A sports car that almost makes you want to break out your Birkenstocks to drive...

The motto of Lotus engineering has always been "performance through light weight." Not only has this created some great handling cars in the years since its founding by Colin Chapman, it has made them relatively fuel efficient.

For the 2008 British Motor Show, Lotus is set to take this inadvertently green approach further by taking some deliberate steps to make a more ecological friendly automobile and introducing their concept car, the Lotus Eco Elise. Composite body panels and the seats are made of hemp. Those two rectangles on the roof? Solar panels to power the electrical systems. And if you thought Lotus couldn't make the Elise any lighter, they somehow managed to shave off an additional 70 pounds off the weight.

The dream lives on. Sigh.

On a side note, this is one of a few new concept cars I've seen incorporating solar panels. Mercedes-Benz has a rumored model with solar panels incorporated into its roof to power the air conditioning system to cool off the car while it's parked. Most of the Kool-Aid Gang probably remembers a certain VW Rabbit running around our old stomping grounds with a unwieldy solar panel on it's top that essentially did the same thing. Crazy how long it's taken for a relatively ingenius idea to finally start making its way into consumer products.

If only my dog's poop would have been a good storage element for heat...

Perhaps if Firecracker George and I weren't so busy annoying my old and now long deceased dog with burning his little fuzzy butt using the concentrated energy of the sun via magnifying glasses on bored Sunday afternoons, we might actually be rich today.  

Previous technology to harness the endless radiation eminating from the Sun has focused on solar panels that convert energy into electricity.  This, of course, could provide endless amounts of free energy on a sunny day.  The problem is trying to store up this energy for later use when sunlight isn't in quite such abundance (i.e. at night or in Seattle).  Batteries are highly inefficient and often times rely on materials that are, themselves, somewhat harmful to the environment.

The solution comes from a rather simple idea (from The New York Times):

The idea is to capture the sun’s heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. For example, a coffee thermos and a laptop computer’s battery store about the same amount of energy, said John S. O’Donnell, executive vice president of a company in the solar thermal business, Ausra. The thermos costs about $5 and the laptop battery $150, he said, and “that’s why solar thermal is going to be the dominant form.”

Solar thermal systems are built to gather heat from the sun, boil water into steam, spin a turbine and make power, as existing solar thermal power plants do — but not immediately. The heat would be stored for hours or even days, like water behind a dam.

A plant that could store its output could pick the time to sell the production based on expected price, as wheat farmers and cattle ranchers do. Ausra, of Palo Alto, Calif., is making components for plants to which thermal storage could be added, if the cost were justified by higher prices after sunset or for production that could be realistically promised even if the weather forecast was iffy. Ausra uses Fresnel lenses, which have a short focal length but focus light intensely, to heat miles of black-painted pipe with a fluid inside.

The picture up top is of a system in Spain.  Dozens of mirrored panels reflect sunlight to a central tower that collects all the thermal energy and transfers it to a tank of molten salt below for storage.  It looks like something out of a James Bond movie.  Actually, that would make a pretty cool ending--diabolical villain trapped in the tower and burned alive by the the focused light of the sun.

Giving up oil is one thing, but give up my beef? Oh, man...

The word for the day is "vegetable."

At times, I kind of understand all those PETA fanatics.  I'm not sure I could truly look into the eyes of an animal and then kill it myself for my dinner. We tend to feel such remorse with the death of dogs, cats, and horses, yet somehow the plight of cattle, pigs, and chickens misses our sympathy.

It turns out, though, that not only is the meat industry questionably bad for your conscious, it's bad for the environment, too:

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

The article in The New York Times goes on to explain the other negative effects of increased demand for meat:

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.

Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough.

I'm not sure I'm willing to give up my meat consumption just yet, but this might make me think twice about whether I should order that ribeye the next time I'm out eating.  Maybe I'll just go with the salad once in awhile.

Ha ha, fooled you Axel Foley! There's a reason why I've got a banana peel in my tailpipe...

I vaguely recall hearing about this sort of stuff before. If you remember the end of Back to the Future, Doc Brown throws all sorts of trash from Marty's garbage into the DeLorean to provide energy for the flux capacitor. Seemed crazy that you could use waste as a source of fuel, but I guess it isn't so far fetched. From Wired:

Coskata uses existing gasification technology to convert almost any organic material into synthesis gas, which is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Rather than fermenting that gas or using thermo-chemical catalysts to produce ethanol, Coskata pumps it into a reactor containing bacteria that consume the gas and excrete ethanol. Richard Tobey, Coskata's vice president of engineering, says the process yields 99.7 percent pure ethanol.

Gasification and bacterial conversion are common methods of producing ethanol, but biofuel experts said Coskata is the first to combine them. Doing so, they said, merges the feedstock flexibility of gasification with the relatively low cost of bacterial conversion.

