By Harriet Blake
Green Right Now

In its waning days, the outgoing Bush administration is promoting oil-shale development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming by passing midnight-hour regulations that would open public lands to oil-shale exploration, leasing and development. In November, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management put these regulations into effect to develop an oil shale program that the bureau says could add 800 billion barrels of oil from land in the Western United States.

In response, earlier this week, 11 environmental groups notified the administration and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of their intent to file federal lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act. The BLM has 60 days to respond. The environmental groups, which include the Sierra Club, the Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity, among others, want the administration to consider the effects that commercial oil-shale development will have on endangered species.

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By Heather Ishimaru
KGO-San Francisco

The nation is working to move away from fossil fuels and toward plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. But, are we trading one limited natural resource for another? Lithium-ion batteries are now considered the best option for the next generation of cars. But where will all that lithium come from?
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By Harriet Blake

Drill, baby, drill may be what’s on the minds of gas companies, but if you’re a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.

Thanks to a new software application that’s being test marketed by MIT, landowners may now extract data to see if the gas companies’ proposals to drill are fair and safe. The software tool, called the Landman Report Card (LRC), will help landowners in any state navigate the government and corporate databases, as well as get feedback from other landowners who’ve been in similar situations. And they can do all this before agreeing to a drilling contract.

The term “land man” refers to an oil company representative who often times shows up on the doorstep of unsuspecting property owners who’ve been targeted as having prospective drill sites.

“People often will sign the day the land man shows up at the door,” says MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. “There are lots of negotiations that people can do, that they often don’t know they can.”

Csikszentmihalyi , co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, and Sara Wylie, a grad student in the Science , Technology and Society Program, are the directors of the Landman Report Card project, which is coming to fruition just as natural gas exploration in America gains traction as a potential energy source that doesn’t rely on foreign oil — affecting land and homeowners from New York to Texas to the Rocky Mountains states.

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By Heather Ishimaru
KGO-San Francisco

SANTA ROSA, CA — Gas prices have plummeted in recent weeks as dramatically as they climbed over the summer. Drivers are relieved, but is there a downside to the relief at the pumps? Maybe so.

>> Watch now

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By John DeFore

Last week in Poland, attendees at the United Nations’ climate conference were greeted by an impressive creature — a car that, powered by nothing but the sun, had made a trip around the globe to meet them.

The car’s owner, a Swiss schoolteacher named Louis Palmer, intends to hang around the conference until its close on Friday, treating his vehicle like a “solar taxi” and offering free rides to the event’s “delegates, ministers and the press”; he even let UN Climate official Yvo de Boer hop in for the last few meters of his historic voyage.

For its record-breaking trek, the car traveled over 33,000 miles through 38 countries (one assumes a boat ride or two were involved as well); the trip took a year and a half.

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By John DeFore

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute believe they’ve made another step toward the economic viability of solar power with a coating that allows “near perfect” absorption of sunlight.

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By John DeFore

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By John DeFore

For everyone puzzled at recent energy-independence speeches that seem to focus as much on building new electric lines as on solar research or wind power, a new report helps make one inconvenient truth clear: Without new infrastructure, switching to non-carbon power could make our electric system far less reliable than it is today.

The report was compiled by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a self-regulatory organization focused in part on ensuring that power transmission stays blackout-free from coast to coast.

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By John DeFore

The latest edition of an annual report by the International Energy Agency was released this week, and while the news may not be unexpected, it’s unsettling nonetheless.

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By Barbara Kessler

Biomass technology promises what few other alternative fuel schemes can: energy from waste. Given the controversial use of corn (and other food crops) for biofuel, which is turning out to be less of a greenhouse gas saver than once thought, waste is looking pretty attractive.

A new plant in Central Texas, dedicated last week, promises to take sewage waste, organic garbage, grass clippings and manure, and convert them into gasoline.

Initially the plant, designed as a large-scale demonstration project, will use forage sorghum as its base material. Forage sorghum, unlike other varieties grown to produce sorghum seed for food products, does not steal directly from the human food chain. It is used as feed for cattle, but even so, it’s more renewable than corn because about twice as much (5-7 tons) can be grown per acre.

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By John DeFore

While biofuel proponents struggle with concerns that some of their favored technologies — like those turning corn into car fuel — literally take food out of the mouths of the poor in pursuit of fossil-fuel independence, scientists are pursuing alternatives that not only won’t interfere with the global food supply, but actually clean up after it.

A new study published in the Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology claims that renewable bioethanol can be squeezed, not out of olives, but out of the seeds we spit out of them.

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By John DeFore

In the quest to ween cars and trucks off oil, alternative-fuel schemes may be heading for a roadblock they haven’t fully considered: water.

Public discussions of alternative fuels have rarely if ever touched on how much water might be needed to produce such fuel on a large scale. But researchers in Texas warn that it may be much more than you’d expect.

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