February 2008 Archives

Passed along to me by reader Kevin:

What Pennsylvania industries produce and what they recycle in a nice easy to read grid by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (DEP).
dep.state.pa.us/recycle_markets/

Oil prices briefly surpassed $103 a barrel for the first time today as persistent weakness in the U.S. dollar and the prospect of lower interest rates attracted fresh money to the oil market. AP

We appear to be locked in a trend. Dollar down so it costs us more to be dependent on foreign oil. Money is flowing into oil because everything else to invest in isn't working. Higher oil pushes up prices/costs in general. The economy erodes....

....so there isn't much to invest in; more money goes into oil

and then more money goes into oil

And it will push higher and higher, until there is a drop in demand either by alternative or a global economy grinding to a halt.

Look for an increase at a gas pump near you.

Paul Kuehnel - York Daily Record / Sunday News

Elijah Leonard, age 2, grieves for his 'Uncle Mark' through painting. His mother has put his paintings on Craigslist hoping to save money for college.

Paul Kuehnel - York Daily Record / Sunday News
Neighbors reflect on a natural gas explosion a year after it leveled a home at 2433 S. Queen St. in York Township severely damaging a home next door.

The Golf Hybrid will get almost 70 mph while meeting Europe's stringent Euro V and America's Tier 2 Bin 5 emissions standards, making it green enough even for California. The car is said to emit just 89 g/km of CO2.
(For comparison, the Prius emits 104 g/km and Honda Civic Hybrid emits 116.) wired.com

( Paul Kuehnel - York Daily Record / Sunday News )

Senior District Justice Paul M. Diehl Jr. is honored for 50 years on the bench as a magistrate in York County. He is believed to be the longest serving justice in Pennsylvania. He reflects on the past and changes he has witnessed.

The Toyota 1/X concept, named because it takes a percentage of what other cars need, made its North American debut at the 2008 Chicago Auto Show,

The 1/X roof is produced from a bio-plastic made from environmentally-responsible material derived from kenaf and ramie plants. The result is a roof that improves heat insulation, emits less carbon dioxide, increases the amount of light entering the cabin, and reducing noise.

The plug-in hybrid unit with a 0.5-liter flexible-fuel engine is 1/4th of the total weight of the Prius powertrain yet has the same acceleration.
netcomposites.com

Paul Kuehnel - York Daily Record / Sunday News

The Cowboy Church, held at the York Springs Equestrian Center, celebrates it's one-year anniversary.

Photovoltaic panels in the moonroof add to the charge of the batteries and also power pre-heaters for the transmission fluid and diesel fuel, the manufacturer says cuts warm-up times considerably and, in turn, further boosting efficiency. The wheels have sail-shaped spokes designed for efficient ventilation and lower wind resistance.

BMW calls it a "Mild ActiveHybrid," which means it's similar in concept to the gasoline-electric systems in large SUVs and pickups from General Motors and the Honda Civic Hybrid.

The Vision EfficientDynamics employs a 2.0-liter clean diesel engine with twin variable-geometry turbochargers and direct injection that produces 204 horsepower and 295 pound-feet of torque. To fully exploit the diesel engine's relatively narrow rev range, BMW fitted the concept with a new eight-speed automatic gearbox from ZF. Flange-mounted to the transmission is an electric motor-generator powered by a lithium-ion battery pack that spins out an additional 20 horsepower and 155 pound-feet of torque during acceleration.

The bottom line is about 36 mpg combined city/highway with emissions of only 172 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer (consider that the X5 3.0si returns roughly half as many miles per gallon and emits 244 g/km) blog.wired.com

The car was a Guinness record holder set in 1973 in a contest sponsored by Shell Oil Co. and then it disappeared into a museum in Florida.

The mileage from the mostly stock four-cylinder came from heating and insulating the fuel line so the gas entered the engine as lean vapor. Then they drove the car on a closed course at a steady 30 mph. The roof was chopped and the narrowed read axle held hard rubber tires. The interior was stripped of everything but a seat.

A stripped car wouldn't work for a daily driver, but according to Evan McMullen, owner of Seattle-based Cosmopolitan Motors, if the car were made more drivable and lost 200 mpg -- it still would get 176 mpg.

"If this is something they could do back in the 1970s, what happened?" he asked, poring over paperwork, including patents, for the car.

"Certainly in 34 years we could do something to make this work."

"Here's a car that was 20 years old at the time of the contest that was the project of a couple of guys in a garage," he said. "You can't tell me we can't do better than this with cars today."

