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Scientists at Columbia University are developing a carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubber device that removes one ton of CO2 from the air every day, says the Heartland Institute. While some see the scrubber as an efficient and economical way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, many environmentalists oppose the technology because it allows people to use fossil fuels and emit carbon in the first place. According to Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner, who is leading the research team: Producing a large number of CO2 scrubbers can keep to a minimum any rise in atmospheric CO2 without the economically painful elimination of inexpensive...

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts. “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. He called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon 39 years ago this month, just eight years after President John F....

The Marcellus Shale play is the latest huge thing in natural gas, considered by some to be a "super giant" gas field. Read more here http://www.petroleumnews.com/pntruncate/246893563.shtml The edge of the Marcellus Shale in Northeast PA and NY is about 100 miles from NYC, which means the gas needs only a very short trip by pipeline to the major metropolitan centers. Natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels and also is a source for hydrogen for hydrogen powered vehicles. So here are a bunch of "concerned citizens" planning to oppose it with all their might. "The Damascus group has...

ST. PAUL, Minn. - The 16 big flasks of bubbling bright green liquids in Roger Ruan's lab at the University of Minnesota are part of a new boom in renewable energy research. Driven by renewed investment as oil prices push $100 a barrel, Ruan and scores of scientists around the world are racing to turn algae into a commercially viable energy source. Some varieties of algae are as much as 50 percent oil, and that oil can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is slashing the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is...

Everyone seems to think that ethanol is a good way to make cars greener. Everyone is wrong SOMETIMES you do things simply because you know how to. People have known how to make ethanol since the dawn of civilisation, if not before. Take some sugary liquid. Add yeast. Wait. They have also known for a thousand years how to get that ethanol out of the formerly sugary liquid and into a more or less pure form. You heat it up, catch the vapour that emanates, and cool that vapour down until it liquefies. The result burns. And when Henry Ford...

Silicon Valley’s technology investors have taken to the ramparts, threatening to tear down the oil and gas industries’ dominance with innovations that use ethanol, solar and wind. A chief champion of the cause has been Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the marquee venture capital firms. Its principals, John Doerr in particular, have passionately advocated development of alternative energies as a way to create energy independence and clean up the carbon-saturated atmosphere. But Kleiner has also poured millions of dollars into Terralliance, a company that makes technology to enable more efficient drilling of oil and gas. The investment underscores...

WASHINGTON - In his first State of the Union address to a Democratic-controlled Congress, President Bush is calling for Americans to slash gasoline consumption by up to 20 percent by 2017. Bush envisions the goal being achieved primarily through a sharp escalation in the amount of ethanol and other alternative fuels that the federal government mandates must be produced. The rest of the fuel use reduction is to come from raising fuel economy standards for passenger cars, Joel Kaplan, White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters in a briefing before Bush's Tuesday night speech to a joint session of...

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 3 (OneWorld) - Wind power is "poised to become to become the foundation of the new energy economy," claims a new survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Earth Policy Institute. According to the environmental group, global wind electricity-generating capacity increased by 24 percent in 2005 to 59,100 megawatts--a twelvefold increase from a decade ago, when world wind-generating capacity stood at less than 5,000 megawatts. The report says wind power is the world's fastest-growing energy source with an average annual growth rate of 29 percent over the last ten years. In contrast, over the same time period, coal use...

In the 1960s, 85% of the oil in the world was available for ownership, development, partnerships, and such. At the time, 14% of the oil reserves belonged to the Soviet Union. Today it is the reverse of that: 16% of the world's oil is available. 65% is owned by the nations that possess the fields and 19% has limited access -- that is, nations, including Russia, will allow others to invest in and partially own their oil fields. It's different now. And, shall we not forget there are some nations that will allow investment and development and then, when all...

Asia has a paltry 5% of the world's oil reserves. Compare that to the former Soviet Union which has more than one fifth (20.8%) and Africa and the Middle East, which have nearly 2/3s of the oil reserves (60.5%). What to do...China National Petroleum Co. and India's Oil & Natural Gas Corp. teamed up to buy a Syrian oil field! I thought about doing that once -- buying a gas station. But then, I realized I still had to buy the gas before I could pump it out. The reason India and China went in to buy the field together...

