What are we waiting for? America can no longer afford the risks of our dependence on oil. The innovative solutions to tackle America’s oil addiction and climate challenge are available and the public is growing impatient for these options to be offered immediately.
Here are a few of the options to lead us into the oil-free twenty-first century:
Walk, Ride Your Bike and Take the Bus!
Bicycles are the best zero-emission vehicles, and the easiest way to break your oil addiction is by walking or riding your bike. Public transportation, even diesel buses, are much much more efficient than single-driver cars. Not everyone has access to public transportation, and many people work too far from home to walk or ride their bikes. But those of us who can walk, ride our bikes, and take the bus or train are helping America declare independence from oil!
Learn more at http://www.sfbike.org/
....and http://www.busridersunion.org/engli/index.html
Run a local campaign to increase green transportation options on your campus or in your city. Find out more about the Transportation Challenge.
The technology exists today that could dramatically improve the fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions of all vehicles. Essentially, a vehicle that is powered by an internal combustion engine is not a very efficient machine. Improvements in engines, transmissions, and vehicle design exist, but they are mostly sitting on shelves instead of making car engines more efficient. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, if the automakers used today’s technology to clean up theinternal combustion engine, cars would get an average of 40 miles per gallon, and if the automakers used the most efficient hybrid-electric technology in its vehicles, they could average 55 mpg, a big improvement over the current industry average of 21 mpg.
Learn more from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
And read about how clean vehicle technologies can save jobs, according to a study by Natural Resources Defense Council and the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (OSAT) at the University of Michigan.
Hybrid electric vehicles are only a first step towards a more fuel-efficient fleet of vehicles. Hybrids use an electric motor and large battery to capture and store energy that is normally lost in inefficient gasoline engines. However, not all hybrids are designed to maximize efficiency; the Honda Accord and Toyota Highlander use the battery electric motor to boost the power of the engine and are hardly more efficient than their non-hybrid counterparts.
Although hybrids have become the most popular green vehicle on the road today, automakers have the ability to double the fuel economy of these cars simply by adding a plug. As institutional fleets are increasingly being converted over to hybrids, fleet purchasers should be demanding even better options.
Keep up with hybrid developments at http://www.hybridcars.com/
Union of Concerned Scientists www.hybridcenter.org.
Engineers estimate that with a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), an American driver could eliminate a whopping 85 percent of his or her gas consumption! A PHEV is more efficient than a regular hybrid due to a bigger battery pack and a plug, so the car can run on electricity from the grid or from rooftop solar power. With a plug-in hybrid (which uses a battery-powered all-electric motor for the first 30 to 60 miles), most American commuters would rarely, if ever, need to fill up with gasoline unless making a long trip. And even if we plug our cars into the existing electrical grid, we can achieve 50 percent greenhouse-gas reductions. Of course, simultaneous work to green the electricity grid can only make plug-ins cleaner. Oil unfortunately will always be toxic and carbon intensive.
PHEVs are currently only available through after-market conversions, although automakers have begun to murmur about production PHEVs. Consumers must keep the pressure on the industry to follow through with promises to mass-manufacture plug-in hybrids.
The greatest advantage to the Electric Vehicle (EV) is that it has no gas tank; the only power for the car is its electric motor and a very large battery pack, which is plugged in to recharge. EVs, which were once sold in the United States, had a range of 80-100 miles, but advances in battery technology give the next wave of EVs up to a 300 mile range. Unfortunately, no major U.S. auto manufacturer currently produces EVs, so Americans no longer have easy access to petroleum- and pollution-free cars.
There was a time when Ford and General Motors both produced two full-sized vehicles that were completely independent from oil. Ignoring demand, Ford and G.M. eliminated the programs and destroyed all but a few hundred of their only zero-emission vehicles. Let us know if you'd like to organize a screening of the film, "Who Killed the Electric Car," and we will send you the DVD.
An ordinary diesel engine, like the one in a Volkswagen or a Jeep Liberty, is already equipped to run on biodiesel, a renewable and biodegradable version of diesel fuel made from biomass such as vegetable oils, animal fats, or algae.
Biodiesel can produce fewer global warming emissions and less air pollution than regular diesel and can help reduce our dependence on petroleum.
