The hard reality is that the minority of us who happened to have been born in a few powerful countries squandered half a billion years of stored photosynthesis to give ourselves a brief period of spectacular economic abundance, and by doing so, foreclosed the chance that anybody else would enjoy that same abundance in the future… All the extraordinary things our species has done with fossil fuels over the last three hundred years are functions, in effect, of the difference in chemical potential energy between a barrel of oil and a cloud of smoke… The great majority will make themselves believe in zero point energy and evil space lizards and any other absurdity you care to name, rather than gulp and take a deep breath and admit that the prosperity we’ve enjoyed for the last three centuries was bought at our grandchildren’s expense.

On the other hand, we may get ourselves and our descendants out of jail if the investment of this endowment in education and research allows us to discover a new process to capture energy before we run out of the wherewithal to roll it out. Looks like it will be down to the wire, and come from discoveries in biology rather than chemistry or physics.

You’ve got to hand it to Venter. After capturing the lead role in sequencing the human genome (one sample turned out to be his own) he spends a few years sailing around the world taking water samples and sequencing the unknown organisms within them. Now he has ExxonMobil backing his latest venture to engineer a fuel-producing algae.

ExxonMobil announced a commitment to invest $300 million over five to six years in Synthetic Genomics, which Craig Venter founded and now leads as CEO, and to spend an additional $300 million on a complementary internal algae program. The push is to take advantage of algae’s ability to efficiently transform sunlight into lipids that can be relatively easily converted into diesel, gasoline, and possibly even advanced hydrocarbons used to manufacture plastics, chemicals, and other products. By the barrel, algae fuel provides three to four units of energy for every unit used to make it — a ratio that approaches petroleum’s [falling] 5-to-1 level of efficiency… Venter’s company has been developing strains of bioengineered algae that ramp up the output of lipids and can in some cases produce hydrocarbons directly… A study in 2004 at the University of New Hampshire concluded that 30 million acres–a space the size of South Carolina–would be required to grow enough algae to satisfy U.S. transportation needs…

Another new algae to biofuel process – consuming CO2 to produce fuel; too good to be true?

Joule Biotechnologies grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed photobioreactors. The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline). The organisms excrete the fuel, which can then be collected using conventional chemical-separation technologies… the new process, because of its high yields, could supply all of the country’s transportation fuel from an area the size of the Texas panhandle… The company plans to build a pilot-scale plant in the southwestern U.S. early next year, and it expects to produce ethanol on a commercial scale by the end of 2010. Large-scale demonstration of hydrocarbon-fuels production would follow in 2011… While algae typically produce oils that have to be refined into fuels, Joule’s microorganisms produce fuel directly–either ethanol or hydrocarbons. And while oil is harvested from algae by collecting and processing the organisms, Joule’s organisms excrete the fuel continuously, which could make harvesting the fuel cheaper…

CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising about 25% faster than the IPCC predicted only 2 years ago, and are on track to reach 450 ppm by 2040 instead of 2100; but the US Chamber of Commerce wants to put global warming science on trial.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change… complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect… to fend off potential emissions regulations by undercutting the scientific consensus over climate change. If the EPA denies the request, as expected, the chamber plans to take the fight to federal court… In the coming weeks, the EPA is set to formally declare that the heat-trapping gases scientists blame for climate change endanger human health, and are thus subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act… “The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable,” said a recent letter to world leaders by the heads of the top science agencies in 13 of the world’s largest countries, including the head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the economist who came up with cap-and-trade in the 1960s, Thomas Crocker, said, “I’m skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon.” Crocker said he favors imposing a firm tax on emissions that would be easier to enforce.

Australia’s climate plan was defeated in the Senate where minority parties hold the balance of power. It’s still likely to pass in November.

Labor’s planned Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) would have reduced Australia’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 5% of 2000 levels by 2020, or 25% of 2000 levels if other major developed countries agreed to similar cuts. Australia is the biggest per-capita emitter in the developed world, largely because of the country’s heavy reliance on coal-generated power.

