Why Does Energy Efficiency’s Promise Remain Unfulfilled?

Why Does Energy Efficiency’s Promise Remain Unfulfilled?

Among the many measures the world can take to wean itself off fossil fuels, few match the benefits of making homes, business, and cars more energy-efficient. But financial and psychological barriers have kept individuals, businesses, and governments from realizing efficiency’s great potential.

BIOFUEL UPDATE: Some Biofuels Worse Than Gas for Global Warming; Danforth Science Center Gets $15M in Stimulus for Biofuels; OriginOil Develops Better Way to Get Oil from Algae; FedEx: to Use 30% Biofuels by 2030

In this first post of the BIOFUEL UPDATE — a newly introduced feature of The Green Economy Post — I write about how so called first generation Biofuels such as Corn Ethanol that are derived from food crops or grown on land that otherwise would be used for food crops may be worse for global warming than burning gasoline is! This reconfirms in my mind the pressing need for the biofuel sector to move towards non-food biofuel crops that also are grown on marginal land; crops such as algae, switchgrass, jatropha etc. In other news the Danforth Science Center in Saint Ls. MO gets $15 million in federal funds. Fedex announces plans to get 30% of its fuel from second generation non-food crop biofuels by 2030. OriginOil has developed a simpler and more efficient way to extract oil from algae.