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I filled up my vehicle with BioDiesel Fuel today. A blend probably, since it’s still liable to snow at any time around here.

I haven’t filled up since February 22. I drove 550, mostly city, miles. I pumped just under 14 gallons. (40 mpg) The cost per gallon was $3.94.

We need to raise the gas tax, again.

Raising the gas tax is the only reasonable way we will be able to pay for fixing all of these roads, build adequate bridges, pay for buses, and continue to make progress on rail transit.

Now, I know that we just raised it a nickel. Big whoop. Raise it a dollar and dedicate it to rail transit. The day I can ride a street car or train to my job will be a happy, happy day. The day that I can take a streetcar to the train station and ride a train to Duluth in 1 1/2 hours or ride a train to Chicago in 4 hours will be a happy day.

California has a $10 billion dollar proposition on the ballot this fall to build high-speed rail between its major cities. This is the scale of regional investment that the Upper Midwest will need to make in the not-to-distant future.

Big SUVs, the suburbs, and cheap energy are on the way out, and we need to plan accordingly.

This is an excellent article. A great summary of why corn and grass ethanol is a bad idea.

The Great Corn Con -The Senate’s preposterous new ethanol bill.

Key quotes:

So, even if Congress mandated that all of America’s corn be turned into ethanol, it would yield only about 28.3 billion gallons, far less than the mandated volume. And, clearly, most of America’s corn is still going to be used for animal feed, family barbecues, and high-fructose corn syrup.

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In May 2006, former CIA Director John Deutch, who’s now a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he claimed that producing enough ethanol from switch grass (a fast-growing plant that’s native to North America) would require vast amounts of acreage. Deutch estimated that producing enough cellulosic ethanol to replace 1 million barrels of oil per day—roughly equivalent to 22 billion gallons of ethanol per year—would require planting 25 million acres of land in switch grass. That’s an area about the size of Kentucky, or about 5 percent of the 440 million acres of cropland in the United States.

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So, what about using more ethanol from sugar cane? Well, the United States could, at least in theory, grow more cane. But that wouldn’t make much sense, given that Brazil can produce it at far lower cost. And, thanks to pressure from farm-state senators, Congress has effectively limited the use of Brazilian ethanol with its $0.54 per-gallon tariff on foreign ethanol.

(Corn, Grass) Ethanol is not the answer!

I’m on various City of Minneapolis email lists, and I typically skim them over before sending them to the trash. Today’s update from Mayor Rybak caught my eye, given my earlier post about light bulbs. Maybe he’s a reader?

Anyway, from the newsletter:

Global climate change can’t be fought in isolation within the borders of Minneapolis, but I’m resolved that we collectively do much more than our part. We are moving ahead on our city-wide environmental sustainability plan that guides our aggressive work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the use of renewable energy sources, and my 2007 city budget adopted by the City Council includes new resources to ramp-up our efforts to directly engage the public on ways to help address climate change.

As a Minneapolis resident, you will be asked to do much more to reduce your energy consumption, but today I ask you to take one simple step towards that goal: this week change three of your light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs. If every household in the U.S. replaced just one light bulb with a compact fluorescent, it would equal the energy conservation of taking one million cars off the road. We all need to do much more, but in this first and possibly fleeting glimpse of a dramatically shortened winter, taking this one simple act together seems like the least we can do to protect this special place in which we are fortunate to live.

He also mentions a website, Minnesota’s Energy Challenge, where you can form teams and track your CO2 savings.

3 bulbs, that’s not so hard…

Tags: energy, environment

Resolution #1: Save Energy Wal-Mart has made it one of their goals, so should you!

As a way to cut energy use, it could not be simpler. Unscrew a light bulb that uses a lot of electricity and replace it with one that uses much less.

Power-Sipping Bulbs Get Backing From Wal-Mart This is an example where a company with government-like power throws its weight around and made a market-based decision to push an energy-saving, albeit consumer and producer unpopular, product. The "wal-mart" model will probably work here. But I’m still going to argue that we need to create a business environment to go green. There are producers of the bulbs in the article complaining that americans will lose jobs, etc. Well, create an incentive for those producers to switch to better technology! Keep the jobs here! It’s not like we’re uncapable of making CFLs. Too often companies will not choose the green route, but choose the entrenched route. Government has a role to play here, even though the market took care of it in this case. Wal-Mart made a decision that could be considered market-irrational, and not all companies have the strength to do that.

Tags: environment, energy, walmart

We saw An Inconvenient Truth on Monday night. It was pretty startling. Lots of good info.

There were three things that really stuck out. The first was the CO2 levels for the past 600,000 years. Shown is a graph, with the rising and falling levels. They dramatically hide the last 50 years, and as it is revealed, I felt myself gasping as the graph spiked far above what the previous peaks were.

Second was the statistic about global warming in the popular press and in scientific journals. Basically, out of 1000 journal articles about global warming, not one of them questioned the human source of global warming. In the popular press though, something like 53% of the articles question whether we are causing global warming.

Finally, the hope. After a couple hours of depression, there is some hope. With current technologies, we can get our CO2 production down below 1970 levels  (Think CFDs and whatnot) I think that is fairly encouraging, if we had some political will on the subject. Also, during the end credits, lots of practical things that you can do to help.

So, it’s not really a “fun” movie to go see, but I think it is a must see for everyone. Have you seen it yet?

(oh, and I ditched the gas powered mower before seeing the movie 😉 )