One of the coolest visions for solar energy we’ve ever seen comes from the “Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation” website (http://www.trecers.net/).  They want to build an ultra high-efficiency DC (direct current) power grid across the deserts of the middle east and africa upwards throughout Europe including offshore windfarms.  Here’s the heart of their plan, taken from [...]

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due in complete form in a few months, but the “Summary for Policymakers” was released last week.  The general consensus from environmental activists, along with the media and nearly all politicians can be summed up as this:  “The ‘question mark’ has been removed; fossil [...]

Biofuel today is produced, overwhelmingly, from oil palms and sugar cane, and overwhelmingly, these plantations stand where tropical rainforest recently stood.  Over a year ago, a well-documented essay entitled “Worse Than Fossil Fuel,” was published in the London Guardian by George Monbiot, an environmental activist and professor at Oxford-Brookes University in the U.K.  In this article, Monbiot [...]

To our knowledge the biggest operator in the USA of commercial scale plants that create fuel from animal waste is Changing World Technologies, headquartered in West Hempstead, New York.  This company has a plant in Carthage, Missouri, that in April 2006 produced 6,000 barrels of diesel fuel.  The plant uses turkey offal as the feedstock, in a joint [...]