1. Haerang Park 2. Don't blame cities for climate change, see them as solutions
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3. Mobilising public attention towards an environmental problem and working on an action plan is crucial when we want to find a solution to mitigate the negative impact on us and the world as a whole. One more important step that should not be omitted is to determine who caused such problems and would be responsilbe for it. Many said and believed that cities and people living there should be blamed for climate change. This is because of the image of modernised cities. Here a paper, published in the journal Environment and Urbanisation by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), reveals that cities are responsible for only 40 per cent of emissions. The remaining proportion comes from agriculture, deforestation, heavy industry, wealthy households, and coal, or gas fuelled power stations outside cities. This fact is valuable to know especially when governments try to set up regulations for greenhouse gas reduction and sell emission tickets globally.
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4. From: SAGE Publications UK Published September 26, 2008 09:27 AM Don't blame cities for climate change, see them as solutions RELATED ARTICLES Saltwater solution to save crops Viruses, oxygen and our green oceans Intellectual work induces excessive calorie intake Climate: New spin on ocean's role
/pollution/article/38264/print
Cities are being unfairly blamed for most of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions and this threatens efforts to tackle climate change, warns a study in the October 2008 issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization.
The paper says cities are often blamed for 75 to 80 percent of emissions, but that the true value is closer to 40 percent. It adds that the potential for cities to help address climate change is being overlooked because of this error.
"Blaming cities for greenhouse gas emissions misses the point that cities are a large part of the solution," says the paper's author, David Satterthwaite, a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). "Well planned, well governed cities can provide high living standards that do not require high consumption levels and high greenhouse gas emissions."
United Nations agencies, former US President Bill Clinton's climate change initiative and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have all stated that between 75 and 80 per cent of emissions come from cities.
Satterthwaite used data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show that only two-fifths of all greenhouse gases from human activities are generated within cities. Agriculture and deforestation account for around 30 percent, and the rest are mostly from heavy industry, wealthy households and coal, oil or gas fuelled power stations located in rural areas and in urban centres too small to be considered cities.
But the paper also highlights how it can be misleading to allocate greenhouse gas emissions to places. For instance, emissions from power stations should be allocated to those that consume the electricity, not the places where the power stations are located. Emissions generated by industries should likewise be allocated to the person consuming the goods the industries produce.
"Consumer demand drives the production of goods and services, and therefore the emission of greenhouse gases," says Satterthwaite. "Allocating emissions to consumers rather than producers shows that the problem is not cities but a minority of the world's population with high-consumption lifestyles. A large proportion of these consumers live not in cities but in small towns and rural areas."
In addition, allocating greenhouse gas emissions to consumers increases the share of global emissions from Europe and North America and highlights the very low emissions per person of most city inhabitants in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In general, wealthy people outside cities are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than those in cities as they have larger homes that need to be heated or cooled, more automobiles per household and greater automobile use.
"The way cities are designed and run can make a big difference," says Satterthwaite. "Most cities in the United States have three to five times the gasoline use per person of most European cities but not three to five times the living standards."
Satterthwaite points out that cities offer many opportunities to reduce per capita greenhouse gas emissions, such as by promoting walking, bicycling and public transport and having building designs that require much less energy for heating and cooling.
"Achieving the needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide depends on seeing and acting on the potential of cities to combine a high quality of life with low greenhouse gas emissions," he says.
3. What puzzled me about the idea of the Treadmill of production is the opposition of economic success and production expansion to environmental consciousness. This article talks a little about an example I think is relevant in the light of our readings these past three sessions or so. How would the Environmental protection agency of the United States' role in creating and enforcing regulations be seen by our favorite EM and ToP authors? Well, they do deal with it; Freudenberg, at least, to show that governmental regulation is often ignored, ineffective or bypassed by companies seeking to produce the amount they wish at the environmental costs that may come of it. But, (at least in theory, for though I don't know much about the EPA, I have heard that it can be quite lax with its standards and with enforcement), the idea of a State agency given powers to regulate such pollution seems great. Freudenberg's problem with imbalance of power and privileged accounts seems to stem from the fact that big capital sometimes engages in pollution. I wonder if a strong State stance against environmental degradation could not successfully combat both the big companies and their pollution, and (with our focus on the United States, we have not really seen this yet) widespread environmental problems as a direct result of the general population (I keep thinking back to my Haitian deforestation example). But in this latter case, what is the State's concern with preserving the lives of it's people who cut trees to make a living? We seemed to dismiss (certainly Freudenberg does) the idea that strict regulation on companies would harm the economy... would strict regulations on individuals be as possible? Yeah, I strayed a little bit, but the article here seems to talk about both the supply and demand impacted by a State actor's decision, which brought me right back to last week and this week's reading...
------------------ Recent new rules announced by the Environmental Protection Agency to curb emissions from small engines, such as those on lawn mowers, is the sort of step Americans need to see.
