Blogs & Ecology

When you say the words "green car," what comes to mind? Prius first, I suspect. One of the numerous electric cars popping up these days. And perhaps a hydrogen car. So would you be surprised to hear that the winner of last week's Green Car of the Year award at the LA Auto Show was...a diesel? Volkswagen's Jetta TDI.

Image from post406

Before TreeHugger know-it-alls Mike and Matt came along with their more sophisticated understanding of these issues, I spent four years dissing the idea of hydrogen cars or the long-term sustainability of any kind of private vehicle when they need a petroleum powered infrastructure. Nevertheless when I was invited to drive a GM hydrogen fuelled, fuel cell powered electric SUV I couldn't pass it up, and engineer Dick Kauling's boyish enthusiasm for the subject was overwhelming.

Environment Month 2008 has seen a variety of festivals around the globe, and Japan was not to be left behind. This weekend saw the second annual Ecolife Fair burst into life with a veritable smorgasboard of all things environmental, not to mention a liberal helping of local celebrities, artists and musicians.

The Ecolife Fair 2008 was held at Yoyogi Park and NHK TV Studios in Tokyo, Japan. With sponsors such as NHK, Japan's largest television network, and Team Minus 6%, an organization founded by the Japanese government and environmental NPOs to promote the 6% CO2 emissions reduction goal established under the Kyoto Protocol, the event was guaranteed success.

It sounds tasty, but what "crispy noodles" is referring to here is (unfortunately) not a delicious dish -- but a new material that could both help cut carbon dioxide emissions and power the next generation of hydrogen vehicles. Developed by a team of chemists at the University of Manchester, this polymer, whose structure resembles that of crispy noodles, is currently being explored as a potential sequestration device to be installed on coal-fired power plants.

The Hydrogen Education Foundation "educates people about how incorporating hydrogen within the world's energy portfolio will simultaneously reduce our dependence on oil, while improving the world's carbon footprint by reducing greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, and spark worldwide economic development." It has also set up a website to promote hydrogen at ::H2 and You.

Image courtesy of Nanoptek, Inc.

The Massachusetts-based energy startup has developed a new process for producing hydrogen fuel from water using just sunlight and a proprietary photocatalyst. Reporting in Technology Review, Kevin Bullis describes its main advantage as being two-fold: it is "cheap enough to compete with the cheapest approaches used now, which strip hydrogen from natural gas, and it has the further advantage of releasing no carbon dioxide."

Faced with the dual challenge of finding new ways to mitigate climate change and improve upon existing clean energy technologies, some scientists are starting to think small. As TreeHugger and other eco-minded blogs have documented over the last few months, the fields of nanotechnology and materials science in particular have witnessed a rash of innovative, promising discoveries and developments in these areas.

Now a team of researchers from the University of Calgary has unveiled a potentially groundbreaking new technique for capturing and storing gas: "molecular nanoval...

The Citaro bus, developed by Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz division, is pretty high-tech as far as urban buses go. It's a series-hybrid, meaning that the diesel engine generates electricity instead of mechanically driving the wheels. This design means that in the future it would be relatively easy to replace the engine with a hydrogen fuel cell, thus making the bus completely zero emissions at the source. But even without a fuel cell, the specifications are pretty good....