This is the year to buy solar panels, as polysilicon prices drop punishing those that bought forward when prices quadrupled at $145 oil and countries (eg. Spain) pull their subsidies in the face of the credit crunch.

Panel prices have fallen about 40 percent since the middle of last year… Until recently, panel makers had been constrained by limited production of polysilicon, which goes into most types of panels. But more factories making the material have opened, as have more plants churning out the panels themselves — especially in China… At the same time, once-roaring global demand for solar panels has slowed, particularly in Europe… Spain slashed its generous subsidy for the panels last year…

Some concern about China calling for a ban on rare earth exports, resources which they almost entirely control and which are vital to many high-tech products though their mining is environmentally damaging..

A draft report by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs. China mines over 95% of the world’s rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia… The rare earth family are hard to find, and harder to extract… Each Toyota Prius uses 25 pounds of rare earth elements…

The European Union has begun a three-year process to phase out the use of traditional incandescent light bulbs. Starting today, old standard frosted light bulbs and clear bulbs of 100 watts and more will no longer be manufactured or imported into the EU. The EU estimates the switch from incandescent bulbs to more efficient ones will bring energy savings of 25 percent to 75 percent compared to the traditional bulbs.

Hot, dry geothermal is struggling to scale to commercial profitability.

Hot dry rock found deep underground is one of the most abundant potential sources of clean energy. Drilling holes into the rock, fracturing it, and pumping water through it to extract the heat, and then using that heat to generate electricity, could supply the world’s energy needs many times over… In practice, however, harvesting that energy is proving a challenge, in part because developers have located the first projects in earthquake prone regions…

Gunnar Grecksch, a geophysicist and hot-rock fracturing expert at the Leibniz Institute for Applied Geosciences in Hanover, Germany, says follow-on efforts in the U.K. and Japan failed for the same reason: the fracturing of the rocks was never sufficient. “Flow resistance is still the key problem,” he says. “In none of these projects were the flow rates in the range you need for a commercial system.”

The Economist rounds up the tradeoffs in the approaches to electric cars.

One is to accept the range limit and design small, thrifty vehicles specialised for city use. This has the virtue of simplicity and the vice of inflexibility. The second is to add a petrol-driven generator known as a “range extender”. This complicates the mechanics, but provides the driver with a security blanket, for he knows he will never be stranded if he can find a petrol station. The third answer is to keep the car all-battery, but to introduce a network of battery-exchange stations similar to the existing network of petrol stations, so that someone who is running out of juice can pull in, swap over and pull out.

According to Bosch’s calculations, a conventional internal-combustion-engined car can travel 1.5-2.5km on a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy. A hybrid with a combined electric and diesel engine would go up to 3.2km. But a battery-powered car can travel 6.5km.

GM is claiming 230mpg in city driving for the Chevy Volt. The calculation apparently doesn’t count the energy used to charge the batteries overnight, so on this basis any fully electric car gets infinite mpg.

The Volt, which will be introduced late next year, is designed to run for 40 miles from a single charge of a lithium-ion battery pack. After the battery is partly depleted, a small combustion engine is designed to kick in to recharge the battery and power the vehicle… The Volt is designed to be recharged at a standard electric outlet… that would reduce the cost of the first 40 miles of driving for some Americans to as little as 40 cents, the cost of recharging the car overnight in a garage…

Germany proposed spending 500 million euros in a program to encourage electric autos.

Volkswagen says it hopes to put its first electric cars on the market in 2013. Daimler is working with Tesla Motors of California on better battery and electric drive systems. Daimler and the utility RWE plan to unveil an electric car and charging station test in Berlin this year.

Chinese auto company BYD, part-owned by investor Warren Buffet, plans to bring an all-electric sedan in small numbers to the U.S. next year.

