VentureBeat has the story (I think the press conference is going on as I write this) of Google making a major commitment to generating energy at lower cost than coal in years rather than decades.

Sounds like they’re going to combine their own research initiatives with funding promising projects across the energy spectrum.

And now a note about ‘real’ Christmas trees. Don’t buy one. During the first years of a tree’s life they are carbon-negative due to the carbon released during planting, fertilization and their size. Christmas trees represent a worst case scenario because they provide no benefit and are typically mulched after use, releasing their carbon into the environment.

Tell your friends- this is tradition that has to stop. Get one of the silver fake ones with the rotating colored light machine 

I buy organic fair trade coffee because it tastes a lot better and regular coffee is one of the most polluted food products we consume- most of it is grown in third world countries with virtually no regulations on the use of pesticides.

While shopping at my local natural food store for coffee I realized I needed milk so I picked up some organic milk. When I got home (Rochester, NY), I looked at the carton and found that this milk was either from Wisconsin or Oregon- it wasn’t clear. This is crazy. We ship a commodity like milk thousands of miles? Don’t the organic food people realize what the carbon cost of this is?

I think if we’re going certify things like Fair Trade and Organic we should add a third food label: Estimated Carbon Cost or ECC. It would a shocker to know that the supposedly environmentally friendly products we’re buying are actually much worse for the planet than those that are local.

If this is for real, it’s a breakthrough. A Penn State research team has developed a way to extract hydrogen using common bacteria that is highly efficient, clean and low cost. They claim it returns 288% more energy than the process consumes.

This would be very big news as hydrogen extraction methods in use today are not energy efficient and typically require the use of petro products, rendering hydrogen’s use in fuel cells inefficient when you look at the big picture, costwise. Because hydrogen is a completely clean fuel, an efficient production process could dramatically change things. I suspect GM will be all over this for their fuel cell car project.

They also claim the process could be used for fertilizer production, another process that currently relies heavily on using petroleum products.

Nice to have something positive to write about!

Image courtesy of the National Science Foundation.