As awareness has grown about emissions in general and what pollution is doing to the environment, the big issue of small engines has become a compelling example of the kind of problem the nation must address. The degree of pollution those engines cause, small though the engines are, continues to be eye-opening. Advertisement
The EPA early this month announced new regulations that will require reductions of 35 percent in emissions from gas-powered lawn equipment less than 25 horsepower. That requirement will go into effect in 2011. It does not pertain to engines already in use. Gas-powered recreational boats will have to have emissions reduced by 70 percent in 2010.
According to the EPA, the new restrictions will result in the reduction of hundreds of thousands of tons of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxide. The EPA also says the new rules will save 190 million gallons of gas each year. At first glance, those numbers seem surprising, but the nature of the engines and the enormous number of small engines in use throughout the country help drive home the need to address problems caused by mowers and other lawn equipment.
Consider some of the measures of the impact of gas-powered mowers. The EPA says lawn mowers create 5 percent of the air pollution in this country. One mower in one hour creates the same amount of pollution that eight new cars moving 55 mph would create, according to one group, the Union of Concerned Scientists. Another group, at Eartheasy.com, says those string-like gas-powered trimmers used on lawns create 21 times more emissions than a typical car.
The longstanding means of mowing lawns need changes.
Findings about the effects of lawn and garden equipment and the reductions being required by the EPA have prompted complaints about costs. But as with many environmental issues, the subject cannot be looked upon only for its financial impact. Cost is a factor, but often a case is made against an environmental move as though no one had considered the price. The nation must consider the environmental cost of not acting. In the matter of gas-powered lawn equipment, the estimate is that new regulations means the price of mowers will increase about 18 percent. Similar percentages are given for price increases for boats. Familiar lines of complaint are that the changes will force manufacturers to increase their prices and that it will fall eventually to consumers. That's usually the tactic utilized to drum up opposition to a new regulation.
The EPA guidelines on small engines are an encouraging sign. Regulators should continue along that path. Ultimately, the approach on lawn and garden equipment, boat engines and similar gas-powered devices should follow the same line of action that is emerging with automobiles. There should be a search for alternative fuels, and there should be a dramatic push toward engines that function on other power sources like electricity, which is not a new concept for lawn mowers anyway. The principles of saving the environment apply across the board, and the motivation to find efficient, affordable alternatives should not wane.
3. Barack Obama and John McCain are promising voters life without a drop of imported oil. McCain promises to secure "strategic independence" from foreign sources by 2025 and Obama pledges to effectively replace oil imports from the Middle East within a decade. However, "energy independence" isn't so easy. A future not reliant on foreign oil, would require some combination of major lifestyle and technological change. Also, oil independence won't happen after a day or after a few years, it will require sustained effort.
4. ----------------------------------
5. UNITED STATES OF ANXIETY
Kicking oil habit harder than they say
Neither candidate's plan comes even close to the decades and trillions of dollars needed to do it
By Jim Tankersley and Christi Parsons | Chicago Tribune correspondents September 26, 2008
ORLANDO — Barack Obama and John McCain are promising voters a Tomorrowland of electric cars and high-speed trains and solar panels, a vision of American life without a drop of imported oil.
But their plans to get there look more like Fantasyland.
A host of energy policy experts agree that true "energy independence"—a key catch phrase of this presidential campaign—would be far more expensive and disruptive than either candidate is telling you.
Our oil addiction hamstrings America's foreign policy and military, contributes to global warming and has robbed the nation of trillions of dollars. One of the country's leading energy modelers estimates that foreign-oil dependence cost our economy $750 billion this year, a little more than the daunting price tag of the proposed Wall Street bailout.
The main culprit sits in your driveway: Due largely to massive increases in highway fuel consumption, our oil imports doubled in the last 30 years. But petroleum is everywhere—in asphalt, ink pens, burger wrappers. Replacing it won't be nearly as easy as it sounds on the campaign trail.
In speech after speech, McCain and Obama extol energy independence and rip the federal government's failure to achieve it. McCain promises to secure "strategic independence" from foreign sources by 2025, with a plan that includes a $300 million prize for a super-efficient electric car battery. Obama pledges to effectively replace oil imports from the Middle East within a decade, largely by investing $150 billion in alternative fuels.
Experts suggest the candidates are wildly understating the cost and time that true independence would require. The transition to a national life without imported oil appears so expensive that none of more than a dozen scientists and scholars interviewed by the Tribune could calculate a price tag. Only one even ventured a ballpark guess: $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
"You're talking really big numbers, to be independent, in terms of the cost," said Hillard Huntington, executive director of Stanford University's Energy Modeling Forum, who declined to speculate on a specific figure. "I'm not sure the electorate would be willing to do it."
Then again, weaning ourselves from foreign oil may be cheaper than the alternative.
No quick fix Presidents and candidates have promised energy independence since the oil shocks of the early 1970s. To see why they all failed, and why the goal is so daunting for this year's contenders, it helps to examine what it would take for one fast-growing American city to achieve "independence" within a generation.
