Green Options

Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is getting $34.7 million to find ways to make cars lighter by improving carbon fiber manufacturing and processing. Though used in race cars and high-performance “supercars,” current carbon fiber composites cost too much for mass market vehicles.

Lightweight, strong carbon fiber will raise fuel efficiency, whether that fuel of the future is the natural biogas that you’ll surely one day tap from the compost in your backyard; or biodiesel (made from drought-resistant weeds of course), or the electrons off your shiny new solar roof.

The new Carbon Fiber Technology Center will try new feedstocks and new ways to create them, with the idea of reducing the cost of carbon fiber to under $5 a pound. Currently it is between $10 and $20 per pound.

Oh, they call him a communist. They call him a Red. But the actual problem is that President Obama is too Green. Barack Obama is our first truly Green President.

This is the real reason the fossil industries whose profits are threatened by renewable energy go after him - and stir up emotional opposition groups to threaten him with outlandish attacks. Because he has already implemented or funded an extraordinary string of renewable energy initiatives.

He will likely be remembered as an [...]