Energy
Reducing Food Waste
Wasted food is one of the greatest economic and environmental problems in the world today. According to a United Nations study, one-third of the world’s food winds up spoiled, rotting in fields, or is thrown away. This amounts to 1.3 billion tons of food wasted annually while at the same time nearly 900 million people around the world go hungry every day.
Hybrid Batteries At Yellowstone
Yellowstone National Park is now the site of the first ever commercial energy storage installation that uses recycled hybrid car batteries.
Carbon Taxes And Canada
Economists around the world are recommending that we move towards systems that reward low-carbon, innovative, resource-efficient production. One way this is likely to happen is through carbon taxes: directly taxing for fossil fuel use and carbon emissions.
Texas Wind Power
Texas has a reputation for conservative politics, a powerful oil and gas industry, and a fair amount of skepticism about human-caused climate change. Despite all of this, Texas now leads the United States in wind power production.
The Biofuel Crop Dilemma
The demand for biofuels continues to grow. Producing fuels from plant matter is considered to be a carbon-neutral way to get energy and is an important part of efforts to move away from fossil fuels.
The Tesla Battery
Tesla recently announced its new product – the Powerwall – a battery energy storage system for the home or small business. The sleek wall-mountable unit goes on sale later this year at a starting price of $3000.
Record CO2 Concentrations
Two years ago, we talked about a report out of the observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii of the first modern measurements of carbon dioxide levels greater than 400 parts per million. But it was only in that location and only for a brief period of time.
An Advance In Artificial Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis is nature’s great energy conversion system. Plants and other organisms convert light energy from the sun into chemical energy in the form of carbohydrate molecules, which are synthesized from carbon dioxide and water.
Affordable Jet Fuel
The aviation industry contributes a relatively small percentage of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – less than 2%, in fact. But jet fuel represents a major expense for the industry that makes it vulnerable to price fluctuations and geopolitical forces.
Airguns In The Atlantic
Seventy-five scientists have issued a plea to President Obama to halt the use of seismic airguns in the Atlantic Ocean. The guns are used for oil and gas exploration mapping, and create a blast of air and sound underwater.
How Much Room Is There For Solar Power?
California has mandated that it will get at least a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and that it will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. To meet these goals, the state has been installing solar power at a staggering rate.
Desalination And California’s Drought
Four years of drought in California have created a serious water crisis. 2014 was the third driest year in 119 years and was also the warmest year in recorded history. California’s Sierra snowpack, which provides a third of the state’s water, is at its lowest level in 65 years.
An Aluminum Battery
We live in a battery-centric world. We depend on them for the ubiquitous devices we use every day: cell phones, tablets, notebook computers and lately, smart watches. Increasingly, we use them to power electric cars as well.
Growing Wind Power
The global wind power industry had a banner year in 2014, installing more than 50 GW of new capacity. To put this in perspective, the total amount of wind power capacity in the world ten years ago was only 60 GW.
Cooling Cities With Electric Cars
We have previously talked about the urban heat island effect. Crowded metropolitan areas are significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas as a result of human activities. Among other things, cities fill up with cars idling in traffic and cars not only produce greenhouse gas emissions, their internal combustion engines also produce a lot of heat.
A New Catalyst for Producing Hydrogen
We have spoken before about the prospects for using hydrogen as a clean auto fuel as well as an energy storage medium. Most hydrogen is produced using the steam methane reforming process, which requires natural gas, uses lots of energy, and produces carbon dioxide as a waste product. Hydrogen made this way is not really a green fuel.
Zero Emission Buses
Most of the news about electric vehicles relates to passenger cars. We hear about Teslas, Leafs, and hydrogen-powered Toyotas all the time. But there is also an expanding fleet of electric and fuel cell buses starting to appear on urban streets in several countries, including the U.S. and China.
Better Carbon Capture
Finding an efficient and cost-effective way to capture the carbon dioxide generated by the use of fossil fuels would be a dramatic game-changer in the fight against climate change. We have often heard about clean coal – coal that doesn’t release lots of carbon dioxide when it is burned – but we haven’t really seen it. Our supplies of coal, natural gas, and these days, even oil are plentiful. We just haven’t figured out how to use these things without damaging the environment.
Eiffel Tower Wind Power