Tobey said Coskata's method generates more ethanol per ton of feedstock than corn-based ethanol and requires far less water, heat and pressure. Those cost savings allow it to turn, say, two bales of hay into five gallons of ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, the company said. Corn-based ethanol costs $1.40 a gallon to produce, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

That organic material could be just about anything, which makes making ethanol quite flexible, depending on your geography:

Making ethanol is one thing, but there's almost no infrastructure in place for distributing it. But the company's method solves that problem because ethanol could be made locally from whatever feedstock is available, Tobey said.

"You're not bound by location," he said. "If you're in Orange County, you can use municipal waste. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, you can use wood waste. Florida has sugar. The Midwest has corn. Each region has been blessed with the ability to grow its own biomass."

I wonder if Leo DiCaprio will finally ditch that ugly car of his for this...

I heard the other day that the Toyota Prius is now outselling the Ford Explorer. I guess this is a good sign that the car-buying public is ready to scrap all that extra cargo room in favor of a more environmentally friendly vehicle. Still, I don't know about you guys, but I find the Prius to be kind of an ugly looking car. Why does a eco-conscious car have to look so goofy? The Tesla Roadster proved you could build a kick-ass electric car that looked sexy. Now, Fisker Automotive is introducing their hybrid called Karma. You can plug it in overnight and go 50 miles strictly on electric charge alone, or rev up the diesel engine and get 100 miles/gallon. 0-60 in 5.8 seconds. Top speed of 125 mph. And if it sort of looks like an Aston Martin DB9 to you, that's because it was designed by the same guy. The downside? Pricetag: $80,000. I guess us normal folk will be stuck with the clown car for awhile.

Maybe I should try and buy some land on the moon now...

Wired Magazine has a short essay about the current battle for Arctic ownership that I've been somewhat obsessed with lately, and it's implications for future territorial disputes on the moon. Little did I know how much those Canucks were trying to flex their muscles up north:

In 2005, the Canadian military launched Exercise Frozen Beaver. Eleven soldiers flew in helicopters to Hans Island, a hunk of rock off the coast of Greenland that's long been claimed by both Denmark and Canada. When they landed on the half-square-mile outcropping, the troops planted a Canadian flag, ripping down the Danish colors that had been flying there since 1984. Once they got home they mailed the confiscated flag to the Danish ambassador in Ottawa.

Of course, they would pick on some puny country like Denmark. Sheesh! But as other countries besides the United States and Russia embark on journeys to the moon, similar skirmishes may begin to occur in the space above us. Even wars in space may not be science fiction either soon:

But what has gone unnoticed amid the international clamor is that the Arctic battle has implications that reach far beyond the top of Earth. The squabbling will be a prelude to — and even set the tone for — eventual sovereignty claims on the moon. At the same time that it was making Arctic claims, Russia announced plans for manned lunar missions by 2025 and a permanent base there by 2032. Japan might beat them to the punch with a 2030 base. Both will be able to stop over and share a glass of Tang with US astronauts, who are supposed to start setting up shop in 2020. China also has lunar aspirations, though officials will say only that they plan to get to the moon sometime after 2020.

Actually, I don't know what all the hub-bub is all about. The U.S. already planted the American flag on it's lunar mission back in the 60's. As far as I'm concerned, that entire orbiting rock is ours. Bwahahahahahahaha!!

If enough plastic collects, can it be considered a land mass, and can we plant a flag on it to claim it as our own country?

I seem to recall a question the wife and I posed to Fandango awhile back: Is it better to ask for paper or plastic at the grocery store? Practically, he said it didn't really make much of a difference. Although technically the plastic bag will take longer to disintegrate, both forms of bags theoretically should end up in a landfill, and neither would decompose within our lifetimes. Unfortunately, a substantial amount of the plastic produced in the world manages to avoid the garbage dumps altogether, and never makes it to that landfill. If you're a piece of plastic that's lucky enough to have escaped to the Pacific Ocean, you'll likely find yourself perpetually floating in the great sink of the Northern Pacific Gyre, a huge collection of circulating bits of trash, driftwood, and the like that seems to be forever trapped due to the natural currents of the water.

So realizing that some of our plastic waste could take a detour to places we never even dreamed of, we got a little more enthusiastic about recycling. In fact, now our trash seems to be miniscule in comparison to the stuff we throw in the recycling bin for pick-up every week. And we felt like we didn't have to make a decision between paper or plastic--we'd just throw both in for recycling. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be quite the utopian answer I was looking for. According to this article in Salon, recycling those plastic bags isn't such an easy task, and actually disrupts what's otherwise a pretty streamlined operation:

Ask John Jurinek, the plant manager at Recycle Central, what's wrong with plastic bags and he has a one-word answer: "Everything." Plastic bags, of which San Franciscans use some 180 million per year, cannot be recycled here. Yet the hopeful arrow symbol emblazoned on the bags no doubt inspires lots of residents to toss their used ones into the blue recycling bin, feeling good that they've done the right thing. But that symbol on all kinds of plastic items by no means guarantees they can be recycled curbside. (The plastic bags collected at the recycling plant are trucked to the regular dump.) By chucking their plastic bags in the recycling, what those well-meaning San Franciscans have done is throw a plastic wrench into the city's grand recycling factory. If you want to recycle a plastic bag it's better to bring it back to the store where you got it.

