3p Contributor: Richard Levangie
Recent Articles
GE Takes Steps to Ensure EVs Arrive Sooner: Will Buy 12,000
Synergy has been used too often in marketing campaigns, but it’s still a wonderful word, and it does describe an emerging trend in the electric vehicle (EV) market. Electric cars are the future of the clean transportation industry, but it may be a distant future. The plug-in-hybrid and electric-vehicle premium that attaches to the early production-line models will scare away most consumers. Automobile manufacturers need economies of scale to kick in so they can advance the technology, and bring prices down to a point where a mass market is created.
Many corporations want the clean transportation industry to succeed because the new technology will create new markets and new opportunities for them. That’s exactly the thinking at GE, which recently announced that it will purchase 12,000 electric or plug-in electric cars from GM, beginning with the soon-to-be-released Chevy Volt. The company pledges that half of its 30,000 vehicle electric fleet will be electric by 2015 — an impressive stat by any measure.
In doing so, GE is helping itself in a couple of ways, so there is a method to the company’s madness. GE recently designed and created the WattStation electric vehicle charger, and it could sell hundreds of thousands of units if groups like Better Place can promote electric car technology, and the EV market kicks into high gear.
Melting Ice and Rising Temperatures
The Arctic is making news this year, but it isn’t good news. Now that the summer solstice has passed and the Arctic sea ice melt season has kicked into high gear, the Arctic sea ice extent is declining rapidly, and setting record lows for June. In May, Arctic air temperatures remained well above average, and scientists believe the sea ice extent has fallen below that recorded in 2006, the previous record low for spring melting. Yet, surprisingly, 2007 set the record for lowest Arctic sea ice extent on record, as summer conditions created an unprecedented and unexpected melting that shocked researchers.
Certainly, current conditions could result in a new record low this summer, but wind and weather conditions are too difficult to predict to know for certain. Most are not predicting a record low for 2010. Nevertheless, these same expert scientists are worried by the decline in sea ice extent, and the dramatic loss of older, more resilient sea ice over the last decade. During May, sea ice melted at the rate of 68,000 square kilometers per day, about 50% above the mean for this time of year. Temperatures throughout most of the Arctic have been a scorching 2 to 5°C (4-9°F) above normal for late spring and early summer
G8 Summit Reflects Canada’s Climate Change Policies
Obama, Medvedev & Harper (White House photo)
No one should be surprised that the G8 Summit in Toronto came and went with almost no mention of global warming. After all, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is the rotating G8 President this year, and his government has been named the world’s Colossal Fossil at each of the last three climate summits. The message from G20 Summit on Sunday was no different.
Though the wording was slightly different, G8 leaders reiterated much the same goal as they did last year in Italy — that they share a desire to cut global CO2 emissions by 50% by 2050. Of course, the devil is in the details, and environmentalists are quite right to criticize their promises as weak and nebulous.
“Consistent with this ambitious long-term objective,” the G8 Communique ran, “we will undertake robust aggregate and individual mid-term reductions, taking into account that baselines may vary and that efforts need to be comparable.”
That and $2.50 will get you a cup of fair trade coffee.
More Fraud Within the Clean Development Mechanism
photo credit: Laz'Andre F. Cawagas
A consortium of North American and European activists have demanded sweeping changes to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) after charging that up to one-third of all CERs ever sold may have been illegitimate.
The groups are demanding an investigation to determine whether a number of coolant firms have manipulated the marketplace since 2005 by deliberately increasing their greenhouse gas emissions in order to obtain offsets by reducing them to normal levels. The 19 firms at the center of the storm are headquartered mainly in China and India, with others based in South Korea, Argentina and Mexico. They are alleged to have increased their production of the greenhouse gas HFC-23, a by-product of the coolant HCFC-22, to earn the CERs.
“Sometimes they produce gas just to burn it and get some CDM money, and it’s not at all an honest way of behaving,” said Chaim Nissim, Director of Noe21. “It’s fake.”
Plastic Made With Wheat Straw Cuts Ford’s Petroleum Use
For years, Ford has been experimenting with materials to cut its petroleum use, and the 2010 Ford Flex will showcase the latest fruits of its labor. The Flex’s third-row storage bin will have a 20 percent wheat straw-based plastic content.