More info and photos of the car
seattlepi.nwsource.com

American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
annual list of the most environmentally-friendly cars by class:
TOYOTA PRIUS
HONDA CIVIC HYBRID
SMART FORTWO CONVERTIBLE/COUPE 1.0L 3, auto stk
HONDA FIT 1.5L 4, auto
FORD ESCAPE HYBRID
HYUNDAI SONATA 2.4L 4, auto
SUBARU OUTBACK WAGON 2.5L 4, auto stk 4wd
NISSAN ROGUE 2.5L 4, auto
TOYOTA TACOMA 2.7L 4, auto
TOYOTA SIENNA 3.5L 6, auto
CHEVROLET TAHOE HYBRID C1500 6.0L 8, auto
NISSAN FRONTIER 4.0L 6, auto 4wd

full listing and reasoning of how they arrive at a green score greenercars.org

And vehicles with the lowest green score:
VOLKSWAGEN TOUAREG
BUGATTI VEYRON
MERCEDES-BENZ GL320 CD
JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE 3.0L 6, auto 4wd
MERCEDES-BENZ R320 CDI 3.0L 6, auto 4wd
LAMBORGHINI MURCIELAGO
MURCIELAGO ROADSTER 6.5L 12, manual 4wd
MERCEDES-BENZ ML320 CD
MERCEDES-BENZ G55 AMG 5.4L 8, auto 4wd
HUMMER H2 c 6.0L 8, auto 4wd
GMC YUKON 2500 c 6.0L 8, auto 4wd
BENTLEY AZURE 6.7L 8, auto stk
BENTLEY ARNAGE d 6.7L 8, auto stk

Ben Caire, vice president of engineering for United Biofuel, Inc. in Manchester Township , referred to algae-derived biodiesel fuel as the holy grail for bio-fuel producers during a panel discussion tonight at Martin Library.

Could the answer be in a place we didn't think to look...Algae is the original oil producer on planet earth... Algae can double it's mass every few hours...The process compresses a 150 million year process into 3 days, states this video from the algae-derived biodiesel fuel company Solazyme

Successful powering a factory-standard automobile for long distances under typical driving conditions has been completed. The car and fuel will make their public debuts at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

More information.
prnewswire.com

A panel discussion about environmentalism in York will be 7 p.m. today at Martin Li­brary. I will be the moderator.

Panel participants in­clude:

Elizabeth Kepley, an environmental educa­tor at Gifford Pinchot State Park
Mark Platts, Lancaster-York Heritage Region
Liz Winand, Shank’s Mare Outfitters at the Susquehanna River
Bob Astor, Shipley Fuels Marketing, LLC
Benjamin Caire, United Biofuels
State Rep. Eugene DePasquale, D­West Manchester Town­ship.

The diesel-electric hybrid is expected to attain 69 mpg

The diesel engine used in the Golf Hybrid meets all Euro 5 emissions criteria and also passes the stringent Tier 2 Bin 5 emissions standards here in the U.S.

Given that costs involved with producing a diesel-electric hybrid powertrain, VW is looking to spread the technology to a number of its vehicle lines. According to 4Car, likely transplants include the VW Jetta and the Audi A3. Other Golf-based vehicles that would be a prime target for the new powertrain include the upcoming VW Tiguan and Audi Q5 crossovers. dailytech.com

Crude oil advanced to a record $101.32 barrel in New York today amid rising demand and concern inflation will erode the value of alternative investments.

Global oil demand will rise 1.7 million barrels a day to 87.6 million barrels a day this year, the International Energy Agency said in a monthly report last week. The U.S. Energy Department and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries also expect daily global consumption to rise by more than 1 million barrels this year.

"We should be looking at oil in the $120-to-$150 area by the end of the year without any major changes," said Peter Schiff, chief executive officer of Darien, Connecticut-based brokerage Euro Pacific Capital, which has $1 billion in customer accounts. www.iht.com

So oil is going up because everything else is a bad investment. This somewhat runs against the idea that in a recession (which isn't officially one) demand declines. It would seem that any scenario is good for the oil business for one good reason. It is the dominate energy business by a wide margin.

Anyone for $4 gasoline for Christmas?

Paul Kuehnel - York Daily Record / Sunday News

Cuban immigrant Marcos Ferral, who was born in Cuba and immigrated to the United States in 1980, reflects on the transfer of power from Fidel Castro to his brother Raoul Castro.

A Wisconsin 29-member task force hoping to achieve energy conservation and efficiency by curbing the states growing appetite for energy. Electricity use has been growing by about 2% a year in the state.

The task force among other things proposes a change in the way utilities earn profits.

When utility profits are tied to sales of energy, there is no incentive for them to promote energy conservation, the report says. The Public Service Commission would be called on to launch a proceeding designed to create more incentives for energy efficiency. jsonline.com

The incentive must come from green choices and the demand for those choices come from consumers who petition their government (who converts tax dollars to destiny) and supporting individuals who pioneer the way to alternative choices.

