Free Republic

Audi is making a new fuel for internal combustion engines that has the potential to make a big dent when it comes to climate change – that's because the synthetic diesel is made from just water and carbon dioxide. The company's pilot plant, which is operated by German startup Sunfire in Dresden, produced its first batches of the "e-diesel" this month. German Federal Minister of Education and Research Johanna Wanka put a few liters of the fuel in her work car, an Audi A8, to commemorate the accomplishment. The base fuel is referred to as "blue crude," and begins by...

In order to understand the steep rise in world food prices that set off food riots in Haiti last week and toppled the government, you need to travel to Iowa. Right now, we're trying to run our cars on corn ethanol instead of gasoline. As a result, we suddenly find ourselves taking food out of the mouths of children in developing nations. That may sound harsh, but it also happens to be true.Environmentalists and farm state senators--the great biofuels coalition--of course object. After U.N. officials called for a biofuels moratorium last week, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, called...

Every week brings new claims that clean, free, inexhaustible renewable energy will soon replace the “dirty” fuels that sustain our economy today. A healthy dose of reality is needed. Over half of our electricity comes from coal. Gas and nuclear generate 36% of our electricity. Barely 1% comes from wind and solar. Coal-generated power typically costs less per kilowatt hour than alternatives – leaving families with more money for food, housing, transportation and healthcare. By 2020, the United States will need 100,000 megawatts of new electricity, say EIA, industry and utility company analysts. Unreliable wind power simply cannot meet these...

Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of "green gasoline," a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees. Reporting in the April 7, 2008 issue of Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials (ChemSusChem), chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) and his graduate students Torren Carlson and Tushar Vispute announced the first direct conversion of plant cellulose into gasoline components. In the same issue, James Dumesic and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison announce an integrated process for creating chemical...

Fads come fast and furious in our viral age, and the reactions to them can be equally ferocious. That’s what we’re seeing right now with biofuels, which everyone loved until everyone decided they were the worst thing since the Black Death. Where fuel distilled from plant matter was once hailed as an answer to everything from global warming to the geo-strategic power shift favoring repressive one-pipeline oil states, its now a “scam” and “part of the problem,” according to Time magazine. Ethanol has turned awful. The supposed crimes of biofuels are manifold. They’re behind soaring global commodity prices, the destruction...

By now, I'm sure everyone is familiar with the commercial that appeared following the October 4th accusations. In this rather ridiculous commercial, the sheriff negates all accusations against Janet Napolitano. Yet he does nothing to assure Arizona's people that the accusations are truely false; he does not offer any evidence that negates the accusations. He only requests that Arizonians join him in refusing the accusations.

The Attorney General claims she had no involvement in this financial disaster. However, the documents included here reveal the involvement of the office of the Attorney General as far back as October 1999. Memoranda from the Attorney General's office early in the implementation of the alt-fuels laws show that concerns surfaced about the actual prices of the vehicles.

(Mesa-AP) -- A runaway subsidy for alternative-fuel vehicles that eventually was scrapped hit Arizona's treasury harder than expected this year. And Arizona State Finance Chairman Scott Bundgaard says he wants to know why. The Governor's Office disputes whether the financial hit surprised anyone. But Bundgaard says he expected a cost to taxpayers of no more than 16 (m) million dollars a year under a law he helped craft. Instead, when a revenue shortfall caused lawmakers to dip into the state's rainy day fund this year for extra cash, they found the fund short by about 112 (m) million dollars. Bundgaard...