Two Sides to Global Warming Is it proven fact, or just conventional wisdom? Ronald Bailey November 10, 2004 http://www.reason.com/rb/rb111004.shtml   During more than 15 years of reporting on climate change science and policy, I have watched climatology become increasingly politicized. Most headlines and publicized scientific reports confirm that humanity is heating up the planet by burning fossil fuels that load the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Take just two reports from the last week. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report from the Arctic Council found that Arctic warming is increasing twice as fast as elsewhere on the planet. This...

GE says its new machine could make the hydrogen economy affordable, by slashing the cost of water-splitting technology. Among the many daunting challenges to replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen is how to make hydrogen cheaply in ways that don't pollute the environment. Splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from energy sources such as wind turbines is one possibility -- but it's still far too expensive to be widely practical. Now researchers at GE say they've come up with a less expensive, easy-to-manufacture apparatus that can directly produce hydrogen via electrolysis for about $3 per kilogram -- a...

The first part of Tuesday's State of the Union -- on national security -- was tough, clear, principled, well reasoned. The second part was a laundry list, reminiscent of the worst of Bill Clinton. I was nodding off when I heard the President Bush say, "America is addicted to oil." Addicted to oil! That woke me up. America is no more addicted to oil than it is addicted to bread, to milk, to paper, to water, to computers or, in the immortal words of the late Robert Palmer, to love. We use oil -- and other unmentioned but implied addictions...

Sunken Fires Menace Land and Climate January 15, 2002 Fires are burning in thousands of underground coal seams from Pennsylvania to Mongolia, releasing toxic gases, adding millions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and baking the earth until vegetation shrivels and the land sinks. Scientists and government agencies are starting to use heat-sensing satellites to map the fires and try new ways to extinguish them. But in many instances -- particularly in Asia -- they are so widespread and stubborn that miners simply work around the flames. There is geological evidence that grassland and forest fires, lightning...

NEW DELHI (AFP) - Energy-thirsty India is hoping to turn its arch rivalry with giant neighbour China for fuel supplies into an alliance but becoming oil patch partners could be tough, analysts say. India, which lags way behind China in the frenzied global race to secure oil and gas supplies, said last week the Asian giants would sign pacts in November aimed at teaming up to bid for oil and gas projects. But analysts are doubtful about whether such a partnership between two neighbours with a history of hostility could work. "It's a nice idea for India and China to...

IF LIFE exists on Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, we could soon know about it - as long as it's the methane-spewing variety. The chemical signature of microbial life could be hidden in readings taken by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe when it landed on Titan in January. Titan's atmosphere is about 5 per cent methane, and Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, thinks that some of it could be coming from methanogens, or methane-producing microbes. Now he and Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, have worked out the likely diet...

Say it isn’t so Department : Renewable Fuels and Hillary Clinton Pro-environment groups have touted the value of ethanol and bio-diesel fuels for at least a generation. (I can remember reading “Gee whiz !” articles about these fuels in” Mother Earth News “ way back when Jimmy Carter was President, and we had long lines at gas stations for rationed fuel. ) Over the years, these “infinitely renewable replacements “ for fossil fuels have received taxpayer subsidies estimated at 3 Billion dollars : subsidies which have, for the most part, simply masked their true costs. Now comes a study ,conducted...

...Mr. Bush stands himself in excellent company here with some of the most respected names in business: GE's Jeff Immelt, Duke Energy's Paul Anderson, Ford's Bill Ford Jr. They, in turn, have benefited from the pioneering PR efforts of BP's John Browne, whose conversion to climate change was based firmly on science -- sociology not climatology.... Mr. Browne and his copycats have largely restricted themselves to acknowledging the inevitability of carbon regulation, not the inevitability of carbon-driven global warming. Most of all, they see a cornucopia of subsidies and tax breaks flowing from an emerging Western consensus to treat carbon...

It's fitting that France was chosen last week as the site for an experimental nuclear fusion reactor being built by an international consortium.... No country gets a larger share of its total electricity from nuclear power than France at 78%. Perhaps more amazing, France consumes less than 4% of the world's energy but produces about a sixth of its nuclear power. Because the groundwork for this nuclear proficiency was laid in decades past, France deserves to be at the center of the attempt to take the next big step forward, fusion.... Most puzzling is that much of the opposition to...

Ever since the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, effectively no new nuclear plants have been licensed by the U.S. However, it is now recognized that the safety measures at this plant worked, so that only a very small amount of radiation was released into the atmosphere, and this had no apparent harmful effects on health. The excellent safety record at American nuclear plants, growing imports of oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels at high prices, and increased concern over the pollution and global warming caused by fossil fuels, has made the case for reducing regulatory obstacles to...