The new Chevy Malibu has been selling well. One plant producing Malibus on one shift has expanded to assembling them on two shifts in just its first few months on the market,

The 3.6-liter, 252-horsepower V-6 is replaced with a 2.4-liter, 164-h.p. 4 with a nickel-metal-hydride assist. A mild power assist and auto-stop at traffic lights yields an extra 2mpg. chicagotribune.com

The success of Plug-in hybrids hinge on the development of lithium-ion batteries. Some interesting inventions that will make your cell phone battery ready to drive your car. Differences in chemistry and structure will depend on application.

The most promising electrode chemical makeups, then, involve nano-engineered materials like phosphates of iron, lithium-titanate spinel and, most recently, bundles of silicon nanowires. Making an electrode out of these tiny particles increases the available surface area for the ions to bond to and exchange electrons, avoiding a bottleneck that used to result in deformation (and diminished effectiveness) of traditional materials like graphite.

Obama said in a speech said that he wanted to call for a decade-long investment in a $150 billion plan to create five million so-called "green-collar" jobs to develop energy sources that are friendly to the environment.

Clinton comes swinging back: I have plans to create five million new, green collar jobs!

McCain also mentioned the need for job training in green technology

A class of people working for the environment... a white collar and blue collar job usually refers to a class defined by income and sometimes culture.... A green collar community surrounded by windmills or tidal generators with people driving solar powered cars?

( Paul Kuehnel - York Daily Record/Sunday News )
inyork.com/ydr

Don Warner took his seat at his organ and within seconds brought the quiet room to life.

His animated hands and feet worked the pedals and keys that gave a whimsical, circus-like flavor to the 1950s hit "April in Portugal."

Warner , 90, is the star of Don Warner at the Organ - a weekly show broadcast on WGCB Red Lion Television which features classics from the 1930s and 1940s.

Warner said the show has aired every week since 1950.

The Great Green America Fest

Saturday & Sunday, May 3 and 4 - 11AM - 8PM

greatgreenamericafest.com
(website under development)

On the grounds of Mount Hope Estate & Winery

2775 Lebanon Road, Manheim PA 17545
(717) 665-7021

(Paul Kuehnel - York Daily Record/Sunday News)

Big things are brewing for player On the brink Robert Rohrbaugh is close to realizing his dream of playing Major League Baseball.

Researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia have developed a device worn much like a knee brace that generates electricity from the natural motion of walking.

The device harvests energy from the end of a walker’s step, when the muscles are working to slow the movement of the leg, in much the same way that hybrid-electric cars recycle power from braking.

Wearing a device on each leg, an individual can generate up to five watts of electricity with little additional physical effort. Walking more quickly generates as much as 13 watts of electricity: at that rate, one minute of walking provides enough electricity to sustain 30 minutes of talk time on a mobile phone.

There is about as much useful energy in a 35-gram granola bar as in a 3.5 kg lithium-ion battery." sfu.ca

images at news.com

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages. blackle.com/about

Aside from the fact that I like black websites and everyone in web design since the beginning of time has told me this is bad because they are hard to read... does it really save energy? Well the server is just pumping out "o's" and "1's"... Black white... yellow..

Lets rip apart a liquid crystal screen, picture tubes are obsolete... My flat screen has two phosphorescent tubes at the bottom and top that back light a grid of thousands of individual liquid crystals. The screen doesn't make light but is rather a gate for the back light. So whether it's a black screen or white, the tubes are lit until it sleeps.

So i don't know about energy saving from black screens, but my computer blows on the thermostat and shuts down the boiler and the house is 5 degrees colder when I use my computer. Energy is saved when I use my computer.

Two studies published this week suggest that almost all bio-fuels cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of production are taken into account.

By planting bio-fuel crops, proponents hope to harvest the benefits of the carbon soaked up as the plants grow to offset the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted when the resulting fuel is burned. According to both studies that depends on what was planted before the bio-crop was planted.

Both rain forests destroyed to produce bio-crops and grassland in the United States do a better job of scrubbing carbon than the crops they replace. Furthermore, the displacement of food crops results in more land being tilled to make up for lost food production pulling natural land out of the loop. If arid land is used that normally doesn't support plant life there is a plus.

One study -- written by a group of researchers from Princeton University, Woods Hole Research Center and Iowa State University along with an agriculture consultant -- concluded that over 30 years, use of traditional corn-based ethanol would produce twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as regular gasoline.

Another analysis, written by a Nature Conservancy scientist along with University of Minnesota researchers, found that converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas or grasslands in Southeast Asia and Latin America to produce biofuels will increase global warming pollution for decades, if not centuries. washingtonpost.com

Nature Conservancy study

A lesson in environmentalism

The United States economy was built on production and consumption. Our fabric was woven from the Henry Ford concept; if you pay people a decent wage future consumers can afford to buy the products they produce.

