hummer R.I.P while Hybrids R-I-P As the Hummer died, hybrid and electric cars continued their confident merge onto U.S. highways. Toyota said it will sell a hybrid RAV4 by 2012. Not to be outdone, Volkswagen announced plans for a hybrid Jetta in 2012, a hybrid Passat and Golf in 2013, and that same year, its first all-electric models. Meanwhile, Tesla announced it would lease the Roadster for the not-inconsiderable sum of $1,658 per month.

March of the Penguins This week the Antarctic melted apace, as an enormous survey of Antarctic sealife showed that global warming is altering its ecology. In an unseemly bid for attention, the continent also calved an iceberg so large that it threatened to change world ocean currents.

A Dangerous Rise in Global Shrugging The Obama administration launched www.climate.gov as the go-to portal for all climate needs. Not that anyone age 18 to 35 cares; according to a new survey, when it comes to global warming, youngsters don’t really give a damn.

The Weekly: Solar Gets Scary, Walmart Gets Tough, Antarctica Can’t Get No Respect is a post from: The Ferris Files

In another concession, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would drag its feet in regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant in order to mollify coal-state lawmakers. In a letter to reluctant Democratic senators, Administrator Lisa Jackson said the agency would pursue the biggest game 400 large emitters, mostly coal plants — in early 2011, followed by refineries and large factories in late 2011.  Medium-sized factories might wait until 2016.

Bill Gates declared in a TED talk that his top priority is bringing the world’s CO2 emissions to zero. This revelation was a surprise, as to date the Gates Foundation has steered its formidable assets  toward public health and poverty alleviation, or as Gates puts it, “vaccines and seeds.”  But since global warming lurks as a threat that could dim hopes of fulfilling his other priorities, Daddy Warbucks is shuffling the deck.

Bloom Energy emerged from years of secrecy by pulling off not one but two publicity coups, first in the form of a glowing segment on “60 Minutes,” followed by a media opportunity starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Colin Powell and drawing glowing comparisons to Google’s IPO. Only problem is there was no IPO, or even a product launch — just an unveiling of the Bloom Box, a $700,000 to $800,000 fuel cell now in use by companies such as eBay and Fedex. Bloom Founder K.R. Sridhar said the company hoped to create a compact unit that could satisfy a home’s energy needs for $3,00o, and that it would change the world. Didn’t they say that about the Segway?

A cadre of fast hybrids are headed to the Geneva Auto show, including the 400-horsepower plug-in hybrid Mercedes F800, a Porche 911 GT3 R hybrid that will hit the racetrack in May, and the Ferrari 599 GTB Hybrid, which boasts a pair of electric motors, a lithium-ion battery, and increased fuel efficiency that bumps from nine miles per gallon to — get ready — 12 miles per gallon.

The EPA announced the priorities for a $475 million plan to save the Great Lakes, including cleaning up pollution, fighting invasive species, cutting runoff and restoring wetlands.  Meanwhile,  Quiznos announced that if any of its paper cups blow into Lake Michigan, at least they’ll be compostable.

In general it was a good week for fish and their ilk. Oceanfront nations agreed on a compact to save sharks, scientists found that marine reserves can speedily restore fish populations, and the Klamath River got a long-sought plan to resuscitate salmon. On the other hand, the International Whaling Commission considered lifting a ban on whale hunting.

In other news, Boulder hit a rocky patch with its smart grid, and a utility discovers the key to making people turn down the thermostat is to employ rivalry and shame.

The Weekly: News from Around the Matter Network is a post from: The Ferris Files

Silicon Valley gained two solar companies and lost one in a busy week of consolidation for a young industry. SunPower, the San Jose firm that is one of the U.S.’s biggest solar panel makers, bought SunRay Renewable Energy of Italy for $277 million, acquiring projects now in the pipeline in six countries in Europe and the Middle East.

Calisolar of Sunnyvale absorbed Ontario’s 6N Silicon Inc., combining two solar-cell makers for expected heavy growth in North America. Also, Areva, a French nuclear-power concern, diversified into renewables as it purchased Ausra, a Mountain View-based maker of concentrated solar thermal equipment.

