That’s politics for you. Always moving too slowly.

President Bush has called for fuel consumption to be cut by 20% over the next 10 years. Sounds great, and overall it’s a great idea, but his concepts for implementation are not ideal.

Using ethanol as fuel has its disadvantages. It doesn’t really do much for fuel efficiency, and making it can have an impact on other agriculture. There’s only so much that can be grown, after all. This could mean higher prices at the grocery store.

Ethanol is not very competitive. It produces less energy than gasoline and requires a subsidy to keep the prices down. Worse, to grow enough corn to meet the demand this would create would require more fertilizer, which is petroleum based. Kind of funny that it can take more petroleum to grow corn for ethanol than the ethanol would replace.

If ethanol must be produced there are better crops for it that produce far more fuel. If we are to go down this path, I hope we are sane enough to pick the right crops for the job.

Technorati Tags: ethanol, President Bush, fuel, biofuel

With the coming of the new year come new thoughts. An article about liquid coal on MSN certainly caught my attention.

Now, thoughts of coal don’t exactly bring environmentally friendly to mind. Instead it brings up pictures of black smoke and hideous pollution as coal is burned. But apparently this isn’t the case when it comes to the plans for using liquid coal in cars.

The trick is that they can catch the harmful CO2 produced from burning the liquid coal. I’m not exactly sure how this is done in cars, but it sounds like they’ve done some work with this sort of technology in South Africa, which uses liquid coal more than we do here in the U.S. Done correctly it is about 30% less polluting than gasoline. Pretty neat stuff.

Some say this technology could be used to fill all our transportation fuel needs. Hard to say if that’s truth or hype, but a rather interesting notion. Continue reading →

What a great move! The EPA finally granted California the right to require that the emissions of smaller engines, such as lawnmowers. New small engines sold in California will have to be sold with a catalytic converter starting January 1.

It doesn’t surprise me that these engines are highly polluting. I don’t own a lawnmower myself, as we are renting a house and the landlord hired someone to take care of that. I’m hoping to just have a push lawnmower when we do have our own. My husband has used that kind before and doesn’t feel it’s that bad.

The new standards will cut emissions by around 40%. That’s pretty significant, especially when you hear that lawnmower emissions are estimated to cause about 7% of California’s mobile source smog emissions. Continue reading →