Audi just made diesel gas out of air and water. Welcome to the future.

Courtesy of Science Alert:  

German car manufacturer Audi has reportedly invented a carbon-neutral diesel fuel, made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable energy sources. And the crystal clear 'e-diesel' is already being used to power the Audi A8 owned by the country’s Federal Minister of Education and Research, Johanna Wanka. 

The creation of the fuel is a huge step forward for sustainable transport, but the fact that it’s being backed by an automotive giant is even more exciting. Audi has now set up a pilot plant in Dresden, Germany, operated by clean tech company Sunfire, which will pump out 160 litres of the synthetic diesel every day in the coming months. 

Their base product, which they’re calling 'blue crude' is created using a three-step process. The first step involves harvesting renewable energy from sources such as wind, solar and hydropower. They then use this energy to split water into oxygen and pure hydrogen, using a process known as reversible electrolysis. 

This hydrogen is then mixed with carbon monoxide (CO), which is created from carbon dioxide (CO2) that’s been harvested from the atmosphere. The two react at high temperatures and under pressure, resulting in the production of the long-chain hydrocarbon compounds that make up the blue crude. 

Once it's been refined, the resulting e-diesel can be mixed in with our current diesel fuel, or used on its own to power cars in a more sustainable way.

Okay I know, I KNOW, that this will not get anywhere near the attention as some of my previous posts.

But I have to reiterate folks that THIS is what is really important, and THIS is what should excite and inspire all of us.

Just take a minute to imagine what this kind of a breakthrough could mean for the future of this planet. 

Less pollution, less raping of the planet, less money spent on energy, fewer reasons to go to war, and that is only the beginning.

I have said it before, but it bears repeating, this is an amazing time to be alive.

Conservatives are now modifying their diesel trucks into "coal rollers" which purposefully emit more pollutant in order to piss off liberals. WTF?

Courtesy of Business Insider:

"Coal Rollers" are diesel trucks modified with chimneys and equipment that can force extra fuel into the engine causing dark black smoke to pour out of the chimney stacks. These modifications are not new, but as Slate's Dave Weigel pointed out on Thursday, "rolling coal" has begun to take on a political dimension with pickup drivers increasingly viewing their smokestacks as a form of protest against environmentalists and Obama administration emissions regulations. 

Last month, Vocativ noted many coal rollers focus their fumes on "nature nuffies," or people who drive hybrids, and "rice burners," or Japanese-made cars. 

 "The feeling around here is that everyone who drives a small car is a liberal," a roller named Ryan told Vocativ. "I rolled coal on a Prius once just because they were tailing me." 

Here is how one salesperson explained it:  

"I run into a lot of people that really don’t like Obama at all," the salesperson said. "If he’s into the environment, if he’s into this or that, we’re not. I hear a lot of that. To get a single stack on my truck—that’s my way of giving them the finger. You want clean air and a tiny carbon footprint? Well, screw you." 

If that does not infuriate you enough take a look at one of these "cola rollers" in action.

Courtesy of Slate:  

At 23 seconds, the engine revs and the viewer finally learns what the arrows were pointing at. Smoke pours out of dual stacks, right in the path of the Prius, which retreats into the rear view. The truck’s passengers share a well-earned chortle. 

“Alright, enough!” says one of them. 

“You got ’im!” says another. 

“We got ’im!” says a co-conspirator.

Yep this is what the people who want to improve the planet for their children, and protect them from an environmental disaster, are up against. 

And they vote too.

The video the Exxon oil company, and the Republican party, DON'T want you to see. Update!

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

An Exxon-Mobil oil pipeline ruptured Friday afternoon in the town of Mayflower, Arkansas, forcing the evacuation of 20 homes and shutting down sections of interstate highway. According to Little Rock’s KATV, a hazardous materials team from the Office of Emergency Management has contained the spill and is currently attempting a cleanup. 

The burst pipe is part of the Pegasus pipeline network, which connects tar sands along the Gulf coast to refineries in Houston. Thousands of gallons of crude oil erupted from the breach around 3:00 p.m. on Friday, spilling through a housing subdivision and into the town’s storm drainage system, fouling drainage ditches and shutting down Highway 365 and Interstate 40. 

Residents were evacuated to avoid health hazards from crude oil fumes and to keep stray sparks from igniting the standing oil. Emergency workers contained the spill by hastily constructing earthen dams.

According to the YouTube link over 84,000 gallons have spilled into the town so far.

You know it is bad enough to have an oil pipeline burst in a remote parts of Alaska but so much worse when the spill is right next door and forces the evacuation of your entire neighborhood.

Perhaps THIS will be enough to get certain politicians to reconsider the idea of building the Keystone XL project.

What am I saying? After all you can bet the pipeline won't be built next to any of the homes of powerful Republican Senators now will it?