The hypermiling community moved into high (though very quiet) gear as Nissan announced that it will accept pre-orders for the Leaf, the first all-electric car by a major carmaker. Customers can register in April, and deliveries are expected in December.

At the Chicago Auto Show, Ford offered test drives of its Transit Connect Electric fleet vehicle and got a favorable review for its hybrid Focus. Meanwhile, at a press conference in Munich, Volkswagen made the latest of a series of contradictory announcements, this time saying its first entry in the hybrid category will be Touareg SUV.

Last week, as the media seemed ready to slice off Toyota’s head for selling cars with faulty brakes, Prius owners tapped their brake pedals and reacted with a shrug.

But the most exciting and weird news in cars came from where you’d least expect it: the half-jet, half-car Delta Wing, the crowdsourced Rally Fighter, and at last a price tag for the skateboard-car, the Trexa.

In biofuels, British Airways leapfrogged other airlines by announcing plans for a plant that would convert 500,000 tons of waste per year into 16 million gallons of jet fuel. Texas took yet another step toward a renewable future as Joule Biotechnologies signed a lease for a property to test its efficient, solar-powered technique for processing biofuel.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce continued its stalwart denial of global warming as it petitioned a federal court to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

In other news, IBM synthesized a super-efficient solar cell from common materials, the U.K. expects an eco-paint without that new-paint smell, and British Columbia banned mining near Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

The Weekly: News from Around the Matter Network is a post from: The Ferris Files

There are many reasons, but one has to do with maintenance. A solar panel requires almost none: Install it and leave it alone for years. But a wind turbine is a finicky device with many moving parts, and the servicing makes a small turbine hardly worth the expense. I’ve always wondered whether we would ever learn to harvest wind on a smaller, simpler scale. Turns out we can.

The WindBelt was dreamed up by 28-year-old Bay Area inventor Shawn Frayne during a trip to Haiti as he tried to figure out how to deliver power to the energy-starved developing world. Frayne dispensed of the turbine altogether and explored a different aerodynamic phenomenon known as aeroelastic flutter. The marquee example of the principle is the so-funny-it’s-tragic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, aka “Galloping Gertie”:

Frayne asked himself: What if I induce those same forces, but on a small scale, and use that flutter to move small magnets and produce electricity? The result is wind power on a modest, rooftop scale. This video demonstrates it best:

The company Frayne created to improve and market the technology, Humdinger Energy, is marketing three sizes of Windbelts to serve different needs. Deploy a regiment of Windbelts in a windy area, and they could supply power equivalent to a large wind turbine, but without the noise or the rotors that kill birds.

The Wind Turbine’s Tiny Cousin is a post from: The Ferris Files

The solar refrigerator. The purple box at bottom is the cooler, the solar panel and activated carbon bed are on top, and the condenser is at center. Image courtesy Michigan State University.

The very idea of a solar refrigerator is a contradiction: Use the hot sun to keep things cold. How could such an oxymoron possibly work?

It would seem impossible if a team of undergraduates from Michigan State University hadn’t already built a prototype, out of cheap materials, in Guatemala.

The potential uses for a solar refrigerator are endless, from air-conditioning buildings to keeping a case of Sam Adams cold on a hot Fourth of July day. But its most immediate purpose is keeping vaccines viable for medical clinics in areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America that aren’t served by an electrical grid. The perfection of a solar fridge could significantly reduce disease in the rural developing world.

The Michigan State undergraduates who built one of the world's first solar fridges.

To get a solar fridge going, one needs a material that remains freezing cold even at room temperature. The Michigan State team chose ethanol, though methanol works too. Vacuum-sealed in pipes to low pressure, ethanol’s molecules slow and its temperature drops to about 35˚ F. The ethanol resides in the “evaporator,” a coil of copper tubes just inside the cooler. (Why is it called an “evaporator”? You’ll see in a minute).