BYD plans to offer a few hundred of one of its most advanced cars in the U.S., the five-seat e6, which takes seven to nine hours to fully charge and has a 250-mile range…

According to the United Nations, by 2020 water use is expected to increase by 40% to support the food requirements of a worldwide population that will grow from 6.7 billion people to 7.5 billion people. The U.N. estimate is that 1.8 billion people will be living in regions with extreme water scarcity… We’ll be able to produce oil and water for decades, but it will cost significantly more to do so. This will result in much higher commodity prices as farming requires prodigious amounts of oil and water… Brazil, Russia, and Canada also have the greatest amount of renewable freshwater…

Bioethanol from corn turns out to be an inefficient way to convert fresh water to ethanol.

Environmental Science & Technology are reporting that production of bioethanol — often regarded as the clean-burning energy source of the future — may consume up to three times more water than previously thought… Previous studies estimated that a gallon of corn-based bioethanol requires the use of 263 to 784 gallons of water from the farm to the fuel pump.

The principle of the process… hygroscopic brine – saline solution which absorbs moisture – runs down a tower-shaped unit and absorbs water from the air. It is then sucked into a tank a few meters off the ground in which a vacuum prevails. Energy from solar collectors heats up the brine, which is diluted by the water it has absorbed. Because of the vacuum, the boiling point of the liquid is lower than it would be under normal atmospheric pressure… The evaporated, non-saline water is condensed and runs down through a completely filled tube in a controlled manner. The gravity of this water column continuously produces the vacuum and so a vacuum pump is not needed. The reconcentrated brine runs down the tower surface again to absorb moisture from the air.

The annual Manchester Summit has newly flagged the 20 best projects directed at ameliorating global warming. They range from the incremental to the bizarre (my ranking)…

• coaching consumers on lifestyle changes to reduce carbon footprint
• changing economic goal from GDP to some better measure of welfare
• “rocket” stoves for 3rd world cut timber use, pollution, cooking time
• universal access to family planning services
• solar panel rollout on domestic and commercial roofs
• “carbon mortgages” to finance addition of renewable power to homes
• capturing investor interest by issuing semi-government “energy bonds”
• “hot dry rock” geothermal produce 24/7 renewable base load
• marine current turbines produce cyclical but predictable base load
• ceramic fuel cells to produce domestic heat and electricity from natural gas
• grazing animals nomadically allowing grassland to regenerate
• leasing low-emission cars like the RiverSimple hydrogen vehicle
• “oxyfuel” and co-fired wood and coal for carbon-negative power plants
• converting waste to charcoal – “biochar” – and then burying it
• mirror arrays concentrating solar; 140km squared equals EU power needs
• sailing ships spraying mist (pdf) to seed stratocumulus clouds at sea
• a liquid-fuel thorium reactor industry – safer and cleaner than uranium
• artificial photosynthesis to turn CO2 to methanol liquid fuel using algae
• mid-ocean harvesting and digestion of kelp forests
• dumping lime into oceans to absorb more CO2

CNET reports on a push for a super-conducting grid across the USA to distribute new power sources from remote areas, like wind farms in the Oklahoma panhandle, to urban centres.

Direct current superconductor cables are also far more efficient because there is minimal loss during transmission–only three percent. Losses today during transmission and distribution can be more than 10 percent of the energy generated (pdf)… there are few installations of superconductor cables now in the U.S. for relatively short distances, a sign that utilities are more comfortable with using alternatives to aluminum or copper lines. But a long-haul direct current superconductor line is a big step… the cables would be placed underground, as gas pipelines are, and have nitrogen cooling stations every seven or eight miles…

A new solar-powered aircraft able to stay aloft through the night is nearing flight tests in Europe.

After further refinements on the ground, the Solar Impulse is scheduled to make its first test flights by the end of 2009. The first flight will see the plane launch from its current home at the Dubendorf airport; the second will see it take off from the Payerne air base less than two hours away… The aircraft will then take its first night test flight in 2010 to see if it can stay in the air for a 36-hour day-night-day cycle running solely on battery power without any fuel.

