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According to this, cells are around 15% efficient, with optimal laboratory results in the 30-40% range.

The SVO approach is interesting but not very practical.

The processing of oil into biodiesel actually adds little to the cost: Biodiesel from waste oil is pretty cheap and the difference in price compares well to the $800 dollars you spend on adding the SVO contraption to your car.

Also, the SVO device makes the car a bit heavier, and energy must be expended to keep the oil hot. This method adds complexity and fuss to each car/driver.

Biodoesel is simple: you pump it in and start it up. With BioD, the fuss is centralized at the processing facility and handled in a decent economy of scale.

New processing tech. with a solid catalyst will make BioD even cheaper.

One thing is true for both fuel types: Your vehicle becomes Solar-Powered!

Hello USA,
what have you got in your own eye?

1/ california: deregulation sucks
2/ microsoft antitrust trial: where are the sanctions?
3/ erin brockowich and elsewhere
4/ homeless: so used to it, it must be OK.
5/ enron
6/ georges bush jr
7/ dmca

no amount of self blindedness or hypocrisy will make the rest of the world forget all this and all the rest.

There isn't an equivalent non-hybrid Toyota to compare with the Prius, but the number I was told is the hybrid is basically a $2,000 premium (with the base price at around $20,000, so vs. $18,000). No bargaining since they're in such demand, but Toyota is making money on them now which is a good sign.

Your math looks right (at least to my cold-addled brain :-) Hybrids make both economic and environmental sense here in California. Depending on whether the governor signs the upcoming bill or not, they may even be required for auto makers to meet the new standards.

Gas is around $1.75-$1.85 a gallon (for the cheap stuff) in the SF Bay Area right now, and has been much worse. There's also enough traffic on the roads that our Prius does a bit better than the manufacturer's numbers (45 MPG highway, 52 MPG city) because speeds are lower. Between my wife's twice a week commute and other driving, and the car it replaced (at ~30 MPG), we figure it will take 5-7 years to pay for the difference. But we plan to have the car at least that long.

It's also a lot safer than the car it replaced (front and side airbags, anti-lock brakes, does well in crash tests), and much more reliable, too. I don't worry about my wife and her carpool partners like I did with the old car.

Add all that to the SULEV (Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) status (ZEV = Zero Emission Vehicle = electric is the only better rating), and it makes a lot of environmental sense, too. Yes, no car would be even better, but this is a good practical choice that's available if you have to have a car.

Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Letter, June 1998
Shell, April 1999
Time, January 2000
National Hydrogen Association, Spring 2000
Red Herring, July 2000
Fast Company, October 2000
ENN, December 2000
BBC, December 2001
etc.

I have to shoot down more of your bullshit.

About 30 percent of China has computers.

About 30% of people in Beijing have computers. Beijing, the largest city in China, along with its surrounding countryside, has a population of about 13.8 million people. 2.8 million Beijing residents have internet access; this is about 20%. Their per-capita income is $1200.

The overall computer ownsership rate in the 14 largest cities in China is 21%.

China has a population of about 1.27 billion people. The population of Beijing is less than 1.5% of the population of China.

Rural China -- which is most of China -- has a much lower ownership rate.

Incidentally, a lot of old computers do end up in China, but they end up in dumps as environmental hazards. "Consequently, the ground water is so polluted that drinking water has to be trucked in from a town 18 miles away". Of course, I' sure you have a pat asnwer as to why this is the fault of the U.S.

Minimum Wage is needed, You have to admit we need a minimum wage.
Your readers have to do nothing of the sort.

IF you dont agree, then you must be CEO
More insulting assumptions. I wish I was a CEO.

And what about the next 1 in a 1000 "catastrophe" that gets predicted? And the next? And the next? And the next?

Errr...such as? Give us some examples of catastrophes so dramatic and with such a degree of probability which are being touted by scientists, otherwise this argument won't go very far. And how are scientists making money by predicting doomsday? They won't be out of a job if it doesn't turn out to be true: they'll just do research on another subject! (It's not as if there was a lack of subjects to research in Environmental Sciences anyway). I'll tell you, for knowing someone in the field, they'll be a lot happier if they didn't think the Earth was endangered by our habits!

Your arguments are weak, and your mistrust is misplaced. Follow the real money!

nice try, but it takes CFCs 50 years to get to the upper atmosphear where it can cause the damage to O3.

My guess is that what you read somewhere said, chemicals can take as long as 50 years to reach the ozone layer, but on balance they get there "It can take days or even years for some chemicals to reach the stratosphere." (this quoted from this article at ENN.)

Also, not all CFCs take so long to break down. To quote the ENN article again, "Ozone depleting chemicals such as CFCs, halons and other substances commonly found in coolants, foaming agents, fire extinguishers and solvents linger in the atmosphere for different periods of time."

perhaps the hole had been growing for the last 400 years.