By the end of the night, the cooler is 39˚ F, cold enough to keep its contents chilly even through a tropical day. As the ethanol has worked its cooling magic, it’s been doing something else: boiling at a furious rate. Ethanol in low pressure boils and turns into gas, just like that foggy liquid nitrogen you might have played with in science class.

Pipes direct that gaseous ethanol to the top of the box, where it drifts through a sandbox-like bed of powder at the top of the machine. The sand is activated carbon, aka charcoal. (John Barrie guesses that even charcoal from burnt coconut shells could serve this function.) The activated carbon traps the ethanol and holds it tight.

A solar refrigerator in action in Guatemala.

Then the hot sun rises. Sun rays strike the solar panel atop the machine. Directly beneath, the bed of activated carbon begins to heat up, and as it does, the ethanol vaporizes again. Only this time, the expanding gas raises the pressure in the pipes so the ethanol can turn back into liquid form. The ethanol gas fills the condenser, the matrix of pipes in the center of the drawing. The condenser has a large surface area that dissipates the sun’s heat and cools the ethanol back into liquid. As the day wears on, the ethanol trickles back down into the evaporator. By the time night falls, all the ethanol is pooled down in the evaporator, and the cycle can start again.

What if it’s cloudy? MSU professor Craig Somerton, who led the solar-fridge team, says that a fire set under the unit would keep it working.

While the sun-powered chiller is still a long way from reality, its promise is substantial. A well-calibrated solar refrigerator could go for years without maintenance, and most importantly, without ever being plugged into an electrical outlet. Click here to learn more and to find design drawings of the solar refrigerator.

A Refrigerator Powered by the Sun is a post from: The Ferris Files

A Lorena stove in action.

In parts of India they’re called chulhas, in Malawi chitetezo mbaula, in Central America the Lorena, and in East Africa the jiko. The names and designs vary, but the principle is the same:  a low-cost, efficient stove that replaces the open fire.

It’s hard to overstate the difference a better stove can make. In many parts of the world women cook over open fires in unventilated huts, filling the living space with smoke that stings the eyes and creates respiratory problems. Children burn themselves on the embers. An open fire requires lots of wood or other burnables, which means stripping the countryside in order to burn it.

An efficient cookstove requires a fraction of the wood, since it burns only exactly what is needed and sends heat directly to the pot. A flue routes the smoke outside, and the air receives less soot and carbon dioxide.

The building material is anything from clay to metal to concrete, and requires an exacting attention to design. To learn how it’s done, read this PDF.

Toward a Better Cookstove is a post from: The Ferris Files

The University of Arizona's Water Wall

Near the Smithsonian building in Washington, D.C. stands a house with a wall of Coke-bottle plastic. Sandwiched between two layers of plastic is water. The wall’s surface conserves heat and also plays tricks with the light, so you can’t help but reach out and touch it.

On the deck of this house, a black kettle hangs twelve feet in the air. On sunny days it is filled with corn kernels. Below, two reflective circles bounce the sun’s rays onto the kettle. When the kettle gets hot enough the kernels pop and send popcorn tumbling down a tube and into a bowl, where they’re served to the crowds at the Solar Decathlon.

When I visited the University of Arizona’s decathlon project today, there was no sun. Clouds and drizzle filled the sky and temperatures hovered in the 40s. Only the feeblest solar energy fed the solar panels, as well as the sightseers, who despite being bundled in thick jackets and hats still stood in lines for half an hour or more to get a glimpse of the homes.

The Solar Decathlon brings 20 universities from around the U.S. and world to build mini-houses on the National Mall. They compete for the title of most energy-efficient house on the basis of ten criteria, including architecture, engineering, comfort and market viability. To win, a project needs to suck as much energy from the sun as possible – the design equivalent of lying on the beach in a bikini slathered in No. 2 Coppertone.

Students met this challenge in many ways. Team Spain embedded solar squares in glass walls and topped itself with a roof-size panel that rotated to face the sun’s rays. Team Germany sheathed its entire building in solar panels, all the way down to the window louvers.

Plants climb the walls at Rice University's Zerow House.

