Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

If drivers switch from gasoline to biofuels, will it lessen the air pollution that shrouds cities around the world? Studies of auto emissions have indicated it might. But the first citywide air quality study of its kind, reported at the meeting, suggests that unless more than 26% of cars make the switch, it will have [...]

Last month, preparatory work began on the Xiaonanhai Dam, with more projects to follow. Within a few years, the Jinsha will slow to a sluggish pace and its temperature will drop as a series of large hydropower dams release cold bottom water from their reservoirs into the river. For species already threatened by the Three [...]

A startup in Germany has developed a new kind of solar panel made of small, organic molecules deposited on polyester films. The technology is similar to what’s used for OLED displays for phones and flat-screen TVs. The panels are flexible, and far lighter than conventional solar panels, yet in some locations—particularly where it’s hot or [...]

Finland and Sweden are leaders in the use of biomass fuels in large-scale boilers. In these countries, the dominating large-scale combustion technology for biomass fuels is fluidized-bed combustion (FBC). Biomass fuels differ in many ways from the standard fossil fuels used in FBC, such as coal. They often have high moisture contents, lower heating values, [...]

We examine the economic feasibility of using dedicated DC circuits to operate lighting in commercial buildings. We compare light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and fluorescents that are powered by either a central DC power supply or traditional AC grid electricity, with and without solar photovoltaics (PV) and battery back-up. Using DOE performance targets for LEDs and solar [...]

This paper examines global carbon dioxide (CO2) efficiency by employing a stochastic cost frontier analysis of about 170 countries in 1997 and 2007. The main contribution lies in providing a new approach to environmental efficiency estimation, in which the efficiency estimates quantify the distance from the policy objective of minimum emissions. We are able to [...]

The Intermittency Challenge and the approaching need for massive storage of rapidly dispatchable energy has led the concept of the National Battery, a unified facility that holds the aggregated outputs from an array of intrinsically episodic renewable sources, releasing energy as demand requires. In this contribution, the original demonstration of Murphy that lead-acid batteries are [...]