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The biofuels news keeps getting hotter by the day, it seems. We recently had the flood of news about Exxon’s $600 million investment in algae biofuel development, and now we have some “minor” announcements (links below), plus a potential blockbuster from Joule. [Press release] Joule Biotechnologies Introduces Revolutionary Process For Producing Renewable Transportation Fuels: Joule Biotechnologies, Inc., an innovative . . . → Read More: A Joule of an announcement I just spotted the post, WaterWired: Energy-Water Nexus: Three Papers For Your Reading Pleasure, on the blog WaterWired: Yesterday I received an email from Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool from the National University of Singapore. Attached to the email were three papers dealing with energy and water. Dear colleagues, Attached are three articles dealing with the U.S. electricity . . . → Read More: Document alert: Energy/water nexus Why people are cool to global warming: Why, asks U of C biology professor David Mayne Reid, do so many people not accept the data of climate change? He suggests no less than seven reasons, and does so in a refreshing departure from the condescending tone more usually heard from that side of the argument. Our skepticism is . . . → Read More: Denial and the media arms merchants The title of this post is one of the scariest numbers I’ve run across in my energy and environmental research is a long time. Nine hundred billion metric tons. What is it? That’s the trend of net ice loss from the Arctic every year over the last few years. That’s 900 cubic kilometers of ice. . . . → Read More: 900 billion metric tons Of all the material I’ve read in the last five-plus years regarding energy and environmental issues, one of the most insightful is a Comment in New Scientist by George Marshall, Why people don’t act on climate change (emphasis added): It is now 44 years since US president Lyndon Johnson’s scientific advisory council warned that our greenhouse gas . . . → Read More: Resorting to belief Gather ’round the monitor, folks, it’s time for yet another of the US Dept. of Energy’s flow diagrams. This time around, it’s petroleum. Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. Anyway, first, the chart: (Click on the image above to see the full-size version in a new window.) Things I find interesting in this one: Total consumption was . . . → Read More: GOTW: Petroleum flow One of the favorite parlor games among energy geeks for some time has been trying to figure out just what EEStor is up to. EEStor is the Texas-based company that has been making some very tantalizing claims about their ultracapacitor-based electricity storage units that will eventually be used in EVs. (See the Wiki machine . . . → Read More: Is EEStor a game changer? There’s new in the local paper here in Rochester this morning about the nuclear power plant closest to our fair city, and it involves everyone’s favorite intractable problem, nuclear waste. Ginna builds crypt for nuclear waste: Since it first began producing electricity in late 1969, the Robert E. Ginna nuclear power plant has put spent fuel rods – . . . → Read More: Nuclear crypt-keeper I mentioned in an earlier post today (Us vs. them vs. all of us) that the AMS (American Meteorological Society) was about to endorse research into geoengineering. The AMS Policy Statement on Geoengineering the Climate System is now online (emphasis added): Human responsibility for most of the well-documented increase in global average temperatures over the last . . . → Read More: AMS statement on geoengineering Despite what a lot of media coverage would have us believe, the biggest single obstacle to dealing with humanity’s two major global challenges–peak oil and climate chaos–is not technological limits to what we can do, nor is it the ghastly specter of economics that hangs over and controls almost everything we do as groups of people. . . . → Read More: Us vs. them vs. all of us |
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