Other projects put water coils under the floor and solar water heaters on the roof and rain-collection systems below the gutters. By investigating these ideas, one starts to look at walls, roof, floors and windows in a new way. They begin to look like a road crew lounging on their shovels. Get to work, you want to say.

One’s roof could be covered with solar panels, or skylights or grass or water tanks. The walls could be made of water or honeysuckle. The windows could open to let cool air in, or served by outdoor louvers to keep the heat out (and then covered with solar film, which worked beautifully for the Germans; they won the contest).

This is how people will look at their home surfaces in the future. The roof and walls will be crowded with energy-saving features, the way a TV remote is covered with buttons or a microchip is covered with circuits. You’ll look for ways to draw just a few more watts out of the sucker.

The Germans' winning design.

Energy Crowds the House is a post from: The Ferris Files

CO2 is removed in the plant's two tall silvery columns (top).

Today, as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists annual meeting, I hopped a bus and toured three of Wisconsin’s leading renewable-energy projects. Heartened as I was to see innovation in action, I could also tell we’re still in Mile One of a long marathon away from fossil fuels.

Just one percent of the plant

First we visited a Wisconsin Energy coal-fired power plant outside of Milwaukee called Pleasant Prairie. There, engineers built a four-story plant that diverts a slice of the coal’s smoke and vapor and extracts the CO2 by sprinkling it with chilled ammonia. This is one approach to “carbon capture,” as its known. On one hand, scrubbers like this could help erase coal’s giant black mark as an agent of global warming. On the other, the very notion of “clean coal” was viewed with suspicion by the well-informed journalists on the bus, who have seen lies billow from the energy industry much like the smoke billowed from Pleasant Prairie’s stack.

At a press conference, the bigwigs at Wisconsin Energy and its affiliates boasted that their new annex pulled two tons of CO2 an hour from the plant’s waste stream. That’s not much really, considering the project treated just one percent of the exhaust gas, and then re-emitted what it captured. But it’s only a pilot project. One of Pleasant Prairie’s sponsors is Alstom, the global power-generation and rail giant. Alstom has now built another and much larger test plant in West Virginia that might remove 110,000 tons of CO2 each year and pump it into the ground. By 2015, Alstom hopes to be selling carbon-capture facilities to  coal plants around the world.

When asked whether energy producers will be able to afford the technology or fit a scrubber the size of an apartment building onto their existing facilities, the executives had no ready answer.

The prototype of the all-electric Ford Escape sat in Johnson Control's plug-in bay.

Next we visited SC Johnson, the manufacturer of such home-care items as Windex and Ziploc bags. All of the plant’s electricity comes from a generator powered by methane from a local landfill. Laudable as the project is, there wasn’t much to see; we put on safety glasses and earplugs and toured the (very hot) generator room, where the methane-powered beast hummed and rattled behind steel plates.

Finally, our bus pulled up to the gleaming headquarters of Johnson Controls (no relationship to SC Johnson), one of the world’s top producers of car batteries, including those for hybrid cars. Nothing loud or dirty here. We toured the manufacturing rooms and saw a prototype of one of Johnson’s most high-profile projects, the battery for the 2012 plug-in electric Ford Escape. I saw the room where the innards of a nickel-metal hydride battery are pressed together and spun in a spool. The Ford Escape, however, uses the even newer lithium-ion battery.

Watching these projects I got the sense of being on the cusp, of technologies ready to spring out of the test lab and into every coal plant and automobile trunk across the land. If Congress gets climate legislation right, that leap might help trim a few degrees Fahrenheit off the Earth’s rising temperatures, and create a safer world.

Wisconsin Badgers Toward Cleaner Energy is a post from: The Ferris Files

Scenario: In 2038, a series of strong cyclones strike Bangladesh, permanently spoiling farmland and turning millions of farmers into refugees.

Worst case: Masses move to inland to live hopeless lives in refugee camps, while millions of others flock across the border to India. Hindu-Muslim tensions in India inflame anew, and the militaries of India and Bangladesh clash.

Best case: The world’s most-developed countries pay into a fund to help erect coastal defenses that blunt the worst effects of the storms. India’s and Bangladesh’s governments work together, reducing tensions and developing a strong working relationship.