Production increased, consumption increased; a loving relationship that lasted for decades. Business expanded searching for new markets in a global economy fed by communication and transportation. Business capitalized on new markets, now possible to exploit, polarizing labor and consumption in the United States.

Two key indicators in the past week indicated a tipping point:

1. A drop in the nonmanufacturing index caused turmoil in the markets because production has been dropping for years. wsj.com
During this decade things like banks and restaurants have come to make up 2/3 of our economy. The focus of our economy has moved from producing to interacting with people and serving customer rather than transforming physical goods. We don't make anything anymore. When you serve, you loose the ability to create and innovate. You also loose the connection between what is created and the costs and consequences of creation.

2. The government/consumer money shot. Politicians of both parties want to avert recession with a quick cash give-a-way so people can buy. The irony of which is paid for by consumer tax dollars or taxed on the debt of future generations by further ballooning the federal deficit. Living on debt, without backing, got us into this mess in the first place. A panic gesture, continuing to throw Band-Aids on a psychotic pyramid scheme. Throwing twigs on a dying fire, this is a defining moment of our economy.

I am sitting here staring at my screen as the sun comes up showering golden rays across my screen... thinking of a conclusion. Maybe the sunrise is my conclusion.

In a post consum(er)ption era, the consumer is the solution. We hold the greatest numbers and define the greatest change of behavior. The beauty of Democracy coupled to Capitalism is that even in failure we have been handed the tools to fix it.

General Motors is to unveil 2009 Sierra Hybrid and Denali XT concept at Chicago motor show. Pairing an E85 engine with the two-mode hybrid for the first time. Another concept is a modern update of the 1970s Chevrolet El Camino pick-up in hybrid form. automotiveworld.com

It's an strange marketing target and more of a niche vehicle than a solution to help save fuel. A new GM full-hybrid truck is approaching $50,000 by the time it rolls off the lot at a time when Japanese rivals are gearing up for lower priced hybrids after refining 10 year old technology.

Mark LaNeve, GM's vice president of North American sales, service and marketing, says the OEM expects close to 5% of pick-up drivers to opt for the hybrid system. LaNeve notes that 208,243 GMC Sierra pick-ups were sold in 2007.

50K is more than I spent on my house. It takes me much more than a year to make 50K

Even in their infancy, a Honda Insight or the strange Toyota Echo looking early Prius of 1999 were tiny fuel efficient cars.

As we wander through a recession, a trend of higher gas prices and middle America loosing the ability to spend, why is it so hard for domestic manufactures to produce a small, highly efficient car that we can fall in love with.

February 4 - April 5

According to their website: GO! is a community programming series that seeks to build community connections through dynamic and unique learning opportunities. Martin Library hosts three series annually, each lasting approximately eight weeks. Each themed GO! series includes displays, author visits, workshops, book discussions, special events, and contests.

This series is entitiled: Our Precious Planet

go.yorklibraries.org

To every [thing there is] a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die..

I'm not one to quote scripture, but there is a correlation in business - an eternal cycle; Incubation, growth and evolution if the business is savy enough to survive.

You can see a trend in Microsoft that buys ideas like Yahoo, but isn't very good at innovating the next new thing. Oil investment is gulping a windfall profit as a result of years of monopoly and an entrenched infrastructure that offers few alternatives, but unless they drive this money into life after oil, this forture will crumble.

Domestic auto manufactures have been slow to react and predict market trends and as a result have seen their market share erode. Last year more Prius hybrids were sold than Ford sold Explorers, an SUV that ruled the domestic market in the 1990's.

Perhaps the next cycle of innovation from American car maker comes from small shops. After the turn of the 20th century, many U.S. cities had car companies. The Bell Motor Car Company and Pullman flourished in York for a time before consolidation of car companies.

Fisker Automotive, a specialty automaker, is considering metro Detroit as it decides where to build the hybrid four-door sports car it introduced at the North American International Auto Show.

Vic Doolan, Fisker's director of retail development, said Michigan has an experienced workforce, unused production capacity and the supplier network Fisker would need to build its plug-in hybrid.

Doolan, who has served as president of BMW North America and Volvo Cars North America, said the company is still in an "exploratory stage" as it talks with potential suppliers to build the vehicle. As for locating in Michigan, he said: "It does make a lot of sense.

The vehicle is billed to drive 620 miles using the battery pack and onboard gas-powered generator. The first 50 comes from a battery pack that can be charged in a household outlet. freep.com

Beyond the pocketbook: Do you feel empowered by your fuel choices? Are we more energy independent than previous years? Do our energy choices offer less pollution? How have we defined reward?

Exxon Mobil delivered its strongest performance ever last year, earning a record $40.6 billion in net income because of surging oil prices, the company said today.

The figure, a 3 percent increase from the previous year, exceeded the company’s own record for profits at an American corporation, set in 2006, and is nearly twice what it earned in 2003. nyt.com