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... if reducing our GHG emissions from light transportation was a real priority - and if the the Oil industry would allow it .. this is what we would be investing in to reduce GHG emissions from cars and trucks the quickest cheapest way possible. But, what the hell, we've got all kinds of time to reduce our GHG emissions.[/font]

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Methanol

–Most efficient, economical liquid fuel to produce from coal and natural gas

–Physical and chemical properties enable ultra-high efficiency engines

• Up to 50% higher efficiency than standard gasoline engine in cars

• 20 - 25% higher efficiency than diesel engine in trucks

Ethanol

–Can be made from natural gas and coal
–Provides similar but lower production and efficiency advantages
–Accepted in US, distribution infrastructure already exists

Ethanol, methanol are liquid fuels produced from biomass/waste most efficiently (or could be made from natural gas and still reduce GHG production vs straight gasoline use_Bill_USA)

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Reformer Enhanced Alcohol Engines


Internal Combustion Engine

Due to high RON and evaporative properties, alcohol fuels facilitate higher engine efficiency

• Higher compression ratio
• Downsize, turbocharge, direct injection
• Heavy EGR/lean + H2-rich reformate gas

Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC)

Alcohol fuels as ORC working fluid, 2 options:

• No-condenser option
• Fuel injected after turbine

• No-condenser, no-turbine option
• Fuel reformed to H2-rich gas, injected to engine, no turbine




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"For better or worse, it looks like many hybrid and EV owners are driven more by financial motives rather than a responsibility to the environment," says Edmunds.com Director of Industry Analysis Jessica Caldwell. "Three years ago, when gas was at near-record highs, it was a lot easier to rationalize the price premiums on alternative fuel vehicles. But with today's gas prices as low as they are, the math just doesn't make a very compelling case."

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Sales of the Nissan Leaf, the best -selling EV in the U.S., are down 27.2% the first quarter this year in a new-vehicle market up 5.6%, says Autodata.

Toyota's Prius gas-electric hybrid is down 7.7%; the plug-in version, fell 61.4%, Autodata says.

Overall, only 45% of this year's hybrid and EV trade-ins have involved the purchase of another alternative-power vehicle, Edmunds data show. That's down from slightly more than 60% in 2012 and is the first time the rate has fallen below 50%.

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I’ve been revisiting economic policy debates since 2008, and what stands out from around 2010 onward is the huge divergence in thinking that emerged between the United States and Europe. In America, the White House and the Federal Reserve mainly stayed faithful to standard Keynesian economics. The Obama administration wasted a lot of time and effort pursuing a so-called Grand Bargain on the budget, but it continued to believe in the textbook proposition that deficit spending is actually a good thing in a depressed economy. Meanwhile, the Fed ignored ominous warnings that it was “debasing the dollar,” sticking with the view that its low-interest-rate policies wouldn’t cause inflation as long as unemployment remained high.

In Europe, by contrast, policy makers were ready and eager to throw textbook economics out the window in favor of new approaches. The European Commission, headquartered here in Brussels, eagerly seized upon supposed evidence for “expansionary austerity,” rejecting the conventional case for deficit spending in favor of the claim that slashing spending in a depressed economy actually creates jobs, because it boosts confidence. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank took inflation warnings to heart and raised interest rates in 2011 even though unemployment was still very high.

But while European policy makers may have imagined that they were showing a praiseworthy openness to new economic ideas, the economists they chose to listen to were those telling them what they wanted to hear. They sought justifications for the harsh policies they were determined, for political and ideological reasons, to impose on debtor nations; they lionized economists, like Harvard’s Alberto Alesina, Carmen Reinhart, and Kenneth Rogoff, who seemed to offer that justification. As it turned out, however, all that exciting new research was deeply flawed, one way or another.

And while new ideas were crashing and burning, that old-time economics was going from strength to strength. Some readers may recall that there was much scoffing at predictions from Keynesian economists, myself included, that interest rates would stay low despite huge budget deficits; that inflation would remain subdued despite huge bond purchases by the Fed; that sharp cuts in government spending, far from unleashing a confidence-driven boom in private spending, would cause private spending to fall further. But all these predictions came true.
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It has been over two years since the Occupy Movement was brutally destroyed by a coordinated national effort led by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Since that time, much documentation has been released under the Freedom of Information Act. Even though they are heavily redacted, these documents provide a frightening window into how far corporate America along with the federal, state, and local governments acting as their agents were willing to go to destroy a populist social movement like Occupy.