2008 was the first year that new power generation investment in renewables was greater than investment in fossil-fueled technologies…

$140-billion went into renewables worldwide in 2008, while $110-billion went into fossil fuels.

The winner of this year’s US high school science prize managed to isolate a strain of yeast bacteria that is remarkably efficient at consuming plastic.

Starting with a common yeast solution, feeding the yeast bits of plastic and selecting for those that munched a little, over time a strain was developed that degrades 40% of the plastic in only 6 weeks.

This is not good news. via SAR.

Reconstruction of sea levels over the past half-million years, based on Antarctic ice core records, implies that even if we were able to stop putting CO2 in the air today – and we’re not – we are already committed to a sea level rise of about 25 meters (80 feet). This estimate agrees with predictions based on data from the Middle Pliocene, 3.5 million years ago when CO2 levels were at today’s level.

Yucca Mountain was always a political, not a technical, solution; but it appears that science is having a come-back.

The area [Yucca] is seismically and volcanically active. More significantly, the repository would have an oxidizing environment — meaning materials there would be exposed to free oxygen in the air. Neither spent nuclear fuel nor canister materials are stable in such an environment in the presence of water… There’s no historical example showing that a lack of a plan for nuclear waste will halt the progress of nuclear energy… Within the next five years, almost every nuclear power plant will have dry-cask storage: the waste will be moved from storage pools to outdoor concrete-and-steel casks inside plant security perimeters. As an interim solution, that’s quite safe. But eventually the casks will corrode and break down and release radioactive material into the environment, though it will probably take hundreds of years. That’s why we need geological storage… We should set aside something on the order of a few decades to get this right. It will cost billions, but that’s part of the price of nuclear power.

Coda Automotive, a startup based in Santa Monica, CA, is attempting to be one of the first companies to sell a highway-capable electric sedan to the general public in the United States.

The car will have a range of 100 miles and will cost $45,000, although federal and state government incentives will bring the cost down to the mid-$30,000 range… The car will be built by the Chinese automaker Hafei, which makes about 200,000 vehicles a year. The electric sedan is a version of one that Hafei already makes, but it’s modified to use an electric motor and batteries instead of a gas engine… Coda hopes to distinguish itself with its battery system, which it developed in cooperation with Tianjin Lishen, a major lithium-ion battery maker based in China, and other companies that specialize in different aspects of the battery system, such as the electronic controls… Coda’s first battery packs will store about 34 kilowatt-hours of electricity and will be made up of 728 battery cells with lithium iron phosphate battery electrodes, which are known to be safer than conventional lithium-ion electrodes…

What auto recession? Prius remains oversubscribed, but the “new” GM will re-launch the Camaro.

The Prius plant has brought back overtime — a rarity these days, given Japan’s weak economy — and recruited workers from Toyota factories across the country… The company sold 110,000 Priuses in Japan in May — and there is a waiting list of several months… Toyota devotes three manufacturing lines in Japan to the Prius — two at Tsutsumi, and another at a subsidiary assembler. At full capacity, the two plants are able to make about 50,000 Prius cars a month, Toyota executives say, about 1.5 times the pace needed to meet its global sales target of 400,000 units…

Production is falling away quite rapidly. The last time production was at this level the suppliers were getting about half as much for it – and exporting a lot more of it.

In the USA, miles driven are down dramatically.

Global electricity consumption is down for the first time ever.

Unfortunately, investment in renewables has been choked off by the credit crisis.

And even in a moderate downturn, the IEA is forecasting demand in India, China and the Middle East growing while that in Europe, Japan and the US continues to fall.

Update 26 Jun 09

Some good charts from Kedrosky.

The world’s third-largest economy will increase its wind power capacity by fivefold to 100,000 megawatts by 2020… five megawatts is sufficient to power about 1,000 households in China on average…

Healthy competition on fuel standards (and autos).