Scenario: Rising oceans cause Alexandria and other cities of Egypt’s Nile Delta to collapse. At the same time, areas of sub-Saharan Africa suffer permanent drought, spurring a mass migration of refugees.

Worst case: Millions of unemployed, dispossessed young men from North Africa and the Sahel press toward Europe. Europe cracks down and ghettoizes North African migrants; Egypt and Ethiopia go to war over the Nile headwaters.

Best case: The international community helps Egypt and other African nations fend off the spread of deserts through water conservation and irrigation. Nations of the Sahel profit from mining and use the proceeds to support their people; Europe establishes migration quotas that everyone can live with.

Scenario: Rivers dwindle in Peru, the result of shrinking glaciers, and Peru’s hydroelectric power and water supply steadily decline.

Worst Case: The population suffers high electricity bills and blackouts, on one hand, and high water bills and shortages on the other. Corruption and crime are rife. The government buckles under the strain and Peru descends into civil war.

Best Case: The government sees what’s coming and does meticulous planning. With international help, it builds reservoirs, water-conservation systems and desalination plants. The ride is bumpy, but order is maintained and people mostly get what they need.

These scenarios address some of climate change’s worst conundrums: Poor, agricultural countries will most likely be hardest hit by climate change, but have the fewest resources to prepare. This is not a situation the neighbors can ignore: Chaos in one country can easily spill over a border. In other words, each country has a stake in solving the problem, even if is own citizens are unaffected.

Each of best-case results assume that governments of poor nations will plan years and decades ahead and keep in mind the welfare of all citizens. Furthermore, they bank on wealthy countries spending trillions of aid out of enlightened self-interest.

I am not optimistic things will work out so well.

On the other hand, do we have any other choice? Any general, president or congresswoman need only think through the consequences of shrinking glaciers, rising oceans, failing crops to realize no nation can go it alone.

This book impressed upon me is that if we are to survive climate change, we’ll need a level of cooperation an order of magnitude greater than any the world has ever seen.  We either make it through together, or we all go down.

War and Global Warming is a post from: The Ferris Files

Fagan’s “long summer” is the Holocene Period, the almost 12,000 years of relatively warm, stable climate in which human civilization began, and that continues to this day. But even a stable climate has hiccups. It’s those odd events that Fagan digs from the records of prehistory.

Three things struck me most of all. The first is how a sudden event on one side of the planet can change weather patterns far away, sometimes for an awfully long time. Take Lake Agassiz, the biggest body of water I’d never heard of. In 11,500 B.C., this vast body of glacial meltwater spanned much of the center of North America, from Manitoba to South Dakota. At some point Agassiz topped its basin and carved a channel into the St. Lawrence River. Within a few months, the lake basin spilled most of its contents into Hudson Bay. This deluge of freshwater into the Atlantic started a chain reaction that led to a thousand-year drought in Mesopotamia and wrote a death sentence for some of the Fertile Crescent’s first cities.

The second was the unpredictable consequences that even semi-regular events, like an El Nino, can have on civilizations. I was a cub reporter in California during the El Nino event of 1998, writing about hillsides that collapsed due to rain. This seemed catastrophic at the time, but it was chump change compared to the havoc that El Ninos once wreaked in ancient Egypt. As surface temperatures shift in the Pacific Ocean, the monsoon can fail over East Africa, drying up the Nile. Fagan described how between 3,000 and 1,200 B.C., El Ninos caused Egyptian grain crops to fail and empires to crumble, not once but several times.

The third is how similar our similar our situation today is to those of villagers in Mesopotamia or the Nile farmers of Egypt. Even with our digital thermometers, ice-core samples from Greenland and weather satellites, we have no idea how much rain will fall in Iowa next year. Yes, we can make a better guess, but trend reports can’t subdue the spirits of a farmer who gazes at the sky and hopes that next year will be better. We’re hard-wired to look toward a brighter future, whether that optimism is warranted or not.

The Long Summer is a post from: The Ferris Files