While there are promising developments of small-scale, local, sustainable biofuels economies, these efforts are dwarfed by the dizzying pace of corporate-controlled large-scale plans for the expansion of agrifuels. The agribusiness and oil companies racing to exploit the biofuels market are counting on consumers’ continued belief in the simple myth of the biofuels solution. So make sure you know the facts: Agrifuels are not necessarily low-emissions when production is included in the equation. Agrifuels are linked to deforestation and human rights abuses. And agrifuels put the service station in competition with the supermarket. Read more on our Agrofuels Fact Sheet.
Learn more at www.biodiesel.org
...and www.biodieselamerica.org/index.php
...and at the Berkeley Biodiesel Collective http://www.berkeleybiodiesel.org/
Run your car on French fry oil!?! Used or new vegetable oil is for more than just cooking; it’s also a biofuel that is gaining nationwide grassroots support. Veggie oil is plant-based, and plants sequester greenhouse gases which offsets the emissions produced by the oil.
Diesel engines running on veggie oil produce less air pollution than regular diesel and would reduce our dependence on petroleum. Used fryer oil is a waste product and operating your vehicle on filtered fryer oil removes this product from the waste stream. And it’s usually free of charge, since restaurants are often happy to get rid of it. The drawback is volume—used veggie oil is free and plentiful right now, but it is in fact a limited resource. As the current grassroots demand grows and shifts toward mainstream usage, we could soon experience Peak Veggie Oil.
Diesel engines can run on vegetable oil with a modification kit, which retails for $600-$1000.
Here is one source for the kit: http://www.greasel.com
Join the Good Grease online community at www.goodgrease.com
Ethanol is a biofuel that can be used in standard (non-diesel) cars that are factory modified. Since 1999 an increasing number of vehicles are designed to be dual-fuel or flex-fuel vehicles, so they can automatically run on either ethanol, gasoline, or a high blend (85%) of ethanol called E85. Gasoline also may have up to a 10% blend of ethanol, known as E10 as an additive to reduce pollution. Ethanol-blended gas is already for sale in California and many regions of the country at an ordinary gas station.
Ethanol produced from sugar cane is being used as automotive fuel in Brazil. Most ethanol in the U.S. is produced from corn, but ethanol also could be derived from wheat, potato wastes, cheese whey, rice straw, sawdust, urban wastes, paper mill wastes, yard clippings, molasses, castor beans, seaweed, surplus food crops, and other plant wastes. The problem is that even if we converted all current U.S. corn and soy production into fuel, we would only be able to meet 12% of our gasoline demand. Agribusiness expansion into other countries for soy production is destroying important ecosystems in intact forests and threatening the cultures that inhabit those lands, thus we do not feel that ethanol is currently a sustainable replacement for gasoline.
Another drawback of ethanol is in the amount of energy inputs required for production. Critics point to the very high energy required to grow crops like corn, including gasoline in tractors and transportation of the grain as well as the various chemicals sprayed on the crops. To learn more, go to:
http://www.ethanol.org/
http://www.e85fuel.com/
http://www.greenenergynetwork.com/
Cellulosic ethanol is the same as normal ethanol except it is not derived from crops. Instead it is made from grasses, agricultural waste or trees. For example, rather than using the kernel of corn, cellulosic ethanol uses corn stalks. Cellulosic ethanol is in the development phase, and its impacts are still largely unknown.
The fact is that hydrogen fuel cells are still science fiction. Fuel cells won’t be marketable for 20 years, not to mention the fact that we do not have an affordable, climate-neutral means of producing hydrogen. In order to generate the amount of electricity needed to get hydrogen from water, we would produce an enormous amount of pollution. In other words, we would use enormous amounts of dirty energy in order to create a nonpolluting energy source. Without a dramatic shift in electricity generation in the U.S., hydrogen fuel cells will be like lead us from the frying pan into the fire. In fact, electric vehicles, available and on the road today, are a sustainable short-cut. They also require a clean energy revolution, but they don’t require us to wait 20 years before we can get started.
We don’t know which of these technologies will enable us to completely end our oil addiction – likely it will be a combination. What we do know is that we can’t wait. Our planet is in a crisis, our country is at war over oil, and we need to take a dramatic step in ending our oil addiction. While we continue to develop new, healthier technologies we can and have the ability to act today.
We recommend:
1) A Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle with at least a 40 mile range in its battery
2) Recharged with electricity powered by residential rooftop solar
3) And for longer trips, locally-sourced waste biodiesel fuel in the tank.
What are we waiting for?
We understand the impact just one dollar can make—in the last three years we’ve donated nearly $2000 to RAN!
Grace McWayne School
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