American Automakers Push Flex-Fuel to Get Around Fuel Efficiency Standards

An article from MSNBC points out the real reason why US car manufacturers are creating flex-fuel vehicles that can run on ethanol-based fuels such as E85; to get around fuel efficiency standards for their fleets. From the article:

But there’s a dirty secret about clean cars. The policies for flexible-fuel vehicles—those that can run on mixtures of gasoline and more than 10 percent ethanol—are written in such a way that they result in a number of unintended consequences. One result is that automakers gain some leeway in meeting fuel-economy standards if they produce flexible-fuel cars and trucks. So Detroit’s automakers have been pumping out hundreds of thousands of the vehicles, even though most consumers have no access to alternative fuels because they’re available at only a fraction of U.S. gas stations.

The problem is that US car manufacturers are struggling to compete with more fuel-efficient imports. It is less costly for the US companies to manufacture gas guzzlers than it is to manufacture well-engineered, fuel efficient cars. Apparently, the US government condones the legislation that allows these car companies to keep the fuel efficiency of their fleets low. Unfortunately, this is not the right way to save American companies from foreign competition. Quoting from the article again,

Environmental advocates aren’t shy about voicing their outrage. “It’s a total scam,” says Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s global warming program. “The automakers are trying to shield themselves from having to make more efficient vehicles. They’re avoiding the path to cutting oil dependence, curbing global warming, saving consumers money, and ultimately saving Detroit from competitors like Toyota.”

read the article

related post: Algae Bioreactors Convert CO2 Into Sustainable Biofuels

FoxyTunes Planet Aggregates Music Content

I previously mentioned Metacritic as a good general-purpose aggregator for all sort of media, as well as aggregators for job boards and product reviews. FoxyTunes Planet is a music-specific web 2.0 style mashup or aggregator that is truly useful. Type in a band and get YouTube videos, lyrics, Flickr photos, links to buy albums from different stores, Last.fm recommendations, Rhapsody streams, and more through various customizable widgets. Note that FoxyTunes itself is a browser plugin for Firefox and IE that allows control of your media player from within your browser.

FoxyTunes Planet [via lifehacker]

Also relevant to this post is Critical Metrics, currently a music review aggregator, or a “multiprotocol media filter” as stated on the site. Their launch category is music, but they plan to expand the service to others.

As more sites begin to offer public API’s, the web will become increasingly useful and efficient to the end-user. The practice of visiting websites is changing, as feeds and widget mashups bring relevant content to the user. Interactive feeds have been proposed to allow a user to make decisions via an interactive RSS protocol.

Algae Bioreactors Convert CO2 Into Sustainable Biofuels

Biofuel is the new buzzword in green politics, but it is far from pretty. It was recently in the news as Bush, US car manufacturers, and Congress all danced around Ethanol as The Answer. Soon North America will be covered in corn crops that will be used to create fuel as well as high fructose corn syrup. Or maybe just fuel. George Monbiot from The Guardian warns that demand for biofuel will compete with demand for food, and that biofuel will win out:

Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled. The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows. Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The US department of agriculture warns that “if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year”. According to the UN food and agriculture organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from maize and wheat.

But there is hope in the form of algae, that awesome, efficient green stuff. Isaac Berzin, who founded GreenFuel Technology Corporation, has created viable algae Bioreactors that use CO2 and sunlight as fuel to produce engineered strains of algae. That algae can then be converted to solid fuel, methane, biodiesel, or ethanol. So they are taking waste CO2 from industry and turning it back into fuel with the help of photosynthesis, that awesome word from middle school. This is the type of technology that should be subsidized, not corn. Crop-derived ethanol is clearly not a sustainable or efficient alternative fuel. Even in an attempt to be Green, the US government can manage to funnel legislation and subsidies into sub-par technologies. This is also the fault of powerful farmer’s organizations lobbying for pro-ethanol legislation. Market forces have overshadowed the voice of the scientific community as it attempts to find fuels and fuel sources that are sustainable in the long term.

Update: Fidel Castro has spoken out against US biofuel use. Disclaimer: I do not condone communist regimes.

Also, GreenFuel is not the only company that is working on algae-derived biofuels. Here is a post from treehugger about a company called Algae Biofuels that is also doing algae bioreactor R&D.

Government Bureaucracy Prevents Use of Used Cooking Oil for Car Fuel

A post at Techdirt presents an incredible example of governmental bureaucracy in the US and also the Principality of Wales. Apparently the use of used restaurant cooking oil for fuel in retrofitted vehicles is being hindered by ridiculous regulations. What is even more alarming is that these regulations are actually being enforced, to the point where an elderly couple in the US was visited by Agents and told that using restaurant cooking oil to power their Volkswagen without the proper license (which they cannot acquire) is a felony. Here is the excellent write-up from Techdirt:

The details sound like they’re right out of a bad movie. They’ve owned the car for while and they fuel it up using leftover restaurant cooking oil. However, earlier this year, two officials knocked on their door from the Illinois Department of Revenue, telling the couple that they were violating the law by not paying an additional motor fuel tax. The couple did the calculations on how much tax they needed to pay, and while annoying, it wasn’t outrageous. However, in order to pay, they first needed to get approved for a license as a “special fuel supplier” or “receiver.” Except… the process to become approved for such a license requires a $2,500 bond, and the forms are designed for businesses not individuals. The couple then received a letter saying they needed to stop being a special fuel supplier or receiver until they were licensed to be such — but the details of how you qualify to be either a special fuel receive or supplier showed that they qualified as neither. Yet, the state still insisted that they had to get such a license, because otherwise they had no way to collect the tax. They then noted that operating as a special fuel supplier or receiver without the necessary license was a felony.

This is absolute insanity, an example of stupid regulations being enforced at the cost of stifling citizen innovation, preventing the use of alternative fuels to power vehicles, and further contributing to the toasty-ness of Earth. Indeed, this does sound like a bad movie, specifically the excellent satire Brazil.

read the article [via Techdirt]

Update: In a nice twist, someone in North Carolina has been taxed $1000 for using used cooking oil for fuel. Slashdot reports:

NC Man Fined For Using Vegetable Oil As Fuel