Chinese officials have drafted automotive fuel economy standards that are even more stringent than those outlined by President Obama… The new plan would require automakers in China to improve fuel economy by an additional 18 percent by 2015… The average fuel economy of family vehicles in China is already higher than in the United States, mainly because cars in China tend to be considerably smaller… China was self-sufficient in oil until 1995, but soaring demand means that China now imports nearly three-fifths of its oil, much of it from potentially unstable countries along sea lanes controlled by the United States Navy.

Charging your devices with motion.

The nPower PEG (Personal Energy Generator) from a company called Tremont Electric harnesses personal kinetic energy as a person walks, transferring it into electricity to the portable electronic device plugged into it. Using this method, the PEG can charge the average portable device up to 80 percent in about an hour. The PEG is 9 inches by 1.5 inches, weighs about 9 ounces… has a standard USB 2.0 output, is compatible with 90 percent of portable electronic devices… carrying the PEG in a backpack, purse, or briefcase while walking provides the opportunity to harvest enough kinetic energy for the electricity.

Declines in energy investment will bite later, says IEA.

Declines in investment across industries for 2009:

• Global upstream oil and gas investment budgets down at least 21%
• Renewables down 38%
• Coal down 40%

Energy demand will rise 44% by 2030, with 70% of the demand increase coming from developing countries.

Investment question: what is the most resource-intensive to extract, yet least substitutable industrial commodity? (via SAR)

Oil, natural gas, and coal provide 86 percent of the world’s energy… At some point the amount of energy needed to bring low-grade deposits of oil, natural gas and coal to the surface and process and transport them will be more than the energy we get from these resources. At that point they will cease to be energy sources, and the vast, remaining ultra-low-grade deposits of these fuels will be useless to us except perhaps as feedstocks for chemicals… the total energy available to world society could begin to decline making resource extraction of all types progressively more expensive and difficult… If peaks in fossil fuel production are nearing, either society will have to learn to get along without many of its critical resources, or it will have to make the transition to alternative energy swiftly as part of an engineering and planning feat that would be unparalleled in human history.

More climate modelling, more bad news.

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees…

Not such a bad sign.

International Energy Agency is forecasting a 3.5% drop in electricity demand this year. Russia’s demand is set to drop 10%, OECD countries nearly 5% and China about 2%. This is the first decline ever in global electricity supply.

Good interactive graphic on power generation and distribution in the US.

A US military thinktank has concluded (74pp pdf) that energy shortage is the most pressing security problem, and recommends conserving liquid fuels for the use of aircraft and the military.

The U.S. consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil production, yet controls less than 3 percent of an increasingly tight supply… The DoD is the nation’s single largest consumer of energy…

Krugman points out the China emission problem.

China’s emissions, which come largely from its coal-burning electricity plants, doubled between 1996 and 2006… China now emits more carbon dioxide than the United States, even though its G.D.P. is only about half as large (and the United States, in turn, is an emissions hog compared with Europe or Japan)… It is unfair to expect China to live within constraints that we didn’t have to face when our own economy was on its way up… Historical injustice aside, the Chinese also insisted that they should not be held responsible for the greenhouse gases they emit when producing goods for foreign consumers. But they refused to accept the logical implication of this view — that the burden should fall on those foreign consumers instead, that shoppers who buy Chinese products should pay a “carbon tariff” that reflects the emissions associated with those goods’ production.

And comes out in favour of cap-and-trade, preferring the good to the perfect.

The legislation now on the table isn’t the bill we’d ideally want, but it’s the bill we can get — and it’s vastly better than no bill at all… In practice, cap and trade has some major advantages [over a carbon tax], especially for achieving effective international cooperation… in the first years of the program’s operation more than a third of the allocation of emission permits would be handed over at no charge to the power industry… Even when polluters get free permits, they still have an incentive to reduce their emissions, so that they can sell their excess permits to someone else… But handing out emission permits does, in effect, transfer wealth from taxpayers to industry.

The NYT reports that LED bulbs and fixtures dominated the lighting industry’s annual trade show.

