Green Options

The United States must take the opportunity of this economic downturn to invest aggressively in renewable energy projects and reduce its dependence on foreign supplies of fuel.

The US Department of Defense is the largest consumer of energy in the United States spending $18 billion a year. Coupled with economics, dwindling natural resources, and the dangers of transporting fuel in war zones, the military is looking towards alternative fuels.

The Pentagon will spend $400 million to develop solar-charged, hydrogen fuel cell blimp which will reach an altitude of 65,000 feet and remain airborne for 10 years.

Cree Inc. will be fitting Wedge 5 of the Pentagon with over 4,000 LED light fixtures.The U.S. Department of Energy said that LED lighting saved the country about 8.7 trillion watt hours in 2007. This is out of the 765 trillion watt hours used for lighting in the United States.

In a secret report,President Bush has been warned that rioting, nuclear war, rising seas that will sink costal cities are just a few of the calamities the will befall earth in 20 years if global warming continues.The Observer says it has obtained a copy of the report, which was commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall.

The report, according to Jeremy Symons, a former EPA employee, was suppressed for four months by the White House. President Bush has been under increasing pressure to pay some attention to the apparent growing evidence that global warming is an almost immediate threat to humanity.

Here are some of the dire predictions in the report:

• Millions of lives will be lost in wars and natural disasters.
• Major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas.
• Britain’s climate will become “Siberian”.
• “Abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies”.
• “The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism”
• “Warfare would define human life”
• Widespread flooding of coastal areas of the United States would create a major upheaval for millions.

Not a very pleasant look at the future.

If the Pentagon has anything to do with it, plastic packaging in the future will not be thrown away; rather, it will be used as a fuel subsitute.

Dr. Richard Gross, chemistry professor at Polytechnic University, is already working on creating bioplastic - plastics derived from plant based oils rather than petroleum. Then, using a naturally occuring enzyme, he breaks down this bioplastic turning it into fuel.

The production of the bioplastics-for-fuel requires use of the

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