As the article points out, the best answer seems to be reusing those bags as many times as feasibly possible or switching to canvas bags and bringing those to the store the next time you need something to haul your groceries home. Of course, in a world where its trendy to show just how conscious one is about humanitarian and conservation issues, someone had to make a particular canvas bag the "it" bag to prominently display ones good deed. The "I'm not a plastic bag" bag is so hip, in fact, they sold out in New York City faster than Tickle Me Elmos at Christmas time. The demand is so insane, people from as far away as Hong Kong actually flew to New York in hopes of getting a hold of one of the coveted bags when they were released at Whole Foods Markets across the city--think of how much in the way of carbon emissions was released during that flight alone. Way to fight the fight for global warming...idiots.

Some might say having to dress up in a corn costume would signal the end of your career...

I'm not sure how you feel about Hollywood stars lending their celebrity to motivate political opinion, but you're probably aware that Ben Affleck has been pretty open about his leanings. He was so vocal, in fact, that there was even rumors he had aspirations to run for public office at some point. Most recently, he, along with other stars like his buddy Matt Damon and his wife Jennifer Garner, have lent themselves to promote awareness of Flex Fuels and its upcoming vote in Congress. Here's the first video of the mildly humorous series, Project Phin:



More about the project, and other videos can be found here. Like I've mentioned before, I'm still a bit confused as to what the prevailing alternative fuel will be in the future, whether it be bioethanol, biobutanol, biodiesel, BioWillie, etc., but getting Congress to increase mileage standards for cars to 35 mpg by 2020 sounds like a step in the right direction.

Resurrecting the electric car...

Although I'd still love to get my hands on a Tesla Roadster, it's not exactly what you'd call practical for hauling the family around. Another startup company called ZAP! has invented an answer with their ZAP-X Crossover electric car. The performance specifications don't seem to be that far off the Tesla either: 0-60 times around 4.8 seconds, 350 mile range, and only 10 minutes to fully recharge the battery, all while with the ability to comfortably seat five.

It's a good thing that these cars are electric because Lotus Engineering has had a role in designing both of these cars, meaning lots of driving miles for no purpose other than to have fun. In fact, the Tesla chassis is based on the Lotus Elise, so you know either of these cars would be a blast to drive.

Interestingly, in my last post about the Tesla Roadster awhile back, I thought domestic car makers getting into the electric car game (or getting back into, in the case of GM) might be good for everybody. I guess I wasn't that far off. GM, it turns out, already has plans to roll out four new hybrids in the next year and an electric car with gas backup (the reverse of the Toyota Prius motor mechanism) by 2010 in response to their lackluster sales of conventional vehicles. After having pioneered the field with the EV-1, GM is now playing catchup to make an iconic and green vehicle like the Toyota Prius in an atmosphere where conservation is all the buzz.

Nevermind the ecological impact of conventional fossil fuel burning cars, though. Considering America's fascination with all things fast and powerful, it bewilders me that they didn't jump on the electric car game with more enthusiasm, considering the speed that these new electric cars can move at. It seems that these 0-60 acceleration times that rival Porsches are simply a result of electric cars, in general.

Environmental thoughts in a global economy...

I may reveal my complete ignorance of the terms of the Kyoto Protocol with this post, but I'll share my thoughts anyway since this story made me think about the problems of environmental pollution in a slightly different way.

On my drive home from work, NPR ran a story about the unresolved problems with carbon emissions resulting from steel production. Quite a bit of carbon dioxide comes from the production of steel, and the explosion of high rise buildings in both the developed and developing world has created a huge environmental problem in ways not as obvious as one would think.

China is cornering the market on cheap steel by putting little to no restrictions on the amount of carbon emissions their factories can produce. Meanwhile, American steel mills will likely be forced out of the market due to higher costs of steel production once government environmental restrictions are put in place on domestic factories here in the U.S. The end result is a double whammy to both the U.S. economy and the environment. As China can provide a cheaper product, their factories will continue to boost production, creating even higher carbon emissions despite efforts to curb such pollution here in the U.S., and American factories will essentially be forced out of business.

