Green Options

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VW’s Jetta BlueTDI: 60 MPG, 90% Emissions Reduction for NOx

VW’s ultra-low emission Jetta BlueTDI will be coming to the US mid-summer, according to an announcement made late last month at the Vienna Motor Symposium.

This newer version of the Jetta will meet the strictest emissions standards in the world—BIN5/LEV2—which are enforced by 5 US states: California, Massachusetts, Maine, New York, and Vermont. BIN5/LEV2 standards severely cap nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions (0.05 g/mile), one of the two tailpipe pollutants that have given diesels a bad rap (that and particulate matter).

Clean Burning Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs) are hot commodities in some parts of the country, where fuel can sell for as low as $0.63 per gallon.

Unlike the world’s most fuel efficient car (VW’s 285 MPG bullet), the Honda Civic GX looks like a standard passenger vehicle. What makes it special is what you don’t see: tailpipe emissions that are often cleaner than ambient air.

The Civic GX is powered by compressed natural gas—methane—the simplest and cleanest-burning hydrocarbon available. With an economical 113-hp, 1.8-Liter engine, the EPA has called the Civic the “world’s cleanest internal-combustion vehicle” with 90% cleaner emissions than the average gasoline-powered car on the road in 2004.

And get this: in Utah, natural gas can be purchased for $0.63 per gallon.

The effort to help change the world’s polluting ways is a long road that was never going to be solved overnight. However, with the help of LiveScience.com, maybe we can effectively destroy any hope of it overnight.

I call this story “How to Successfully Undermine Good Ideas” thanks to a recent article written over at LiveScience.com entitled “Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas.” And, in short, several of their “zany ideas” are possible chances for survival.

When you think of Americans who have done a lot for Climate Change, current president George W. Bush doesn’t spring to mind. The guy he beat for the current spot, Al Gore, definitely springs to mind; I like to think of GBW as the anti-Gore.

Over the past week rumors and rumblings about a climate plan underway in the current and fading Whitehouse have emerged. Thankfully, it all seems a bit “disappointing.”

Seventeen nations have come together in Paris for two days in the latest round of climate warming talks, under the heading of the Major Emitters Meeting. The South African delegation was the one to label Bush’s proposals – to halt a rise in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 – as disappointing. “There is no way whatever that we can agree to what the U.S. is proposing,” South African Environmental Affairs Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said in a statement.

Every now and again I like to return to a topic I’ve already touched on before (please don’t ask me to find where I did, the archives confuse me). So when my news feeds pointed me towards this new research, I couldn’t help but head back to another ‘no-brainer’ for you all.

To be published online in the open access journal Carbon Balance and Management, new research shows that, while planting trees alone may not be the only solution to solving our climate problems, planting new forests or managing existing forests or agricultural land could help us in the long term.

How? By encouraging the land to work as the natural carbon sink it has been for so long. \

As I walked around last year’s Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Las Vegas, I asked where I could find the green products. I was encouraged to put on my walking shoes and make the trek to a minor hall where I found about twenty square feet devoted to five or six products that left little impression on me. Much has changed, it seems, in only one year. Green is the buzzword at this year’s show, helped in no small part by the host city, Chicago, showing off its green-ness through LEED building projects going up within sight of the convention center. Just about every booth displayed information on how green their products were. “Green building has become the spark that has added some life to this industry,” a representative from MasterBrand Cabinets told me.

Water saving innovators Kohler and TOTO made green the focus of their booths, proudly displaying the Watersense stickers on their high efficiency toilets. TOTO, who recycles 100% of their china, has developed a universal toilet bowl whose tank can be interchanged from a 1.6 gallon per flush to a 1.28 gpf e-tank.

Most of us are at least vaguely familiar with biodiesel, but how much do we really know? While biodiesel is easily the most popular alternative fuel available, it’s commonly misunderstood or misrepresented by inaccurate information. Since the most frequent question I get is, “So what exactly is biodiesel, anyway?“, I decided to write a tome covering all the basics—a one stop shop for all your biodiesel- related questions.

It’s been exactly one year since I published the first Biodiesel Mythbuster on GreenOptions.com, and its popularity made a sequel inevitable. By way of a short introduction, here’s what I wrote last year:

Straight up, I’ll say that the heading is supposed to be “alarmist.” But the fact remains that, unless we do something now, the future is far too unpredictable to depend upon.

A report published in Nature by authors Roger Pielke Jr., Tom Wigley and Christopher Green, has described the IPCC’s assumptions that the bulk of the challenge of reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies as “…optimistic at best and unachievable at worst…”

The 2008 Olympic torch relay will cover more than 85,000 miles and visit 23 cities before reaching Beijing. Covering that kind of ground (and ocean) will require the help of Air China, burning an estimated 464,400 gallons of fuel and emitting 5,500 tons of carbon dioxide in the process.

See the story from Wired’s Autopia.

British Columbia will be the first in North America to institute a comprehensive carbon tax on nearly all fossil fuels. It’s a groundbreaking move that could prove the feasibility of taxing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Beginning July 1st, 2008, businesses and residents of British Columbia will be taxed $10 per metric ton of carbon emitted by fuels such as gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel. The tax will increase yearly by $5 per ton to $30 per ton in 2012, at which point the government will reevaluate the tax rate.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that particulate matter from diesel exhaust causes a range of respiratory problems including 15,000 premature deaths each year, new research shows that even short-term exposure to nanoparticles found in diesel fumes can affect brain function.

Nanoparticles can travel to the brain via the olfactory nerve, where they could cause an oxidative stress response in the region of the brain critical to information processing.

Researchers placed subjects in a room with either clean air or diesel fumes (similar to a busy street), and used a electro- encephalograph (EEG) to measure brain response. Subjects breathing the sooty air showed a stress response in the brain’s cortex within 30 minutes, which continued even after they left the room.