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.
Now having to commute by car to get to my new job I can’t wait for having an electric car. But current prices are way to high for me to afford one. Luckily, this might change quite quickly. To AutoBlog Green :
” U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu estimates that plug-in vehicle battery costs will have dropped 70 percent between 2008 and 2015 and will fall another 58 percent between 2015 and 2020 “
I have already stressed how electric vehicles are critical in our quest for energy efficiency and more sustainability as they consume five time less energy than their counterparts.
To Ecogeek : ” Paris has introduced plans for a city-wide EV car-sharing network that will operate much like its successful Velib bike-sharing system. The car-sharing program will begin on December 5 with 250 EVs available. “
” The system will allow to pick up and drop off the cars at different locations as long as they’re returned to a designated parking spot. The chosen vehicles, called Bluecars, will (..) let drivers know where those parking spaces are. “
” The Bluecars are tiny, compact EVs (which) will have solid-state lithium metal polymer batteries that Pininfarina claims have a lifespan of 200,000 km and require no maintenance. “
Electric cars are great as they consume much less energy and don’t rely on dirty foreign oil to transport people. They promise to be all the rage in the years and decades to come, but to date, we see very few of them.
But what if we transformed today’s cars into electric ones ? This is the question raised by Andrew Revkin’s article on Dot Earth. This got me thinking and I wanted to document myself on that promising matter.
To Gas 2.0 this has been the case many times over already with various kinds of cars such as a Corvette, a roadster or a VW Beetle to name but a few. Continue »
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…
Is this the car of tomorrow ? Gas 2.0 published an article on an electric car that did more than 1,600 kilometers (a thousand miles) with a single charge. The top speed was less than 50 kilometers per hour. As they note :
” The record for longest drive ever in a battery-powered vehicle (no recharge) was broken last weekend by a new, experimental electric vehicle called “Schluckspecht” (“heavy drinker” in colloquial German). “
Of course, at these speeds and with only one passenger, this could be used for the daily commutes of millions of people in hundreds of cities around the world…
With the incoming energy scarcity crisis, we are all due to rediscover one way or another the many advantages of biking as fueling our cars will get more and more expansive. Bikes are great, but a tad dangerous when the night comes.
Luckily for all the bikers of the night, Treehugger have been publishing an article on not one but two great ideas : Revolights – which is currently looking for funds – and AURA, a project by two students of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Both systems put lights into the wheels themselves. I don’t know about you but these projects make me think of the movies Tron. Below you will find the videos of the projects. Continue »
As GreenTech Media notes : ” President Obama and leaders from major automakers today heralded an agreement to raise the average fuel economy for light trucks and cars to 54.5 miles per gallon.” (Today they are at 28.3 MPG.)
-$1.7 trillion. (around 1,200 billion euros) That’s the estimated amount of money that Americans will save from 2011 through 2025 on gas because of the new rules, the White House estimates. “
I believe this is a good thing but I am still not satisfied. Indeed, American cars consume to date much more than their European and Japanese counterparts. Continue »
According to Fast Company : ” Many major cities have seen a decline in driving over the past few years. The reasons for this are varied, but if it’s a continuing trend, it’s going to mean drastic changes for the way we shape our cities. “
” (…) There’s just one caveat: The study only looked at car usage patterns in Europe, North America, and Australia. In rapidly developing countries like India and China, car use is likely to grow for the foreseeable future. “
So perhaps peak car will occur in peak oil in Western countries. But it is most unlikely that on a global level it will be the case… Indeed, there might be billions of cars on the roads in 2050, when there are 600 million today.
An article from Cleantechies pointed out that according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) liquefied coal may become an economically viable fuel option by 2015. Further to this, I left a comment :
” Just as we are thinking about solving the climate/energy equation by ditching coal, some are willing to put it in our car tanks… Shouldn’t we concentrate on REAL alternatives instead ? Ones that actually cut our emissions and pollutions ? ”
” It’s not as if the climate was getting weirder and weirder and it is not as if coal cost half a trillion to the USA each year in externalities… What about peak coal ? “ Continue »