Update: This is somebody's backyard in Mayflower, Arkansas.

That is NOT water.

Did you know that bicycle riders create more pollution than the drivers of cars? No? Well that's because you're not a Republican. Update!

"Wait, what was I saying?"

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

The ranking Republican member on Washington state’s House Transportation Committee thinks that riding bicycles causes more pollution than driving cars, the Seattle Bike Blog reported Saturday. 

State Rep. Ed Orcutt (R) wrote an email to a constituent who disagreed with his support for a new tax on the sales of bicycles, a proposal being considered as part of a larger piece of transportation legislation. Reached by the Seattle Bike Blog, he confirmed the email is real. 

In his message, sent to the owner of a bicycle shop, Orcutt wrote: “If I am not mistaken, a cyclists [sic] has an increased heart rate and respiration. That means that the act of riding a bike results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride.” 

He added that when citizens drive cars they are helping to pay for the roads, whereas bicyclists “need to start paying for the roads they ride on rather than make motorists pay.” 

Reached for comment, Orcutt told Seattle Bike Blog that “you would be giving off more CO2 if you are riding a bike than driving in a car,” although he admitted to having no evidence to back the claim.

So essentially this scientifically ignorant Republican is upset that bicyclists get to ride on roads that they don't pay for. (Apparently road repairs are paid for through gas taxes, though that may soon change.) Though I would argue that the contribution to wear and tear on the roads, which creates the the need for much of road repair, is substantially less from bicycle tires than from heavy automobiles.

However back to Orcutt's point about the fact that bicyclists create more CO2 pollution than do automobile drivers. Essentially that's bullshit!

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that each passenger vehicle in the U.S. generates on average 4.8 metric tons of CO2 every year, not accounting for emissions resulting in damage to the vehicle and local infrastructure, along with the actual production of fuel. The European Cyclists Federation, however, puts CO2 emissions from biking at about 10 times less than driving a car (PDF), even after accounting for the emissions required to make the bike and emissions linked to food the rider eats to power the device.

You know you would think that after so MANY ridiculous attempts to use science to support their argument, that the Republicans would simply stop using it.

The earth is six thousand years old, women getting raped can "shut that whole reproductive thing down." Mitt Romeny is going to win by a landslide, all completely, and embarrassingly, wrong.

No wonder the Republicans are constantly attacking education. If they can't figure out reality, then dammit they will keep others too dumb to figure it out too!

Update: Apparently Orcutt received so much backlash due his ridiculous statements that he has decided to walk them back:  

"My point was that by not driving a car, a cyclist was not necessarily having a zero-carbon footprint," Orcutt wrote in an email delivered to constituents. "In looking back, it was not a point worthy of even mentioning so, again, I apologize."

Well it's nice that he realizes what he said was ignorant, and I have one response to his apology and desperate attempt to put this behind him.

"Too late!"

Sometimes the things that President Obama accomplishes may seem small, but they also have significantly positive impacts on our country.

Courtesy of David Roberts:

Anyone who pays attention to green news will have spent the last two years hearing a torrent of stories about EPA rules and the political fights over them. It can get tedious. After a certain point even my eyes glaze over, and I'm paid to follow this stuff. 

But this one is a Big Deal. It's worth lifting our heads out of the news cycle and taking a moment to appreciate that history is being made. Finally controlling mercury and toxics will be an advance on par with getting lead out of gasoline. It will save save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases. It will make America a more decent, just, and humane place to live.  

Paul Krugman weighs in:

As Roberts explains, we’ve known about these costs of mercury pollution for decades, yet it took until now to get something done. The reason is, of course, obvious: special interests, hiding behind claims of immense economic damage if anything was done, were able to block action. 

It’s worth noting that these claims of economic harm from pollution regulation have always been proved wrong when the regulation finally came. Ozone regulation was supposed to cripple the economy; so was acid rain regulation; neither did. 

Oh, and if we’re going to have to scrap some power plants and replace them, it’s hard to think of a better time to do it than now, when the workers and resources needed to do the replacing would largely have been unemployed otherwise. 

The point that strikes me most, however, is that this shows that it matters who holds the White House. You can complain about Obama’s lack of a strong progressive agenda, which I sometimes do, or wonder what good it is to hold the White House when the other side blocks every attempt to do good through legislation. But mercury regulation would not have happened if John McCain were president. 

As I have noted before, there is MUCH that this President is doing that we, the public, are simply never made aware of. 

In fact it seems to me that the main problem with the Obama presidency is not so much a lack of accomplishments, but a lack of the President blowing his horn to let us KNOW about his accomplishments. The sad fact is that because this man is so humble, we are not being made aware of just how great of a president he has become.

Dare I say that this President might be better served if he adopted just a little of George Bush's swagger?

Only this time it would a "swagger with substance."