Despite all the documentation we have, there are still many out there who are in denial about these facts. After reading some recent comments that misrepresent what happened to the Occupy Movement, I decided to review how Occupy was so brutally squelched by Wall Street and corporate America using government forces as their agents acting upon their behalf.
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Terrorism. The word alone can bring about unwarranted fear in otherwise normal people. The images of the twin towers of the World trade Center were deeply etched into the American psyche and created a climate of intense fear which provided the rationale for the current "war on terror." But what is terrorism and how is a terrorist organization defined? Let's start with Merriam Webster's dictionary which defines terrorism as thus:

[div class="excerpt" style="background:#ccccff;"]the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal

The head of the International Monetary Fund said Thursday that global growth remains "moderate and uneven" and that's "just not good enough" to erase the scars of the Great Recession.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, speaking ahead of next week's IMF-World Bank spring meetings in Washington, D.C., proposed steps governments can take to reduce debt, reform product and labor markets, and promote more cooperation among countries.

Lagarde's speech comes two days after World Bank President Jim Yong Kim told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that slow global economic growth threatened the World Bank's goal of nearly wiping out extreme world poverty by 2030.

Bettering the world economy will be discussed more at next week's IMF-World Bank meetings that will be attended by central bank governors and finance ministers from 188 countries.
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The richest 85 people in the world have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion – or half the world's entire population – put together. This is the stark headline of a report from Oxfam ahead of the World Economic Forum at Davos. Is there a reason why the world's powerful, gathering at the exclusive resort to sip cognac and eat blinis, should care? Well, yes.

If one subscribes to the charitable view that neoliberal philosophy was simply naive or misguided in thinking that "trickle down" would work infinitely, then evidence that it doesn't, should be cause for concern. It is a fundamental building block of supply-side economic theory – the tool of choice these past few decades for those in charge to make adjustments. The realisation that governments have been pulling at economic levers which, for some time, have been attached to nothing, should be a wake-up call to the deepest sleepers.

Even if one subscribes to the cynical view that the elite knew what they were doing all along, observing that the "rising tide" is lifting fewer and fewer boats and leaving more and more to rot in the sediment – both at a personal and national level – must make most wonder "am I in the right boat and is it big enough?" Concentration is rampant. Credit Suisse estimates that the world will have 11 trillionaires within two generations.

It is not so much that the supply-side principle "if you build it, they will come" is no longer true. It is more that we appear to have passed a tipping point, where so much wealth has been concentrated at the top, they no longer need bother to "build" anything. In short, it has become more economically efficient to buy countries' economic policy than to create value in order to sell it on. If one can control government to favour the richest, while raising barriers for new entrants, thus increasing their share of the pie exponentially, what is the incentive to grow the pie?
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Hillary Clinton has been in the national eye for almost a quarter of a century. Over that time, seemingly every aspect of Clintonland has been picked over by the national media and the Clintons' conservative opponents. So it's understandable that as Clinton embarks on a second run for president, the Republicans who hope to defeat her next year are looking for some fresh material.

The recent email kerfuffle — as secretary of State, Clinton used a personal email address hosted on a server located at her New York residence, an unusual arrangement to be sure — seems to be fertile ground (though perhaps slightly less fecund if you are/were a governor who doesn't want to release all of your own official emails). There has also been a flurry of criticism over the Clinton Foundation's acceptance of funds from a handful of foreign governments when Clinton was secretary of State and married to the foundation's founder. There were more donations from foreign governments after Clinton resigned from the Obama administration and joined the newly branded Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Foundation funding was the line of attack pursued by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday. "Hillary Clinton has taken money from countries that rape victims are publicly lashed," he said on NBC's Meet the Press. "I would expect Hillary Clinton, if she believes in women's rights, she should be calling for a boycott of Saudi Arabia. Instead, she's accepting tens of millions of dollars." Paul went on to call that "a grand hypocrisy."