Thinking in those terms, the Bush administration essentially pulling the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol by not submitting it to Congress for ratification, seems like a smart move if one is trying to preserve the U.S. economic interests both for big business and for the blue collar steel worker. If the end result is even more pollution and a weakened U.S. economy, what did we ever have to gain in ratifying this treaty? Am I missing something here?

Money cures all?

In the checkout line of my local Whole Foods Market are a stack of cards you can buy to purchase carbon emission credits. As I think I posted about awhile back, companies like Whole Foods and the Vail Resorts group have been buying power credits from energy companies utilizing renewable sources to offset the electricity they use from conventional power plants at their local stores and vacation properties. Now, the public can do the same? Worried about how much pollution you're creating by that commute to work or that electricity you're using to watch television at night? No problem. Buy some carbon emission credits, and you've essentially funneled some money to a windmill somewhere to make clean energy for someone else.

It seems, though, that this has become more of a fad, rather than a lifestyle change. As pointed out by a recent article in The New York Times, carbon trading is hip, but may not necessarily be making the impact celebrities would make us think it does:

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

Seems he may have a point. Even during the most recent Academy Awards, Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio proudly announced that the entire extravaganza of the Oscars was totally green, as they had purchased enough carbon emission credits to offset all the carbon production from the electricity used during the festivities. The audience of celebrities and Hollywood executives gave a standing ovation, as if to pat themselves on the back for their wonderful deed for society, and later exiting the awards show in their gas-guzzling limos to go to indulge in the post-Oscar parties that I'm sure were full of environmentally unfriendly party favors, gift bags, imported foods, and unrecycled garbage.

After the Al Gore won an Oscar for his film about the encroaching dangers of global warming, many in the press called him a hypocrite by citing his use of electricity in his large mansion in Tennessee. The more modest ranch house of George W. Bush in Crawford, TX, in comparison, was found to be much more progressive in it's measure to be "green"--kind of odd for a President seemingly in bed with the energy and petroleum industry.

Now I'm not trying to berate Al Gore. Most of you have read about my growing admiration of him for his efforts to increase awareness of global warming. My point, though, is that I think some of the rich in this environmental movement are sending the wrong message. Simply throwing money at the problem isn't necessarily going to change how society views the problem. It only makes those with less money feel that they can't help decrease our production of carbon emissions because they don't have the funds to buy credits like the Hollywood stars that are the so-called role models of the movement. It's a bit sad that many in the public look up to the celebrities for guidance, but that's the reality. And we do have the Ed Begley, Jr.'s running around in Hollywood, but they seem to be looked at as radical freaks. However, perhaps we need the rich to take some more radical, lifestyle changing steps like him.

Anywho, I think I'll go drive down to the Whole Foods that's just a few blocks away from my home now to buy some bottled water that was shipped over from Iceland, and buy a few carbon emission credits to offset all that car exhaust I just blew into the atmosphere in addition to the pollution created by the plane and trucks that had to transport my water over here in the first place.

Maybe all those creepy guys wearing polyester suits in the 70's were on to something...

I think the majority of people are convinced that global warming is real. Even the President is promoting an increase in our use of alternative fuels. Although this is being touted as more of a national security issue to absolve our dependence on foreign oil, I'm beginning to think that even the most conservative of Republicans are seeing the weird fluctuations in the weather this winter, and wondering if perhaps this isn't just a natural cycle of the Earth.

An international committee of world science experts are planning to release an official statement next month saying that global warming may be even more catastrophic than previously estimated. As noted in the story, one UK expert says:

The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary.

So what is a country to do? Well, the current American strategy seems to be a promotion of alternative fuels. However, so far, this doesn't seem to be making much of a dent. Some believe that we should be taking an approach that hits everyone where it hurts to make them really understand the impact our stratospheric production of carbon emissions is making on the environment--a carbon tax. Considering the way that the recent jump in gasoline prices seemed to convince everyone over the past couple of years to drive a little less, I think this may make some sense. After all, the crash of GM and Ford in large part due to the lessening demand for SUVs and pickups, is probably more in part to the high price of gas rather than any actual concern about the environment.

Apparently, most of the rest of the industrialized world is doing their part to reduce carbon emissions. In fact, Sweden is apparently one of the world leaders in environmentally friendly industry practices. What strikes me as odd, though, is that this is the country that has brought us megastores like Ikea and H&M, a furniture store and clothing store, respectively, that pride themselves on providing consumers with cheap disposable products that allow you to just buy new things at low prices as trends change with time. How that jives with the environment, I'll never understand.

So what are we to do? If you believe this story from The New York Times, perhaps we should be wearing more polyester. The energy expenditures for a cotton shirt over its lifetime, when you include the electricity needed to wash and dry it, are much higher when you compare it to an equivalent polyester one. Who knew we could be reducing carbon emissions with just a simple change in our clothing material? Now I won't be sweating it out in polyester any time soon, but it does make you think.