Manufacturers displayed LEDs incorporated into large warehouse, garage and street-lighting fixtures, flexible light ribbons, and replacements for the halogen reflector lamps used in kitchens and offices… Osram, Lighting Science and Philips will introduce 25,000-hour LED lamps that look like traditional bulbs but use just 8 watts of electricity to produce the same amount of light as a 40-watt bulb… they will last 25,000 hours instead of 1,500 for an incandescent bulb… Cree, a leading maker of LEDs, showed a new version of its LED ceiling fixture that uses 6.5 watts, compared with 11 watts for last year’s model, to create the light of a standard 65-watt lamp.

Cyclical slump in photovoltaics, with prices down 50% to $2/watt.

World-wide shipments of solar cells to companies that install rooftop solar-power systems and build fields of solar panels for commercial energy production grew 85% to almost 6,000 megawatts in 2008, according to research firm Collins Stewart LLC. This year shipments are expected to fall to 5,575 megawatts. First-quarter sales at SunPower Corp. fell 22%, and the California solar-cell producer cut its revenue forecast for 2009 by 17%. Last month, Taiwan’s Motech Industries reported its worst quarter since 2003 with revenues down 15% and net income down 80% to $1.4 million.

Expected output from one of these is 20 million kilo watt-hours per year, enough for 5,000+ (European) households. High of the hub is 442 feet (135m), the rotor diameter 416 feet (127m), tower base diameter 48 feet (14,5m).

PG&E has agreed to buy energy from Solaren, a venture hoping to launch power satellites by 2016. I talked about the solar from space idea a while back.

San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric said it was seeking approval from state regulators for an agreement to purchase power over a 15-year period from Solaren Corp., an 8-year-old company based in Manhattan Beach, Calif… Solaren would generate the power using solar panels in Earth orbit and convert it to radio-frequency transmissions that would be beamed down to a receiving station in Fresno…

It’s not often you get something useful from the mainstream media, but Time’s Top 10 Ideas issue was such.

• Jobs are the New Assets – a renewed focus on human capital…
• Recycling the Suburbs – they are indeed a write-off…
• The New Calvinism – religion about wealth…
• Reinstating the Interstate – another write-off…
• Amortality – their take is endless adolescence eg. Madonna, mine is the imminent arrival of practical immortality…
• Africa as Business Destination – the final frontier…
• The Rent-a-Country – long term sovereign agricultural leases…
• Biobanks – so your tissue samples are safe…
• Survival Stores – “low-cost, long-lasting durable goods”, who would have thought it…
• Ecological Intelligence – externality accounting…

The question of what an economy that is not relying on liquidating it’s resource endowment to survive would look like is asked at the LA Times.

The human population will consume at least twice as much food in 2050 as in 1995. Energy consumption will rise by approximately 76% between 2000 and 2030. The urban population will rise from 3.3 billion in 2007 to 5 billion in 2030 and further on to 6.4 billion in 2050. There will be an estimated 9.15 billion people on Earth in 2050, compared with 6.7 billion in early 2009, and they will all want to live decent lives… What does it mean to build an economy on sound ecological principles? It means that all forms of business and other human activity will be directed toward a truly cyclical use of resources, zero carbon emissions, and restoration and reinvestment in natural capital.

Historically a ton of ammonia cost about eighty bushels of wheat; $2.25 wheat, $200 ammonia, and this ratio held for forty years. Two years ago that long standing relationship broke down. Today wheat is $4.50 and ammonia is $1,000 – over two hundred bushels of wheat are required to purchase a ton of ammonia… The first effect of this has been a reduction in fertilization on wheat planted. Instead of 14% protein we’ll be seeing crops with protein closer to the 8% range. Instead of the seventy bushels per acre achieved with full fertilization we’ll see yields sliding off towards the twenty five bushels per acre unfertilized wheat yielded…

An interesting interview with Vinod Khosla, IT billionaire cum green tech VC.