Take Orlando, a theme-park hub where Walt Disney opened "Tomorrowland" in 1971, just two years before Richard Nixon promised Americans they soon would depend on no other nation to heat their homes and power their cars.
Today, city leaders here are trying to envision exactly that.
You can stand on the balcony of a downtown high-rise with Mayor Buddy Dyer as he points out the path of the commuter train they're building from scratch. Count the sparkling new condos, built to concentrate more of the city's population around the stations.
Sniff the bundles of garbage that soon will help cool and light the homes of Orlando residents through a trash-to-power plant. Spend an afternoon on the rides at Universal Studios, where engineers are switching their vehicle fleet to biofuels—and dreaming of a solar-paneled parking lot where employees could charge their sun-powered cars.
Dyer's partner in the project is Alan Oyler, a fellow engineer for whom energy independence is more than just a professional goal. In his garage at home, he's overhauling his 1984 Mercedes to run on vegetable oil.
"What can we do to be self-sufficient?" Oyler muses as he and Dyer ride in a city hybrid minivan. "To supply our own fuel demand, transportation and power? And how can we reduce our need?"
When Dyer and Oyler turn the van back toward City Hall, their ambition runs headlong into reality. The traffic on Interstate Highway 4 is jammed with commuters inching their way from work to home. In greater Orlando, those places usually are miles and miles apart. It's only going to get worse. City planners anticipate 1.2 million more residents in the next 20 years.
This is a small slice of the challenge America faces in its independence pursuit. We import almost 14 million barrels of oil daily, nearly 60 percent of our total use.
Experts say we could shave imports a bit by drilling more in our coastal waters and tapping our mountain-state oil shale—but that's not nearly enough for independence. A future not reliant on foreign oil, most experts agree, would require some combination of major lifestyle and technological change.
In one scenario, Americans abandon sprawl and freeways for high-density, public-transit-powered urban living. In the second, we keep our exurban commutes but make them in cars that use little or no gasoline—super-efficient hybrids, perhaps fueled by electricity or biofuel or hydrogen. Many experts predict a mix of the two.
Either way, we'd need a new network of fueling stations, likely a beefed-up electric grid, and perhaps to literally swap out 250 million cars, trucks and motorcycles.
Plans that sound ambitious on the campaign trail fall short of what's needed to get there. Obama's proposal to replace imports from the Middle East and Venezuela includes putting 1 million new plug-in hybrids on the road. That's not even enough to make Orlando energy-independent.
On the other hand, if every American car owner took Obama up on his offer of a $7,000 tax credit to buy a plug-in hybrid, it would cost the federal government close to $1 trillion.
McCain's energy speeches emphasize domestic oil drilling, which would replace a small fraction of imports, and building a fleet of nuclear power plants—which would only reduce foreign dependence significantly if America converted to electric cars.
Mayor Dyer hopes to see a day when anyone can live car-free in Orlando—by 2050, when he's 92.
"The typical political point of view is, 'I'm here for four years. I want my four years to be great,' " he says. But "you have to take the long view."
Costly paralysis Perhaps the simplest argument for independence is financial.
Oil is traded globally, but supply and demand alone don't dictate its price. A few nationalized interests control much of world's oil reserves. They keep prices higher than a free market would, says David Greene, an energy researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. That socks our economy three ways: We transfer wealth abroad that would otherwise stay here. We lose manufacturing production. And when prices spike and fall, they temporarily disrupt our output.
This year, Greene says that all adds up to a $750 billion loss. In coming decades, he predicts it could hit $1 trillion a year. Other experts call that a major opportunity for the next president.
"To truly woo us away from oil, you're looking at somewhere between 1 and 2 trillion dollars," says Charles Ebinger, a longtime energy consultant in developing nations who now directs the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institute. Compared to what dependence costs the economy, he adds, the nation can afford it.
High oil prices already are spurring change in car-buying, commuting patterns and investment in new technologies. But most experts, drawing on history, argue that market forces alone won't change America's energy picture long-term. Oil prices are too volatile to exert a steady pressure on Americans' habits.
"Maintaining oil independence will require sustained effort," Greene writes at the end of a recent report. "History teaches that if we relent, believing that the problem has been solved, our oil dependence problem is likely to return."
Kelly Sims Gallagher, who directs the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group at Harvard University, calls independence "a politically difficult thing that would require a lot of presidential leadership. There's a good argument to be made here, but somebody's going to have to be persuasive."
3.This article speaks about structural requirements for electrical cars and gives some outlooks on future developments. After seeing you tube videos related to "who killed the electrical car" I was quite amazed that there is actually a development in many countries. The article speaks about business companies who want to build around 100 000 refill stations to 2015 and about a test project in Berlin including about 1000 refill stations and 100 electrical cars. I wonder if this development will take place. However, I brought up an objection in class which was also indicated by this article. The energy needed for electric cras will come from the energy net which is mainly based on coal and oil or nuclear energy. As our energy system wont change that fast, I see this whole issue more as a shift of pollution, although the pollution of one plant might be a bit less than the combined solution of the according number of cars.
