Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
If traditional / first generation biofuels based on cereals are nowhere near being sustainable, the ones based on algae could be a good or even great solution in the not so far future…
Some entrepreneurs and scientists are sharing this opinion as the New Mexico Business Weekly reports than at least three different companies are working on the very topic in the United States.
Far from being just a solution to keep our car running on liquid fuels, algae could also feed livestocks and so on. Please be sure I will keep you informed on the topic.
To the New York Times green blog : ” The European Union is overestimating the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions achieved through reliance on biofuels as a result of a “serious accounting error”
Here is further evidence that biofuels aren’t really the answer we are looking for. If you have been reading this blog for some time now, you perhaps remember this post : Biofuels aren’t a sustainable solution.
Of course, second generation biofuels might offer us better solutions. But we will have to be checked. Meanwhile, I keep on betting on electric vehicles as they are much more efficient than internal combustion engines…
To TreeHugger : “A measure that would remove roughly $6 billion in annual ethanol subsidies just passed the U.S. Senate, signaling, among other things, a shift in public attitude towards the once-heralded alternative fuel.
” It wasn’t so long ago that corn ethanol was considered a plausible replacement for oil – but that was before further scientific inquiry revealed it to be nearly as environmentally damaging as black gold. ”
” Today, the Senate has cleared the way towards ending the ethanol industry’s generous federal funding.” I hope that other rich nations will understand that biofuels aren’t the sustainable solution they promised to be…
This week was published another new landmark report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This one is focusing on renewable energies as no less than 164 scenario where studied.
You may have read it, one of them notes that energy sources like solar, wind and biomass could answer up to 77 % of our needs by the middle of this century. This is not surprising as the WWF even believes they could answer ALL of them.
Much has been said about this on countless websites and newspapers such as the New York Times but I would like to point out a few things. Continue »
Cleantechnica got another interesting article, this time on what the past ten years meant to cleantech and what the next ten years could bring. The occasion is given by Clean Edge’s market research.
” With growth rates like seen in the telephone industry (…) during comparable revolutions, clean energy options like solar and wind have been growing tremendously in recent years.“
Indeed, renewable energies like solar and wind have huge potentials as we have seen previously. Today’s article is due to give us more figures… Continue »
The State of the Union speech given yesterday by President Barack Obama might well stay in the History books like John Fitzgerald Kennedy moon shot speech that sent Americans on the moon in less than a decade.
Indeed President Obama asked for 80% of America’s electricity from ‘clean energy’ by 2035 (including clean coal and natural gas, nobody’s perfect) and for more than one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
Even more, he called for the suppression of the billions worth of subsidies to Big Oil companies. Let’s hope Congress will give him the means to do all this. Continue »
I have been committed since January 2007 to bring you each month a selection of the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change and the world energy sector.
However, I don’t blog as much as I would like to and generally write around 25 posts per month. But many more news are worth reading. This is why I use Twitter to share more news that are worth your time.
I believe it offers a good complement to this website. So if you are on Twitter and like this selection, don’t hesitate to start following me. Continue »
I previously noted that biofuels are more a problem than a solution. It seems I was right as to the Institute for European Environmental Policy, the European Union biofuel expansion plans are worse than burning fossil fuels.
As TreeHugger notes: “ Over the next decade the extra biofuels used in the EU will be on average 81-176% worse for the climate than fossil fuels. “ Talk about a solution…
Why are we pushing forward a solution that will lead million people more to starvation AND increase greenhouse gases emissions ? This is not really sustainable development… Continue »
We have heard that before : ” Wind power is far too unreliable ” or ” Nuclear power isn’t a safe solution “. Yet the reality is most of the times far from these myths. Popular Mechanics published a long article debunking energy myths.
I wrote about some of them such as clean coal that won’t clean up our air or biofuels that won’t cure our addiction to oil or don’t even represent an alternative to oil. Some others, like algae are quite new topics here.
After debunking all these myths, this long article ends with a true fact that I have been hammering here since the beginning of this blog : ” Energy saved, it turns out, is the cheapest new source. “
At first I wasn’t sure even if I had huge doubts. But now this is a certainty as I came accross three articles on how biofuels production in the United States, Brazil and Europe is a threat to our societies and our environment.
In Brazil, biofuels production are a danger to the Amazon rainforest as farmers are willing to cut trees to plant more and thus earn more. In America, 25 percent of the cereals grown are fed to cars.
This is enough to feed no less than 350 million people. As over a billion people are still starving around the globe I don’t call that a sustainable solution. Continue »