There are “only” four main problems that need solving, according to Khosla — oil, coal, cement and steel. Between them they are responsible for 75% of greenhouse-gas emissions… Bio-fuels are the single most important tool we have so far for alleviating climate change…

Shai Agassi’s Better Place may be one of the most important initiatives in the world right now. The former SAP executive is installing a clean-energy electric-auto network world-wide, beginning in Israel, then Denmark, then Hawaii, then Australia. Pogue interviews (read the whole thing):

We started from the infrastructure. We came up with an electric car that would have two features that nobody had before. 1) The battery is removable. So if you wanted to go a long distance, you could switch your battery instead of waiting for it to charge for a very long time… And 2) It was cheaper than gasoline car, not more expensive. Because you didn’t buy the battery. You paid just for the miles and for the car… We sell miles, the way that AT&T sells you minutes… We buy batteries and clean electrons–we only buy electrons that come from renewable sources–and we translate that into miles.

The Economist points out that the introduction of electric bikes may well have more of a climate impact than electric cars.

an electric bicyle wins out handsomely in the emission competition with a petrol-driven car, as it is 15-20 times more efficient. Moreover, making an electric bicycle uses far less energy than making an electric car… Some 21m electric bicycles were sold in China in 2008… The figure has doubled since 2005. In Shanghai alone there are an estimated 1m electric bicycles. Some 800,000 are also sold each year in South East Asia… Typically, an electric bike can run for 30-50 kilometres (20-30 miles) between charges. Recharging a battery can take 5-8 hours, but costs only a few cents a day…

Piaggio Group Americas, a subsidiary of the Italian manufacturer known for the Vespa, has a highway legal plug-in hybrid scooter in the works that could be available in the U.S. for early 2010… The MP3 500 scooter in plug-in hybrid version will get about 140 mpg, have a range of 40 miles per charge when running on electric power alone, and be priced between $8,000 and $9,000…

I’ve noticed that the world’s scientists have gone curiously quiet lately, giving up on making any meaningful difference and presumably moving to higher ground.

Nicholas Stern, the economist who warned the government of the high cost of climate change… told a meeting of climate change scientists in Copenhagen that the effects of global warming would be worse than he predicted in his seminal 2006 report on the economics of the problem… many climate experts and officials say that the European target of limiting world temperature rise to 2C above pre-industrial levels is no longer realistic…

Atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gas are hitting new highs, with no sign yet that the world economic downturn is curbing industrial emissions… Levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities, rose to 392 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere in Svalbard in December, a rise of 2-3 ppm from the same time a year earlier… Levels of carbon dioxide are around the highest in at least 800,000 years, and up by about a third since the Industrial Revolution.

…sea levels appear to be rising almost twice as rapidly as had been forecast by the United Nations just two years ago… The reason for the rapid change in the predicted rise in sea levels is a rapid increase in the information available… scientists now reckon that sea levels will rise by between 50cm and 100cm by 2100…

World fish production hit 143.6m tonnes in 2006, the highest since records began in 1950, according to a new biannual report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Just over 110m tonnes was eaten by people, with the rest used as animal feed or for other commercial uses. Some 47% of fish on dinner plates is now farmed, and this is likely to increase as the amount caught in the wild levels off. The catch in 2006 from marine and inland waters fell to 92m tonnes from 94.2m the previous year. China is the world’s biggest producer in both categories, landing 17.1m tonnes of fish from its waters, and farming 34.4m tonnes.

In the ‘dog barks’ department, it turns out that the big-oil anti-climate change lobby knew all along that they were lying about the science. Their own advisors had told them so.

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming… a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted. “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

One less disaster to worry about. Methane releases during other warming episodes were not from clathrates, but from wetlands, thus not as susceptible to a rapid warming-release feedback loop.

Ice core research has revealed that a vast, potential source of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, is more stable in a warming world than previously thought… Massive quantities of methane are locked away in permafrost and in the ocean floors as methane clathrate – an ice-like material which can return to gas if temperatures increase or pressures drop. Just a 10 per cent release of methane would have the equivalent impact on global warming of a ten-fold increase in carbon dioxide concentration…