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4.
Electric Cars: What's Needed Now Better batteries and longer range make them viable. Next hurdle: a network of places to recharge on the go by Matt Mabe
Europe Nokia's Bid to Rule the Mobile Web - BusinessWeek Prospect Fades for Joint EU Bank Bailout - BusinessWeek Credit Starvation Could Whack Britain - BusinessWeek Chevrolet Pins Europe Hopes on Cruze - BusinessWeek Electric Cars: What's Needed Now - BusinessWeek Story Tools post a comment e-mail this story print this story order a reprint suggest a story digg this save to del.icio.us linkedin connections View Slide Show They're finally for real. Plug-in electric vehicles are no longer consigned to the imaginations of the environmentally minded or fuel-price-shocked motorists. Since the beginning of this decade, innovations in lithium ion batteries and the materials used to make them have increased the range of electric cars and decreased the time needed for a recharge. Increased green awareness and the unpredictable behavior of oil prices are driving investment in electric car technology as never before.
Until now, all-electric vehicles have been a niche. A few tens of thousands are in use in municipal and university fleets, and several limited-edition luxury roadsters are available from upstarts such as Tesla and Venturi. Now that the vehicles themselves are reaching greater technical maturity, the biggest remaining hurdle is to create an infrastructure for recharging them on the go. Analysts caution that a widespread network of charge points remains many years away.
Upsurge in Europe The problem isn't lack of opportunity. A recent study from researcher Frost & Sullivan forecasts that by 2015, Europe alone will see 250,000 all-electric vehicles on the roads. By then, the technology and marketing of electric vehicles will be such that sedans, family vans, and sports cars all will join the repertoire of available models. Major auto manufacturers in Europe, the U.S., and Asia are now teaming up with electronics companies to get these vehicles rolling. "Every day, there is another investor looking to get in on this," says Anjan Kumar, an India-based researcher who authored the Frost & Sullivan report.
Yet no matter how fast and long-running electric cars may become, sales won't take off unless a recharging infrastructure grows in tandem. It's a classic chicken-or-egg dilemma: Utilities won't invest in charge points if there aren't enough cars, but consumers won't buy vehicles until they have ample places to "fill up." The needed infrastructure also will be hugely expensive to build and put new stresses on the electrical grid. "It's going to be a drain on the system," says Stephanie Brinley, an analyst at market researcher AutoPacific.
Fortunately, automakers and utilities are talking a lot more than they did a decade ago, Brinley says. But discussions won't turn into concrete plans until there are profits to be made—something she warns is still years off. "Hybrids have been around for 10 years, and they're still not profitable," she notes.
Boon for Cities The only path forward is gradually to bootstrap fleets and recharging networks. A handful of European cities are exploring this approach by setting up charge points and testing fleets of all-electric vehicles. After all, crowded and polluted cities are the ideal place for short-range, low-speed, zero-emission vehicles. Since January, Daimler (DAI) has used London as a testing ground for a fleet of 100 EV versions of its popular Smart ForTwo mini-car. And just last week, the company announced a deal with German energy utility RWE (RWEG.DE) to test 100 cars and install 500 recharge points in Berlin as part of a test project called "E-mobility Berlin."
One brave electric car company is even trying to reinvent the entire business model of the auto industry by turning personal transportation into something more like a subscription service. Starting in 2009, Palo Alto (Calif.) venture-backed startup Project Better Place will begin building and operating an electrical network capable of supporting tens of thousands of cars. Customers will buy a monthly mileage plan, and in turn will get recharge points installed at their homes and workplaces. For trips of more than 120 miles (193km), they'll be able to pull into automated battery swap stations and replace depleted batteries in less time than it takes to fill up a tank of gas.
Tipping Point By 2011, Project Better Place aims to have 100,000 exchange stations and half a million recharge units up and running. In partnership with Renault-Nissan (RENA.PA), which will provide the vehicles, Better Place already has signed agreements with Israel and Denmark—two countries where fuel prices are high and domestic travel distances are relatively short—to build networks (BusinessWeek.com, 1/25/08).
It's too early to tell how or when electric cars will become a viable mass-market business, but change is in the air. "We're just getting to the tipping point now," says Tim Urquhart, an analyst at market researcher Global Insight. Urquhart says government subsidies for the transition to electric vehicles and tougher pollution regulations for petroleum vehicles are the carrots and sticks needed to force the auto industry to reposition itself for a new kind of profitability that's gentler on the environment.
For a look at some of the newest electric cars and concepts, see our slide show.