Robert Redford takes on the Pebble Mine in Alaska.

I know that we are a little irritated at the Huffington Post, but this article written by Robert Redford is required reading for anybody who loves Alaska, and every other wonderous, magical  place on our planet:

Imagine a pit two miles wide by 2,000 feet deep, and an underground mine a mile deep. This gargantuan gold and copper operation would produce an estimated 10 billion tons of contaminated waste -- 3,000 pounds for every man, woman and child on Earth.

Massive earthen dams -- some taller than the Three Gorges Dam in China -- would be constructed to hold back that waste forever. Now imagine all this in an active earthquake zone at the headwaters of the largest sockeye salmon runs in the world. The threat to Bristol Bay just below is unimaginable.

No wonder the Pebble Mine is opposed by nearly 80 percent of Bristol Bay residents. The growing coalition to stop this disaster-in-the-making is led by Native village corporations, associations and tribes from around Bristol Bay. They've partnered with commercial and recreational fishermen, sportsmen and conservation groups to protect the thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars that come from Bristol Bay's renewable economic engine: wild salmon.

Anglo American's history is littered with one pollution disaster after another: from Zimbabwe to Ireland to Nevada. Rio Tinto has left a trail of toxic contamination that spans the globe: from Indonesia to Bolivia to Utah. Do you trust these companies to take a catastrophic risk with one of our last and greatest wild places?

Mr. Redford also provides this link to a petition that I am asking all of you to please sign in order to protect this sparkling jewel of Alaska  from becoming a toilet filled with contaminated industrial sludge.

It will only take a moment, and afterward you will not only have the satisfaction of protecting such a gorgeous place, but you will have the added satisfaction of knowing that you have helped to sabotage yet another of Sarah Palin's carefully laid plans to ravage our pristine landscape.

Ahh picturesque Anchorage, Alaska! Surrounded by beautiful mountains, teeming with wildlife, and right next to a giant toilet bowl. Wait, what?

As adults, most of us do not like to get caught up in fantasy. We don't put lost teeth under our pillows and we know who leaves the presents under the tree. But there is a little pretend story we tell ourselves every time we put something nasty down the drain.

It just disappears, right? I mean, of course, some government someone somewhere --the EPA or the DEC or the FBI or whoever-- must be keeping an eye on things to make sure nothing bad happens. But in general, for most of us, it's out of sight, out of mind.

That's the way of thinking that keeps us from coming up with a better long-term plan to deal with the tons of pollution we dump in Cook Inlet every day. Think doo in the snow is gross? Try this: salty, oily run-off from city streets, runway de-icer and tons of filtered and chlorinated sewer discharge. Now imagine it marinating your halibut steaks.

This is our approach to waste water here. It has not changed much in 30 years.

Let us take a little trip down the drain. What you flush travels through a series of pipes until it reaches the waste water treatment plant at Point Woronzof. When it gets there, it goes through what is called "primary treatment." A big screen filters larger solids. Then the water goes to big basins, where floating material is skimmed off, and sludge is removed from the bottom. All that stuff gets incinerated. Heavy grit and incineration ash goes to the landfill. As one of the guys at the plant explained it to me, you got your "floaties," your "sinkies" and your "lurkers."

Sewage marinated halibut steaks! I bet your mouth is simply watering at the very thought. Or is it your eyes that are watering?

I know what some of you anti-regulation guys are thinking. "Oh c'mon they took the turds out and treated it with chlorine so how bad can it be?"

What lurks once you get rid of all that floats and sinks? Water soluble pollutants like detergents and chemicals, particles of decomposing human waste and bacteria. That "effluent," as it is called, gets chlorinated and heads out into the inlet. The liquid is relatively clear, but it has more decomposing material in it than what is being discharged almost everywhere else in America. Piping it into Cook Inlet is legal thanks to a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency we've been getting renewed for the last three decades. We're in another renewal process right now.

In other words just because you can't see it does not mean it is not there. Sure it LOOKS clean but in reality it is simply chock full of chemicals, excreted pharmaceuticals, and estrogen from birth control pills. Yes you heard me ESTROGEN! And that estrogen is absorbed by the fish which is then eaten by the families of these fishermen.

Personally I have refused to eat fish caught in and around Anchorage for almost twenty years. I like my fish the old fashioned way, sewage free and delicious. Not filled with anti-depressants and man-boob causing estrogen.

We have treated our inlet like a cesspool for almost a hundred years now, isn't it time that we started to take responsibility for ourselves? Or at the very least, our poop?

(You can read the rest of Julia O'Malley's very informative article by clicking the title.)

Update: Dennis Zaki read my post and sent me this.

Alaska Timelapses from Dennis Zaki on Vimeo.

It just goes to show that even our polluted waterways are freaking beautiful. Too bad they are not as healthy as they look.