Actually, the hole did appear after we began measurements in Antarctica. This does not preclude some cyclical natural phenomenon, but there's good evidence that anthropogenic effects are at least a major part of the problem.

Indeed, the evidence is much more clear than anthropogenic global warming.

I myself, tend to believe more of the crackpot pseudoscience than the greedy bastard pseudoscience, thank you very much!

If you believe pseudoscience, you're part of the problem. You see, it is likely that the changeover from CFC based systems to other systems did cost on the order of a billion dollars (that isn't that much, just 1 B2 bomber). Now if, in fact, we did not need to do so, that billion dollar hit to the economy could have been taken in an environmental area that was needed. So getting environmental science wrong is not helpful. The emotional environmentalists have done more to harm the environment than any single chemical manufacturer. My own case in point is the nuclear debate. Emotional environmentalists have pushed FUD tactics regarding nuclear power for some time. This has caused industrial nations to increase use of oil, coal, and hydro-electric systems, each of which have terrible environmental disadvantages of their own. Geologically, coal tends to be a trap for naturally occuring radiogenic compounds, and your average coal plant spews out more radioactive gasses than all the nuclear spills of all western reactors combined (clearly Chernobyl is a case apart), not to mention the tons and tons of CO2 that get tossed into the atmosphere. Hydro dams destroy habitat by the hundreds of square miles.

here are evidences[sic] that we are destroying nature, look at the rivers!

The US is hardly the worst polluter of riparian environments in the world. The clean water act has actually been very effective at cleaning the rivers. I heard a story by an entymologist I know at Clemson university who specializes in cadis flies and other aquatic insects as indicators of stream health. He'd developed standards of measurements for defining stream pollution throughout the southeastern US. He traveled to China to do some work there, and had to travel several hundred miles inland before he found environments that were healthy enough to even show up on his scale.

US citizens are not even one 20th of the world population but they manage to produce half the pollution.

This depend highly on how polution is defined. We are the largest producer of CO2, which was not considered a pollutant until fairly recently. In other respects, we've greatly reduced our environmental destruction. At the turn of the century, South Carolina was largely devoid of trees. Through conservation and forestry, that state has now recovered large tracts of forest land. Clearly this land is not as healthy as old-growth forest yet, but such things take time, and its doing better than one might think.

Also, it is the third world, the developing countries, that continue to use CFC depleting chemicals. For more details check out this article at ENN.

Now, I do believe that CFC reductions are largely responsible for the halting of growth in the ozone layer. It is true that ozone depletors remain active for quite some time. However, ozone is continuously being produced by incident radiation, and even if depletors are present in the atmosphere, ozone levels will quickly reach equilibrium once the amount of depleting agents stabilizes. We can expect a slow recovery, but we should expect to see stabilization quickly. This is precisely what is being reported.

Don't give CmdrTaco too hard of a time, even ZDNet got it wrong. The Motorola cell phone uses Methanol (a liquid), not methane (a gas).

see:

http://www.cellular.co.za/battery_technology.htm

and

here

I hate to break it to you and mess up all of these posts about gas, gasoline, etc..., but the ZDNet article is screwed up. The Motorola Fuel Cell uses Methanol, not methane!

See: http://www.cellular.co.za/battery_technology.htm

and http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2000/09/09272 000/upi_fuelcell_31950.asp

Just like much of the Amazon rainforest, amazon.com will soon meet a good team of slash and burn corporate types who will level the company to make way for a more profitable enterprise.

Once the guy down the street tries to launch himself in his own rocket, believe you me, people will pay attention. But today's shuttle launches, perhaps not all that safe, are certainly much more safe than the early pioneers.

A manned space program is an expensive endeavor. But it makes sense to spend money where it has the longest, biggest payoff. The short answer to minimize costs is to modernize both manned and unmanned launch vehicles. According to this (http://www.enn.com/enn-news-archive/2000/06/06172 000/plasma_13933.asp&e=42), the payoff of a small suite of new rockets will be significant in terms of costs and space-accessibility.

See http://www.enn.com/enn-news-archive/2000/06/061720 00/plasma_13933.asp&e=42)

Once the guy down the street tries to launch himself in his own rocket, believe you me, people will pay attention. But today's shuttle launches, perhaps not all that safe, are certainly much more safe than the early pioneers.

A manned space program is an expensive endeavor. But it makes sense to spend money where it has the longest, biggest payoff. The short answer to minimize costs is to modernize both manned and unmanned launch vehicles. According to this (http://www.enn.com/enn-news-archive/2000/06/06172 000/plasma_13933.asp&e=42), the payoff of a small suite of new rockets will be significant in terms of costs and space-accessibility.