Matt Mabe is a reporter in BusinessWeek's Paris bureau
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
4 comments:
1. Haerang Park
2. Don't blame cities for climate change, see them as solutions
-------
3. Mobilising public attention towards an environmental problem and working on an action plan is crucial when we want to find a solution to mitigate the negative impact on us and the world as a whole. One more important step that should not be omitted is to determine who caused such problems and would be responsilbe for it. Many said and believed that cities and people living there should be blamed for climate change. This is because of the image of modernised cities. Here a paper, published in the journal Environment and Urbanisation by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), reveals that cities are responsible for only 40 per cent of emissions. The remaining proportion comes from agriculture, deforestation, heavy industry, wealthy households, and coal, or gas fuelled power stations outside cities. This fact is valuable to know especially when governments try to set up regulations for greenhouse gas reduction and sell emission tickets globally.
--------
4. From: SAGE Publications UK
Published September 26, 2008 09:27 AM
Don't blame cities for climate change, see them as solutions
RELATED ARTICLES
Saltwater solution to save crops
Viruses, oxygen and our green oceans
Intellectual work induces excessive calorie intake
Climate: New spin on ocean's role
/pollution/article/38264/print
Cities are being unfairly blamed for most of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions and this threatens efforts to tackle climate change, warns a study in the October 2008 issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization.
The paper says cities are often blamed for 75 to 80 percent of emissions, but that the true value is closer to 40 percent. It adds that the potential for cities to help address climate change is being overlooked because of this error.
"Blaming cities for greenhouse gas emissions misses the point that cities are a large part of the solution," says the paper's author, David Satterthwaite, a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). "Well planned, well governed cities can provide high living standards that do not require high consumption levels and high greenhouse gas emissions."
United Nations agencies, former US President Bill Clinton's climate change initiative and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have all stated that between 75 and 80 per cent of emissions come from cities.
Satterthwaite used data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show that only two-fifths of all greenhouse gases from human activities are generated within cities. Agriculture and deforestation account for around 30 percent, and the rest are mostly from heavy industry, wealthy households and coal, oil or gas fuelled power stations located in rural areas and in urban centres too small to be considered cities.
But the paper also highlights how it can be misleading to allocate greenhouse gas emissions to places. For instance, emissions from power stations should be allocated to those that consume the electricity, not the places where the power stations are located. Emissions generated by industries should likewise be allocated to the person consuming the goods the industries produce.
"Consumer demand drives the production of goods and services, and therefore the emission of greenhouse gases," says Satterthwaite. "Allocating emissions to consumers rather than producers shows that the problem is not cities but a minority of the world's population with high-consumption lifestyles. A large proportion of these consumers live not in cities but in small towns and rural areas."
In addition, allocating greenhouse gas emissions to consumers increases the share of global emissions from Europe and North America and highlights the very low emissions per person of most city inhabitants in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In general, wealthy people outside cities are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than those in cities as they have larger homes that need to be heated or cooled, more automobiles per household and greater automobile use.
"The way cities are designed and run can make a big difference," says Satterthwaite. "Most cities in the United States have three to five times the gasoline use per person of most European cities but not three to five times the living standards."
Satterthwaite points out that cities offer many opportunities to reduce per capita greenhouse gas emissions, such as by promoting walking, bicycling and public transport and having building designs that require much less energy for heating and cooling.
"Achieving the needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide depends on seeing and acting on the potential of cities to combine a high quality of life with low greenhouse gas emissions," he says.
5. http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/38264/print
1. Moctar Aboubacar
2. Environmental protection agencies
3. What puzzled me about the idea of the Treadmill of production is the opposition of economic success and production expansion to environmental consciousness. This article talks a little about an example I think is relevant in the light of our readings these past three sessions or so. How would the Environmental protection agency of the United States' role in creating and enforcing regulations be seen by our favorite EM and ToP authors? Well, they do deal with it; Freudenberg, at least, to show that governmental regulation is often ignored, ineffective or bypassed by companies seeking to produce the amount they wish at the environmental costs that may come of it.
But, (at least in theory, for though I don't know much about the EPA, I have heard that it can be quite lax with its standards and with enforcement), the idea of a State agency given powers to regulate such pollution seems great. Freudenberg's problem with imbalance of power and privileged accounts seems to stem from the fact that big capital sometimes engages in pollution. I wonder if a strong State stance against environmental degradation could not successfully combat both the big companies and their pollution, and (with our focus on the United States, we have not really seen this yet) widespread environmental problems as a direct result of the general population (I keep thinking back to my Haitian deforestation example). But in this latter case, what is the State's concern with preserving the lives of it's people who cut trees to make a living? We seemed to dismiss (certainly Freudenberg does) the idea that strict regulation on companies would harm the economy... would strict regulations on individuals be as possible?
Yeah, I strayed a little bit, but the article here seems to talk about both the supply and demand impacted by a State actor's decision, which brought me right back to last week and this week's reading...
