Green Options

Running your car on biodiesel fuel is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint. BioFuel Oasis, a women’s collective/owned business in Berkeley, offers not only fuel, but a level of expertise and service you haven’t experienced in a fuel transaction in years.

Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil, normally from soybeans. You can grow the beans to produce the oil, but the most environmentally conscious way is to use recycled oil from restaurants. Because diesel engines have much higher compression than gas engines, they can burn a range of fuels, including the stuff they use to cook French fries.

Editor’s Note: This is Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates’ first post for Gas 2.0. Mayor Bates is the latest to join The Great Electric Vehicle Race.

Last month, our city council adopted Berkeley’s bold Climate Action Plan.  This plan calls for systemic action, by all Berkeley residents and agencies to reduce our city’s greenhouse gas (GHG) consumption by 80% below 2000 levels by the year 2050, and the investment in electric vehicle infrastructure will be a key method for achieving these larger goals.

If every building had a white roof, we would be able to cool the surrounding areas. That is the reasoning behind a California law about to go into effect next month requiring light reflective roofs on all new buildings. It is already the law for new flat roofs here.

Here, architect Richard Meier and his partner Michael Palladino have apparently created a design to go one further. [...]

In the constant push for ever newer and greener technology and energy, we sometimes forget that it is often both simpler and cheaper to revisit old techniques in new ways. And that’s exactly what a group of researchers in California has done.

Do you live in San Diego, CA and want to buy a solar panel system but just don’t have the cash? Congratulations, it’s your lucky day–or rather, it will be your lucky day beginning in July. That’s when a revolutionary program goes into effect that allows residents to pay for solar panels through property tax bills over a period of 20 years.

According to a new study conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, The average installed costs for photovoltaic cells (in real 2007 dollars) went down from $10.50-per-watt in 1998, to $7.60-per-watt in 2007.

What’s most amazing about this report is that it appears to validate a whole slew of state and local solar initiatives. The researchers found that—despite the many, many reported advances to solar cell efficiency—most of the savings during this nine year period came from reductions to installation and external hardware costs.

California officially leads the nation in recycling, according to a report published by the California Integrated Waste Management Board announcing the state has reached a 58% waste diversion rate. Of the 93 million tons of solid waste produced by Californians, nearly 54 million tons have found renewed use in places other than landfills.

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California have suggested a plan to drastically reduce global warming, by painting the world white.  If implemented successfully, it would be the equivalent of taking the world’s 600 million cars off the road for 18 years.

Hashem Akbari and Surabi Meno, along with Art Rosenfeld, California Energy Commissioner and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, are so convinced that their idea will work, that they have proposed a “Cool World” plan that would use white roofs, and solar-reflective roofs of other colors, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help delay atmospheric heating effects.

A new report says that global warming could cost the Californian economy billions of dollars each year, through a combination of rising sea levels, and the increased frequency of wild fires and extreme weather events.

This week, the Berkeley City Council unanimously voted to give city-backed loans to property owners for rooftop solar systems.  Solar loans for as much as $22,000 will be paid off over 20 years and included on property tax bills. Other cities are closely watching Berkeley’s unique solar loan program and have expressed interest.

Via:  New York Times

In May of 2006, I had the chance to attend the China-US Climate Change Forum hosted by the University of California at Berkeley. To an eco-geek, the list of speakers was star-studded with Nobel laureates, professors from top universities, famous innovators, and leaders from the business communities in China and the United States. The conference opened with the premier of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, just before it hit theaters. Before a university worker’s strike altered plans, Al Gore himself was slated to join the stage.

But it was a random guy in the audience who stole the show with a single insightful comment in the closing moments.