You'd have to be a real gas pump aficionado to notice the new gear that gas stations across California are required to have installed by April 1st. California's gas nozzles have been outfitted for some time with vapor-capture devices, designed to cut back on the amount of volatile organic compounds – those smelly fumes – that escape when you pump gas. This explains that accordion-style rubber sheath that bunches up against your gas tank when you pump – a feature you don't necessarily find in states with less stringent air quality laws.

When those fumes combine with sunlight, along with other emissions, they form ground-level ozone, an air pollutant which acts as a greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming much like carbon dioxide does.

Take a look at this nifty, infra-red video footage from the California Air Resources Board, showing how fumes disperse from the gas pump when they aren't properly collected.

Ground-level ozone is also a real problem for human health, especially for people with asthma and respiratory disease. Just this week, UC Berkeley released a study finding that people living in areas with high ozone levels, like Los Angeles and the Central Valley, have a 25-30% greater risk of dying from respiratory disease than those in less ozone-heavy parts of the state, like San Francisco.

By the way, if you're wondering what "ground-level ozone" has to do with that ozone hole we used to hear so much about, here's the short answer: Turns out ozone does different things, depending on where you find it. In the atmosphere, ozone's a good thing. It forms a protective layer that shields the Earth from the sun's radiation – a layer that's been steadily eroded by chlorofluorocarbons, found in aerosol sprays and other places. Here at ground level, ozone's much less likable: a toxic air pollutant, as I said above.

If every station in California installs the new, hi-tech "enhanced vapor recovery system" they'll collectively cut back statewide, ground-level ozone emissions by ten tons a day – that's roughly equivalent to taking 450,000 cars off the road, according to CARB.

Listen to the Changes at the Pump radio report online.

The Tesla Roadster is an all-electric sports car you can buy today.

General Motors, Chrysler and Ford face an uncertain future. They have been lobbying Congress for a $25 billion bailout, which representatives seem reluctant to grant them. It seems like an odd time to be talking about technological breakthroughs in the automotive industry. But GM is saying that it still intends to come out with its plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, by 2010, and that this new car will "completely reinvent the automotive industry."

Plug-in hybrids run for a certain distance on batteries (so far, hackers have been able to create plug-in hybrids that run for about 10 miles on batteries). After that, they revert to standard hybrid operation, which uses gas and electricity. When you get home in the evening, you plug the car in and recharge the batteries so that the following day you can drive another 10 miles with the electric charge.

Today you can only get a plug-in hybrid by hacking your Prius to add more batteries to it. We filmed members of the Palo Alto nonprofit CalCars doing just this for our QUEST story on plug-in hybrids in 2007. If you're not handy with tools, you can have someone else retrofit your Prius with the necessary battery pack. Luscious Garage, in San Francisco, has started offering this service. They're featured in today’s QUEST story "Waiting for the Electric Car," which explores why all-electric everyday cars remain an elusive goal. The limiting factor is the difficulty in making a battery that is powerful, long-lasting and cheap. QUEST goes behind the scenes to a battery lab at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley to find out what goes into the making of a lithium-ion battery and why it’s taking so long to make one that can power an all-electric car, or even a plug-in hybrid that can go for more than 10 miles on its electric charge.

Watch the Waiting for the Electric Car television story online.

Jamais Cascio and a carbon-spewing cheeseburger.Ever wonder what the carbon footprint of a cheeseburger is? According to Jamais Cascio, Research Affiliate with The Institute for the Future, it’s 4-6 kg of CO2 equivalent per burger — or 150 million tonnes per year in the United States, given that we eat an average of 100 cheeseburgers per person per year. (I'm sure the Bay Area brought the national average of burgers consumed way down. Thank you Alice Waters!)

Cascio recently spoke about cheeseburger emissions and other unintended consequences of our lifestyles, in a plenary address at the Summer Study of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), which took place at Asilomar State Park, Pacific Grove, California, August 17–22. He also discussed 250-mpg hybrid cars, cool roofs, walkable cities, and urban auto congestion charges.