------------------
Recent new rules announced by the Environmental Protection Agency to curb emissions from small engines, such as those on lawn mowers, is the sort of step Americans need to see.
As awareness has grown about emissions in general and what pollution is doing to the environment, the big issue of small engines has become a compelling example of the kind of problem the nation must address. The degree of pollution those engines cause, small though the engines are, continues to be eye-opening.
Advertisement
The EPA early this month announced new regulations that will require reductions of 35 percent in emissions from gas-powered lawn equipment less than 25 horsepower. That requirement will go into effect in 2011. It does not pertain to engines already in use. Gas-powered recreational boats will have to have emissions reduced by 70 percent in 2010.
According to the EPA, the new restrictions will result in the reduction of hundreds of thousands of tons of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxide. The EPA also says the new rules will save 190 million gallons of gas each year. At first glance, those numbers seem surprising, but the nature of the engines and the enormous number of small engines in use throughout the country help drive home the need to address problems caused by mowers and other lawn equipment.
Consider some of the measures of the impact of gas-powered mowers. The EPA says lawn mowers create 5 percent of the air pollution in this country. One mower in one hour creates the same amount of pollution that eight new cars moving 55 mph would create, according to one group, the Union of Concerned Scientists. Another group, at Eartheasy.com, says those string-like gas-powered trimmers used on lawns create 21 times more emissions than a typical car.
The longstanding means of mowing lawns need changes.
Findings about the effects of lawn and garden equipment and the reductions being required by the EPA have prompted complaints about costs. But as with many environmental issues, the subject cannot be looked upon only for its financial impact. Cost is a factor, but often a case is made against an environmental move as though no one had considered the price. The nation must consider the environmental cost of not acting. In the matter of gas-powered lawn equipment, the estimate is that new regulations means the price of mowers will increase about 18 percent. Similar percentages are given for price increases for boats. Familiar lines of complaint are that the changes will force manufacturers to increase their prices and that it will fall eventually to consumers. That's usually the tactic utilized to drum up opposition to a new regulation.
The EPA guidelines on small engines are an encouraging sign. Regulators should continue along that path. Ultimately, the approach on lawn and garden equipment, boat engines and similar gas-powered devices should follow the same line of action that is emerging with automobiles. There should be a search for alternative fuels, and there should be a dramatic push toward engines that function on other power sources like electricity, which is not a new concept for lawn mowers anyway. The principles of saving the environment apply across the board, and the motivation to find efficient, affordable alternatives should not wane.
-----------
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080927/OPINION01/809270368/1008
1. Sally Paik
2. Kicking oil habit harder than they say
3. Barack Obama and John McCain are promising voters life without a drop of imported oil. McCain promises to secure "strategic independence" from foreign sources by 2025 and Obama pledges to effectively replace oil imports from the Middle East within a decade. However, "energy independence" isn't so easy. A future not reliant on foreign oil, would require some combination of major lifestyle and technological change. Also, oil independence won't happen after a day or after a few years, it will require sustained effort.
4. ----------------------------------
5. UNITED STATES OF ANXIETY
Kicking oil habit harder than they say
Neither candidate's plan comes even close to the decades and trillions of dollars needed to do it
By Jim Tankersley and Christi Parsons | Chicago Tribune correspondents
September 26, 2008
ORLANDO — Barack Obama and John McCain are promising voters a Tomorrowland of electric cars and high-speed trains and solar panels, a vision of American life without a drop of imported oil.
But their plans to get there look more like Fantasyland.
A host of energy policy experts agree that true "energy independence"—a key catch phrase of this presidential campaign—would be far more expensive and disruptive than either candidate is telling you.
Our oil addiction hamstrings America's foreign policy and military, contributes to global warming and has robbed the nation of trillions of dollars. One of the country's leading energy modelers estimates that foreign-oil dependence cost our economy $750 billion this year, a little more than the daunting price tag of the proposed Wall Street bailout.
The main culprit sits in your driveway: Due largely to massive increases in highway fuel consumption, our oil imports doubled in the last 30 years. But petroleum is everywhere—in asphalt, ink pens, burger wrappers. Replacing it won't be nearly as easy as it sounds on the campaign trail.
In speech after speech, McCain and Obama extol energy independence and rip the federal government's failure to achieve it. McCain promises to secure "strategic independence" from foreign sources by 2025, with a plan that includes a $300 million prize for a super-efficient electric car battery. Obama pledges to effectively replace oil imports from the Middle East within a decade, largely by investing $150 billion in alternative fuels.
Experts suggest the candidates are wildly understating the cost and time that true independence would require. The transition to a national life without imported oil appears so expensive that none of more than a dozen scientists and scholars interviewed by the Tribune could calculate a price tag. Only one even ventured a ballpark guess: $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
"You're talking really big numbers, to be independent, in terms of the cost," said Hillard Huntington, executive director of Stanford University's Energy Modeling Forum, who declined to speculate on a specific figure. "I'm not sure the electorate would be willing to do it."