Paul isn't the first Republican to criticize Clinton for serving on the board (until Sunday) of a family charity that accepted millions of dollars from countries with poor records on women's rights — though most Republicans haven't gone so far as to call for "voluntarily boycotting" America's closest Arab ally. Carly Fiorina, the HP CEO turned Republican politician, made a similar point at CPAC, and the Republican National Committee released a video criticizing the Clinton Foundation's donations from foreign governments.

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The Clinton Foundation has $226 million in assets, and it uses them on an array of health, economic development, and women's issues around the world. It has to get that money from somewhere, and as Hillary Clinton pointed out recently, if the Saudis, UAE, and other countries with poor women's rights records are directly or indirectly bankrolling programs aimed at empowering women and girls, that's their choice: "I think that people who want to support the foundation know full well what it is we stand for and what we're working on," Clinton says.
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Despite the ever-widening income gap in America with the poor and middle class losing wealth to the richest Americans in the top one percent of income earners, Republicans still are on a crusade to hand more riches to the already uber-wealthy. This week, Speaker of the House John Boehner will hold a vote to repeal the “Estate Tax” and give the very richest of the rich another government handout at the expense of the rest of the population.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, “The Estate Tax is a tax on your right to transfer property at your death” to your heirs. As it stands now, no-one pays ‘Estate Tax” on any inherited estate unless it exceeds $5.4 million that affects the top 0.2 percent (two-tenths) of households in America. Everyone else, including the top 1 percent, pays no estate tax for inherited wealth up to $5.4 million. It is what gives the wealthiest families in America the ability to stay wealthy and become more powerful from generation to generation all while paying nothing for newfound wealth. Republicans want to completely eliminate the Estate Tax to unburden the richest 0.2% of households that include the likes of Romney and Kochs of America.

If one listens to, or believes, Republicans this country just has not been as generous to the wealthy as it has the overwhelming majority of Americans either wallowing in poverty and low wages or struggling to remain in a rapidly vanishing middle class. It is worth noting that the median income in America is below $50,000 and those families not only have little if anything to pass on to their heirs, they will likely struggle to survive right up until the day they die. Still, Republicans complain bitterly that the majority of Americans are sucking money from the government and the wealthy that should be given to the beleaguered and struggling ‘job creator‘ class.

The only problem with that assertion is that the wealthy are major recipients of government welfare most Americans are unaware of. If Republicans can eliminate the estate tax, super-wealthy families will be able to hoard, and increase, their wealth in perpetuity and become ever wealthier from other forms of government welfare Republicans refuse to subject to “reform” revealing the lack of morals they are known for around the world.

It is true that no-one in their right mind would ever accuse any Republican of having any morals, and in no small part it is due to demands Republicans make on the working poor and poverty class in order to receive government aid they need to survive like food and healthcare assistance; demands and requirements Republicans would never consider making on their wealthy recipients. Republicans have never subjected farmers receiving agriculture subsidies, oil companies receiving billions in subsidies, churches getting hundreds-of-billions in subsidies, or Pell Grant recipients getting free tuition assistance to any of the limitations or demeaning requirements they are putting on poor Americans for something as necessary as food stamps.
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Scientists might have to change their projected timelines for when Greenland’s permafrost will completely melt due to man-made climate change, now that new research from Denmark has shown it could be thawing faster than expected.

Published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, the research shows that tiny microbes trapped in Greenland’s permafrost are becoming active as the climate warms and the permafrost begins to thaw. As those microbes become active, they are feeding on previously-frozen organic matter, producing heat, and threatening to thaw the permafrost even further.

In other words, according to the research, permafrost thaw could be accelerating permafrost thaw to a “potentially critical” level.

“The accompanying heat production from microbial metabolism of organic material has been recognized as a potential positive-feedback mechanism that would enhance permafrost thawing and the release of carbon,” the study, conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Permafrost, said. “This internal heat production is poorly understood, however, and the strength of this effect remains unclear.”

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What makes this new research so important is that it adds to the urgency of stemming permafrost thaw. Because even without this new discovery of heat-producing microbes, estimates for carbon releases from thawing permafrost have been alarmingly large. According to the National Snow & Ice Data Center, there are about 1,700 gigatons of carbon currently frozen in permafrost — more than the total amount in the atmosphere now (Earth’s atmosphere contains about 850 gigatons of carbon, according to the Center).
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