Covering Cleantech: The New Electric Cars

The “Sprout” below represents a prototype for a series of backgrounders on major cleantech topics (think of it as a beat memo in Flash). If you have ideas for how this sort of thing might be made more useful, I hope you’ll share them. If you’d like to embed this shell on another page, simply click on Share in the lower right and then copy the code.

more about “Covering Cleantech: The New Electric …“, posted with vodpod

Water Tech and Climate

A few notes from the Churchill Club’s 10th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends event on Wednesday:

Trend: Water tech will replace global warming as a global priority
— Joe Schoendorf, Accel Partners

• “The world is running out of usable water.” This will kill millions more people in our lifetime than global warming.
• Connection to Davos: Anders Berntell, director of the Stockholm International Water Institute cited similar stats at the World Economic Forum. Sunita Narain, winner of the Stockholm Water Prize and director of New Delhi’s Centre for Science and Environment, warned against “looking for quick fix technological solutions to what is primarily a governance issue.” No mention of this at Tech Trends.
• Schoendorf proposes desalination is a solution.
• “There’s some real chance that they could write about us as the generation that was worried so much about global warming that they forgot about water.” Fellow VC and panelist Steve Jurveston (of DFJ) called this a “siren call” for the venture capital community to address severe water shortages in the developing world.
• Vinod Khosla said that his firm has invested in two water tech companies (Quos and NanoH2O, both working with desalination). He’s now “looking for more because of its criticality.” To no one’s surprise, Khosla forecast another trend in the “green” category, this one having to do with ethanol.

Schoendorf framed his forecast as a matter of priorities, but he also raised the question (inadvertently) of how to approach the problem: as an illness in itself—humans need more fresh water, so let’s make some—or as a symptom of something larger and more complex. Yesterday, the United Nations released a report that seems to point to the latter.

Colbert on Ethanol

“Corn + magic = gasoline.” That’s the equation Stephen Colbert runs with in this Apr. 28 segment. Serving as fodder for his riffs on U.S. energy consumption and fossil fuel dependence were comments from a member of a European organization called the Royal Society of Chemistry, or RSC. Made up of 44,000 chemical scientists and students, the group has campaigned since 2007 for a prominent role (and government funding) for chemical sciences in the UK’s development of new fuel technologies.

Paraphrasing the chemist’s comments, Colbert says, “The fuel for one transatlantic flight would require a year’s worth of corn from 30 soccer fields.” (Of course, being Colbert, he adds, “The Royal Society calls this an “extremely inefficient process”—it is very efficient. You get to fly across the Atlantic and destroy soccer at the same time.”)

To be sure, the segment is timely and brilliantly delivered. But Colbert (or his writers) overlooked at least one detail: According to the RSC press office, the original comments addressed not ethanol but biokerosene, or “biojet,” which Virgin Atlantic, Boeing, and NASA have been testing air flight. A Brazilian company called Tecbio that now works with NASA claims to have invented the fuel in the ’80s, but it has taken the recent spike in oil prices to restore interest in the technology.

View the full video on Comedy Central.

More media

Like the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor launched a multimedia piece earlier this month on the global food crunch. The Monitor’s came first, but it’s less rich—none of the fancy video found on WaPo this week. (Featured on the homepage earlier this week, the Post’s “Global Food Crisis” special report now lives in the World and Green: Science. Policy. Living sections.) Still, check out CS Monitor’s interactive map showing rice imports and exports in Asia.

WaPo Digs Deep

Washington Post launched a new multimedia series this week about “the world’s worst food crisis since the 1970s.” Sunday’s piece, “The New Economics of Hunger,” looked at the role of globalization in the current food shortage. Globe-spanning food supply chains mean a multiyear drought in Australia (and the relatively tiny rice harvest that results) has contributed to higher wheat prices on international markets.

Now the cleantech connection: Swapping energy crops for food has also tipped the balance of supply and demand. (Did you know that between one fifth and one quarter of the U.S. corn crop will go into ethanol this year?) In order to “capitalize on the biofuel frenzy,” Anthony Faiola writes, U.S. farmers have not only cut back on the amount of wheat being planted, but they’ve demoted what they do plant to less fertile fields.

On tomorrow’s lineup: a closer look at how U.S. mandates for corn-based ethanol have created problems for farmers and consumers.

Equity, Food and Fuel

Picture a farmer: Perhaps you imagine him with leathery skin, a bit of scruff. But the image bears little resemblance to a majority of people growing food in places where the work’s still done by hand. That job, the World Bank reports, falls primarily to women. Women’s eNews correspondent Dominique Soguel used this fact—and a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization—to shed light on a little explored consequence of the changing links between food and fuel.

While many stories over the last few days have mentioned biofuels as a contributing factor in rising grain prices worldwide, Soguel looks into how demand for corn and other energy crops could widen a socioeconomic divide between male and female farmers. She explained:

[F]emale farmers may be hurt by biofuel trends. That’s because governments often divert resources away from food production to expand bio-energy production and target marginal lands, which women more often than men depend on for food, fuel and livestock feed.