See http://www.enn.com/enn-news-archive/2000/06/061720 00/plasma_13933.asp&e=42)

po_boy wrote: I refuse to believe that in the few thousand years since humans started being "civilized" that we have caused more animal species to become extinct than in the few million years before that. Unless species are becoming extinct at several thousand times the previous rates of extinctions, this is pretty much impossible.

well, If you "refuse to believe" then you are mindlessly dogmatic and debate with you is pointless... but, on the offchance that you were just being melodramatic when you employed that damning phrase, I'll present an argument here. Even if you refuse to believe what you don't like to hear, others who have been misled by your dogma may ne more open minded.

Widley accepted figures indicate that current rates of extinction are 100 times the "natural" rate and climbing to something between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate of extinction. According to an article in the Washington Post:

"The speed at which species are being lost is much faster than any we've seen in the past -- including those [extinctions] related to meteor collisions," said Daniel Simberloff, a University of Tennessee ecologist and prominent expert in biological diversity who participated in the museum's survey. [Note: the last mass extinction caused by a meteor collision was that of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.]

Most of his peers apparently agree. Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a "mass extinction" was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. Nearly all attributed the losses to human activity, especially the destruction of plant and animal habitats.

Other sources of depressing news you won't want to believe:

According to scientists at the American Museum of Natural History:"This mass extinction is the fastest in Earth's 4.5-billion-year history and, unlike prior extinctions, is mainly the result of human activity and not of natural phenomena." The same scientists note that "In strong contrast to the fears expressed by scientists, the general public is relatively unaware of the loss of species and the threats that it poses." I guess they've been talking to po_boy...

http://www.greenpeace.org/majordomo/index-press-re leases/1997/msg00184.html

http://beacon-www. asa .utk.edu/issues/v78/n2/asteroids.2n.html

http://www.mapcruzin.com/ scr uztri/docs/news0922991.htm

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ fie ldguide.html

http://www.pupress.princeton.e du/ titles/6276.html

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ ext inction.html

what are known as eco pencils. They are made from processed recycled newspaper. The newspaper is pressed into a wood-shingle like substance with glue/heat. There are other kinds made from recycled blue jeans too.
The pencil is a relatively new device (compared to the thousands of years man has been making a mark). It has a fascinating history, and the book The Pencil is definitive. It shows how the technology evolves in such a 'low tech' device. This is a must read if you're the least bit interested. Buy from Barnes and Noble because they respect your privacy. If you want more about technological evolution in everyday things, the Zipper is also good.
The sad fact of the matter is that the vast majority of pencils come from overseas, which in turn comes from a rainforest. The culture of ecological sensitivity is just not present in someplace like China. Unless it says that it comes from a renewable source on the box, it is tropical wood. Worse, they are alot cheaper than an eco pencil (thats the way it is with any natural resource until it's gone). You may think that it doesn't matter because the amount of wood in a single pencil is small, but the amount of wood that is used to supply the 2 billion pencils we use each year is staggerring.
I myself am partial to the old-tech fountain pen with all its messy implications. Because that's what the nuns taught me to write with, as ballpoints weren't "proper" (don't laugh too hard - the fountain pen does produce a nicer line).
I am continually amazed by the constant improvements in everyday 'low tech' things. There was a day that you needed to use a tool to take off a bottlecap. Somewhere along the way the rifinement was made so that they could be screwed off. Same with the pull top on aluminum cans. The pull top used to litter the landscape, until it was improved with a tab. See Scientific American September 1994 for an excellent article on the aluminum beverage container.
The best 'tech' is not 'high tech' or 'low tech', but 'usability tech'. Technology should not be seen as a means to an end, but as a tool to make lives better.

Switching from once fossil fuel to another is just... well stupid. And I don't know the industrial method for extracting Ethenol, but I expect it involves the purchase of an organic coumpound, and lots of time.

Hydrogen however is the most available substance in the universe. Hydrogen as fuel could be used in ICEs (Internal Conbustion Engines) such as what you might term the classical gas engine, though I was more referring to Tesla's Disc pump, which can be fueled by anything that creates a pressure differental of matter (79 years ago that was steam). But also Fuel cells whose exhaust is pure H2O.

Hydrogen is extensivly used in modern society, so the industry for its creation is already there. Beyond that, you could just make your own. I would expect that if cars actually used Hydrogen, it would be fesable to buy a device for about $400-$1000 U.S. that would simply be plugged into an outlet or run off of solar power, and be refreshed with water as needed, producing hydrogen and oxygen through electrolisis at as much as 85% efficency. Hydrogen fuel cells are around 80-90% efficent. Standard ICEs are 10-20% efficent, Tesla's disc pump is about 60% efficent.

There is a lot of reasearch into hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells, so learn away.

At any rate water is cheap as hell, and contains alot of Hydrogen. Electricity is cheap as hell too (compared to gasoline & fossil fuels). So if I remember avigodro's number correctly (and I'm sure I don't) 20 kg of watter = 4 kg of Hydrogen and 16 kg of Oxygen. Now one of you chemists out there can tell us how much energy that is, but I suspect that much fuel would last you at least a weeks worth of commutes.

--ac

-dB