Then again, weaning ourselves from foreign oil may be cheaper than the alternative.
No quick fix
Presidents and candidates have promised energy independence since the oil shocks of the early 1970s. To see why they all failed, and why the goal is so daunting for this year's contenders, it helps to examine what it would take for one fast-growing American city to achieve "independence" within a generation.
Take Orlando, a theme-park hub where Walt Disney opened "Tomorrowland" in 1971, just two years before Richard Nixon promised Americans they soon would depend on no other nation to heat their homes and power their cars.
Today, city leaders here are trying to envision exactly that.
You can stand on the balcony of a downtown high-rise with Mayor Buddy Dyer as he points out the path of the commuter train they're building from scratch. Count the sparkling new condos, built to concentrate more of the city's population around the stations.
Sniff the bundles of garbage that soon will help cool and light the homes of Orlando residents through a trash-to-power plant. Spend an afternoon on the rides at Universal Studios, where engineers are switching their vehicle fleet to biofuels—and dreaming of a solar-paneled parking lot where employees could charge their sun-powered cars.
Dyer's partner in the project is Alan Oyler, a fellow engineer for whom energy independence is more than just a professional goal. In his garage at home, he's overhauling his 1984 Mercedes to run on vegetable oil.
"What can we do to be self-sufficient?" Oyler muses as he and Dyer ride in a city hybrid minivan. "To supply our own fuel demand, transportation and power? And how can we reduce our need?"
When Dyer and Oyler turn the van back toward City Hall, their ambition runs headlong into reality. The traffic on Interstate Highway 4 is jammed with commuters inching their way from work to home. In greater Orlando, those places usually are miles and miles apart. It's only going to get worse. City planners anticipate 1.2 million more residents in the next 20 years.
This is a small slice of the challenge America faces in its independence pursuit. We import almost 14 million barrels of oil daily, nearly 60 percent of our total use.
Experts say we could shave imports a bit by drilling more in our coastal waters and tapping our mountain-state oil shale—but that's not nearly enough for independence. A future not reliant on foreign oil, most experts agree, would require some combination of major lifestyle and technological change.
In one scenario, Americans abandon sprawl and freeways for high-density, public-transit-powered urban living. In the second, we keep our exurban commutes but make them in cars that use little or no gasoline—super-efficient hybrids, perhaps fueled by electricity or biofuel or hydrogen. Many experts predict a mix of the two.
Either way, we'd need a new network of fueling stations, likely a beefed-up electric grid, and perhaps to literally swap out 250 million cars, trucks and motorcycles.
Plans that sound ambitious on the campaign trail fall short of what's needed to get there. Obama's proposal to replace imports from the Middle East and Venezuela includes putting 1 million new plug-in hybrids on the road. That's not even enough to make Orlando energy-independent.
On the other hand, if every American car owner took Obama up on his offer of a $7,000 tax credit to buy a plug-in hybrid, it would cost the federal government close to $1 trillion.
McCain's energy speeches emphasize domestic oil drilling, which would replace a small fraction of imports, and building a fleet of nuclear power plants—which would only reduce foreign dependence significantly if America converted to electric cars.
Mayor Dyer hopes to see a day when anyone can live car-free in Orlando—by 2050, when he's 92.
"The typical political point of view is, 'I'm here for four years. I want my four years to be great,' " he says. But "you have to take the long view."
Costly paralysis
Perhaps the simplest argument for independence is financial.
Oil is traded globally, but supply and demand alone don't dictate its price. A few nationalized interests control much of world's oil reserves. They keep prices higher than a free market would, says David Greene, an energy researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. That socks our economy three ways: We transfer wealth abroad that would otherwise stay here. We lose manufacturing production. And when prices spike and fall, they temporarily disrupt our output.
This year, Greene says that all adds up to a $750 billion loss. In coming decades, he predicts it could hit $1 trillion a year. Other experts call that a major opportunity for the next president.
"To truly woo us away from oil, you're looking at somewhere between 1 and 2 trillion dollars," says Charles Ebinger, a longtime energy consultant in developing nations who now directs the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institute. Compared to what dependence costs the economy, he adds, the nation can afford it.
High oil prices already are spurring change in car-buying, commuting patterns and investment in new technologies. But most experts, drawing on history, argue that market forces alone won't change America's energy picture long-term. Oil prices are too volatile to exert a steady pressure on Americans' habits.
"Maintaining oil independence will require sustained effort," Greene writes at the end of a recent report. "History teaches that if we relent, believing that the problem has been solved, our oil dependence problem is likely to return."
Kelly Sims Gallagher, who directs the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group at Harvard University, calls independence "a politically difficult thing that would require a lot of presidential leadership. There's a good argument to be made here, but somebody's going to have to be persuasive."
