China Signals 30% of Car Fleet to be Non (less) Fossil Fuel

China’s official news agency reported that at least 30 percent of government cars that will be newly purchased will be electric cars or “new energy vehicles.”

“New energy vehicles” include plug-in hybrid cars, fuel cell-powered cars and solar-powered cars.

Tech Times

If true, and done, good.  How about throwing down the challenge glove China?  We won’t accept number 2.! Anyone else who promises 31% we’ll go to 32%.  A race to the top, instead of the bottom!  What a concept.

What about a World Cup, alternative fuel vehicles competing?

Stop the Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Producers of oil, gas and coal received more than $500 billion in government subsidies around the world in 2011, with the richest nations collectively spending more than $70 billion every year to support fossil fuels.

Those are the findings of a recent report by the Overseas Development Institute, a think tank based in the United Kingdom.

“If their aim is to avoid dangerous climate change, governments are shooting themselves in both feet,” the report, headed by ODI research fellow Shelagh Whitley, said. “They are subsidizing the very activities that are pushing the world towards dangerous climate change, and creating barriers to investment in low-carbon development and subsidy incentives that encourage investment in carbon-intensive energy.”

 

from Climate Progress

Do the Math: Divest!

Divestment campaigns to shame holders of fossil-fuel stocks are begining to rise up. [I don’t see Stanford, UC Berkeley !? but good on Brown, Cal State Bakersfield (!! right in the oil patch), and many more. ]

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coaloil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.

“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.

Much More

What are the companies?  Bill McKibben with 350.org has a good idea.  The chart below is just the first ten on his group of 200.

Company GtCO2 Primary Fossil Fuel
Severstal JSC 141.6 Coal
Lukoil Holdings 43.56 Oil and/or Gas
Exxon Mobil Corp. 41.03 Oil and/or Gas
BP PLC 34.6 Oil and/or Gas
Gazprom OAO 28.83 Oil and/or Gas
Chevron Corp. 21.22 Oil and/or Gas
ConocoPhillips 19.14 Oil and/or Gas
Total S.A. 18.02 Oil and/or Gas
Anglo American PLC 16.75 Coal

Here is the Rolling Stone article that caught the eyes of some of the young organzers.

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – and that make clear who the real enemy is

 

Flabbergasting Thought for the Day

Fossil Fuels – Defeated by War?

Strange as it may sound, the urgency and capacity to rapidly reduce the dependency on fossil fuels, and thereby save future generations from permanent climate wars may be provided by the needs of present wars.

The NY Times is reporting a major push for non-fossil fuel energy sources for the wars going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer.

Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan, bringing costs as well as risk. While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.

Last year, the Navy introduced its first hybrid vessel, a Wasp class amphibious assault ship called the U.S.S. Makin Island, which at speeds under 10 knots runs on electricity rather than on fossil fuel, a shift resulting in greater efficiency that saved 900,000 gallons of fuel on its maiden voyage from Mississippi to San Diego, compared with a conventional ship its size, the Navy said.

The Air Force will have its entire fleet certified to fly on biofuels by 2011 and has already flown test flights using a 50-50 mix of plant-based biofuel and jet fuel; the Navy took its first delivery of fuel made from algae this summer. Biofuels can in theory be produced wherever the raw materials, like plants, are available, and could ultimately be made near battlefields.

Concerns about the military’s dependence on fossil fuels in far-flung battlefields began in 2006 in Iraq, where Richard Zilmer, then a major general and the top American commander in western Iraq, sent an urgent cable to Washington suggesting that renewable technology could prevent loss of life. That request catalyzed new research, but the pressure for immediate results magnified as the military shifted its focus to Afghanistan, a country with little available native fossil fuel and scarce electricity outside cities.

NY Times

Oh how Senator McCain’s military stamped soul must be at war with his climate change denying mouth….