A new study suggests bioelectricity, made from biomass, is more a more efficient and environmentally friendly way to power transportation than using straight up biofuels like ethanol in the fuel tank.
Transparent solar cells!!! Need I say more? These flexible plastic cells can be used to make power generating windows, among other things, and can be tinted in different colors!
Researchers have developed a way of reducing methane gas from cattle production by 25% - a highly scientific dietary formula that balances starch, sugar, cellulose, ash, fat and other elements of feed. Feeding cows grass, their natural diet, is of course out of the question.
Global warming claims another victim - the Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia. The 18,000 year-old glacier began melting in the 80s and has now completely, officially and irreversibly disappeared.
Also under threat is the original Orchard of Eden. The ancient forests of Central Asia, the birthplace of most modern fruit and nut tree varieties, are critically endangered. In the past 50 years, 90% of those wild forests have been destroyed.
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I really like the bioelectricity idea for many reasons:
1) It does not need specialised crops such as corns and grains that generate high starches and sugars and need to be kept weed free etc. Grow switchgrass, bamboo, etc etc. It is also far easier to match the plants to local conditions: low/high rainfall, poor soils,...
2)Weeds are not a problem: just chuck those in too! That means it is easier to make an organic system with biodiversity to help feed bees etc.
The corn-ethanol route is largely there because corn growers have lobbied the system to death. They have no interest in generating ethanol or solving energy issues. All they really care about is driving up consumption, and thus price, of corn.
Transparent solar cells on windows is a good idea if they can be made cheap enough. To become viable for widespread uptake, the primary concern is $/W.
Until very recently the only significant goal that solar cell manufacturers were chasing was efficiency - W/area. That's a great goal for aerospace where getting a lot of power out of a small and light device is important. It's great to show off this technology by doing solar racing in cars with two hundred thousand dollars of solar cells on them, but this does nothing useful to provide power on earth.
Efficiency is not nearly as important for rooftop power. $/W is the only important factor. Make them cheap and make roofing material out of them. That way you can make your whole roof out of the stuff. If you have 1000sq foot of roof (== 100 sq metres) you don't need very high performance, percentage wise, to be getting considerable power output.
Tackling methane from cattle is just a smoke screen and shows what happens when people tackle the perceived problem rather than the true problem. If you look at the carbon footprint of a pound of beef then most of it is incurred in producing the feed - before it even gets to the cow - yet there is a perception amongst many that the farting and burping causes the problem. Reduce the farting and burping by 25% and you're only addressing 25% of a tiny part of the whole footprint. Not enough that you'll see any difference, but it causes enough confusion and dis-information that consumers now think they're getting low carbon meat.
The average person out there thinks that vegetarians fart more, and thus create more carbon footprint, than a meat eater. The truth is very different mainly because a vegetarian diet can be derived from less than 10% of the land that is required to sustain a meat-rich diet.
Written in May 2009