While the change may seem small, it will cut manufacturing petroleum by 10 tons and CO2 emissions by 15 tons, and cut the storage bin’s weight by 10 percent — thereby saving the end consumer a small amount of fuel, as well. Similarly, in late September, Ford announced that it is now using soy-based foam in seat cushions and backs and interior roof covers, a change that saved 750 tons of petroleum in the manufacturing process. The soy foam is also 25 percent lighter than petroleum foam.
Sinautec Makes Ultracapacitors Work
Ultracapacitors are the Holy Grail of clean transportation: they’re powerful, they’re reliable, they’re relatively inexpensive and they charge in minutes. But they also discharge in minutes, and that’s the problem companies like EEStor and Altair Nano are working furiously to combat. Even the best ultracapacitors have about five percent of the average lithium-ion battery’s storage capacity.
But Sinautec Automobile Technologies, a capacitor company based in Arlington, Virginia, has decided to to turn the technology’s weakness into its advantage. Along with Chinese partner Shanghai Aowei Technology Development Limited Corporation, Sinautec has developed an ultracapacitor-powered bus that charges quickly every few stops. A collector on the bus roof extends to overhead power lines, and in minutes the batteries — called banks — charge fully.
Climate Scientists: “Inaction Is Inexcusable”
Global warming deniers often suggest that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report is a political document, and they’re partially right — but not in the way that they might think. The report is conservative by nature, relying on studies that were largely published before 2005, and the picture it paints is far rosier than it should be.
Over the last five years, study after peer-reviewed study has suggested that the Fourth Assessment Report is already out-of-date, and global warming is barreling along.
So it’s worthwhile to reconsider the science on this, Blog Action Day. Luckily for me, I don’t have to do the heavy lifting. Leading experts have made good on a promise to update the climate change science in advance of Copenhagen, and they’re telling politicians that humanity is risking “abrupt and irreversible climatic shifts” from the accelerating pace of global warming. Rising global surface and ocean temperatures, surging sea levels, extreme weather events, and the retreat of Arctic sea ice* are all coming harder and faster than research suggested five or 10 years ago. The takeaway message is that politicians had better find a way to work together at the next international climate summit in December — or shortly after — or the results will be devastating.
Buying Time: Cutting Non-CO2 Pollutants Will Slow Climate Change
Climate change isn’t only about carbon dioxide. So that’s why, in a world that is stepping close to a steep precipice, doing more to reduce non-CO2 climate change contributors such as black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), as well as expanding bio-sequestration through biochar production, might head global warming off at the pass, according to Nobel Laureate Dr. Mario Molina and co-authors in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The authors argue that this novel perspective could transform the debate at United Nations climate change conference slated for Copenhagen in December.
Cutting Emissions Immediately Is an Economic Imperative, Study Says
A new analysis by university economists suggests that we need to start fighting climate change now, while we can still afford it. But if we take the cautious approach advocated by some well-known academics, mitigating climate change will put us in the poor house.
The Economics of 350, a detailed study put forth by Economics for Equity and the Environment (E3), weighed the cost of keeping global CO2 concentrations at 350 parts per million — an ambitious target that’s already in the rearview mirror. And that cost would cut between one and three percent off GDP. That might seem steep, but it’s nothing compared to what’s coming down the turnpike if we fail to act.
The study strongly suggests that economists such as William Nordhaus of Yale University have it backwards when they suggest we should start tackling climate change with modest measures, and ramp up our efforts when advances in technology make it affordable and economies have grown to absorb the costs.
Hotter, Faster: New Report Slices Decades From Warming Scenarios
Are people in the U.S. illiterate when it comes to climate change?
Just days after Rasmussen reported that 47 percent of U.S. citizens suggested that it was OK to put the economy before climate change concerns, one of the key advisors to the German government suggested that North Americans know less about climate change than just about anyone else in the world.
Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, is one of the world’s foremost climate experts. On the sidelines at a climate conference at Oxford University, he predicted that it will be several years before the U.S. will be able to get its house — or perhaps Senate — in order to join the world in cutting emissions. And until that happens, says Schellnhuber, developing countries like India and China won’t set hard emission targets. It’s a dangerous Catch-22. He’s hoping that most G20 economies will reach some measure of an agreement at Copenhagen, and the U.S. and Canada will follow in a few years time.
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