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7. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-anxiety-energysep26,0,1297430,full.story
1. Bjoern Schmidt
2. Actual Development in electrical cars?
3.This article speaks about structural requirements for electrical cars and gives some outlooks on future developments. After seeing you tube videos related to "who killed the electrical car" I was quite amazed that there is actually a development in many countries. The article speaks about business companies who want to build around 100 000 refill stations to 2015 and about a test project in Berlin including about 1000 refill stations and 100 electrical cars.
I wonder if this development will take place.
However, I brought up an objection in class which was also indicated by this article. The energy needed for electric cras will come from the energy net which is mainly based on coal and oil or nuclear energy. As our energy system wont change that fast, I see this whole issue more as a shift of pollution, although the pollution of one plant might be a bit less than the combined solution of the according number of cars.
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4.
Electric Cars: What's Needed Now
Better batteries and longer range make them viable. Next hurdle: a network of places to recharge on the go
by Matt Mabe
Europe
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They're finally for real. Plug-in electric vehicles are no longer consigned to the imaginations of the environmentally minded or fuel-price-shocked motorists. Since the beginning of this decade, innovations in lithium ion batteries and the materials used to make them have increased the range of electric cars and decreased the time needed for a recharge. Increased green awareness and the unpredictable behavior of oil prices are driving investment in electric car technology as never before.
Until now, all-electric vehicles have been a niche. A few tens of thousands are in use in municipal and university fleets, and several limited-edition luxury roadsters are available from upstarts such as Tesla and Venturi. Now that the vehicles themselves are reaching greater technical maturity, the biggest remaining hurdle is to create an infrastructure for recharging them on the go. Analysts caution that a widespread network of charge points remains many years away.
Upsurge in Europe
The problem isn't lack of opportunity. A recent study from researcher Frost & Sullivan forecasts that by 2015, Europe alone will see 250,000 all-electric vehicles on the roads. By then, the technology and marketing of electric vehicles will be such that sedans, family vans, and sports cars all will join the repertoire of available models. Major auto manufacturers in Europe, the U.S., and Asia are now teaming up with electronics companies to get these vehicles rolling. "Every day, there is another investor looking to get in on this," says Anjan Kumar, an India-based researcher who authored the Frost & Sullivan report.
Yet no matter how fast and long-running electric cars may become, sales won't take off unless a recharging infrastructure grows in tandem. It's a classic chicken-or-egg dilemma: Utilities won't invest in charge points if there aren't enough cars, but consumers won't buy vehicles until they have ample places to "fill up." The needed infrastructure also will be hugely expensive to build and put new stresses on the electrical grid. "It's going to be a drain on the system," says Stephanie Brinley, an analyst at market researcher AutoPacific.
Fortunately, automakers and utilities are talking a lot more than they did a decade ago, Brinley says. But discussions won't turn into concrete plans until there are profits to be made—something she warns is still years off. "Hybrids have been around for 10 years, and they're still not profitable," she notes.
Boon for Cities
The only path forward is gradually to bootstrap fleets and recharging networks. A handful of European cities are exploring this approach by setting up charge points and testing fleets of all-electric vehicles. After all, crowded and polluted cities are the ideal place for short-range, low-speed, zero-emission vehicles. Since January, Daimler (DAI) has used London as a testing ground for a fleet of 100 EV versions of its popular Smart ForTwo mini-car. And just last week, the company announced a deal with German energy utility RWE (RWEG.DE) to test 100 cars and install 500 recharge points in Berlin as part of a test project called "E-mobility Berlin."
One brave electric car company is even trying to reinvent the entire business model of the auto industry by turning personal transportation into something more like a subscription service. Starting in 2009, Palo Alto (Calif.) venture-backed startup Project Better Place will begin building and operating an electrical network capable of supporting tens of thousands of cars. Customers will buy a monthly mileage plan, and in turn will get recharge points installed at their homes and workplaces. For trips of more than 120 miles (193km), they'll be able to pull into automated battery swap stations and replace depleted batteries in less time than it takes to fill up a tank of gas.
Tipping Point
By 2011, Project Better Place aims to have 100,000 exchange stations and half a million recharge units up and running. In partnership with Renault-Nissan (RENA.PA), which will provide the vehicles, Better Place already has signed agreements with Israel and Denmark—two countries where fuel prices are high and domestic travel distances are relatively short—to build networks (BusinessWeek.com, 1/25/08).
It's too early to tell how or when electric cars will become a viable mass-market business, but change is in the air. "We're just getting to the tipping point now," says Tim Urquhart, an analyst at market researcher Global Insight. Urquhart says government subsidies for the transition to electric vehicles and tougher pollution regulations for petroleum vehicles are the carrots and sticks needed to force the auto industry to reposition itself for a new kind of profitability that's gentler on the environment.
For a look at some of the newest electric cars and concepts, see our slide show.
Matt Mabe is a reporter in BusinessWeek's Paris bureau
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5. http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2008/gb2008103_795504.htm?chan=globalbiz_europe+index+page_top+stories
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