Cheeseburger emissions include that from fuel used to transport beef to market, food that fed the cows that gave the meat and the milk to make the cheese, as well as… cow farts, a significant source of methane, a serious greenhouse gas.

The more I examine our lifestyle, the more I find that it has an impact on the environment equal to, if not greater than, that of our technology. The most energy efficient homes can be operated in a way that makes them energy hogs — turning thermostats way up in the winter and way down in the summer. A myriad of electronic devices, all sucking energy in standby mode, will overcome the best of design intentions. When architects add square yard upon square yard of glazing to new buildings, even ones designed to be efficient and sustainable and to the highest of green building standards, energy efficiency suffers. Even the very best insulating window assemblies deliver at most an R-5 insulation rating, equivalent to about an inch and a half of fiberglass batt insulation.

Because behavior influences energy use so profoundly, the scientists at ACEEE recently hired Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, a sociologist, as a Research Associate. To give you a hint at the kind of research Ehrhardt-Martinez will be doing, here is the title of a recent paper she published in Dialogue: "Energy Efficiency and Socially Rational Behaviors: The Role of Social Sciences in Bridging the Energy-Efficiency Gap and Accelerating Efficiency Gains."

I’m wondering when the energy efficiency community will be calling on the research abilities of people with theological backgrounds. This theologian is ready! I've already come up with the title of my first academic paper, "Measuring the Spiritual R-Value of Homes: Aquinas on Building Tight, and Ventilating Right." Or something like that.

Blower door equipment is used to measure a home's
air leaks. A blower door test is part of the evaluation for
determining a home's HERS Index.
Photo by: D&R International

Remember the day when most men knew the horsepower of their muscle cars? Now most of us are concerned about miles per gallon. But what can we use to bring prestige to our houses? It used to be that a large square footage gave us bragging rights. But if all goes according to the plan of the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET), the talk around the water cooler will be "What's your house's HERS score?"

Home energy ratings have been around since 1981. The idea began in the mortgage industry to credit the energy efficiency of homes towards the home mortgage. An energy efficient home means that the homeowner is spending less each month on electricity and natural gas and therefore has more to spend on the mortgage. RESNET has been developing the Home Energy Rating System (HERS) since 1981. In the beginning, it was the higher the HERS score the better. But because of the more widespread introduction of renewable energy systems, such as photovoltaics (PV) and solar hot water systems, into homes, and the ability of many houses today to produce as much electricity and/or hot water as they need over the course of a year-these are called net zero-energy houses-a HERS Index of "0″ is the goal. A HERS score of 85 means that a new home meets Energy Star standards. A HERS score of 150 means you're living with an Energy Hog. The typical existing home in the United States has a HERS Index of 130.

HERS raters look at a home's heating and cooling efficiency, insulation levels, appliance and lighting energy use, window efficiency, a home's solar orientation, and other factors that are tailored to the home's climate region, and use computer software to calculate a HERS index.

Some readers my be asking, "Why should I care?" You should care because the HERS score is becoming the standard du jour for homebuilders. If you want a bigger, energy efficiency mortgage, you'll need a HERS rater to measure the efficiency of the home you want to buy and to tell you what retrofits you need to do to qualify. If you are a builder and want to catch the "green wave" by earning an Energy Star rating for the new homes you are selling, you've got to get those homes rated by a certified HERS rater.

Many states have Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standards and Energy Efficiency Credit trading, and many more will in the future as we move towards national standards for meeting greenhouse gas emissions goals. The HERS Index is in place to serve the need for a third-party verifier of energy efficiency improvements.

Want energy efficiency tax credits for your new home? Better find a RESNET-certified rater. Moving to Canada? The Canadian RESNET, or CRESNET, is in the process of accepting the U.S. standards. I don't know the HERS Index of my home, but we did recently have some air sealing and insulation work done-but not quite to Energy Star standards. My guess is we'd score about 100. What's your HERS score?

A sample of switchgrass at Sandia National
LaboratoriesIt doesn't need to be said that there's a heated debate about how to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions with actions that lessen our society's carbon footprint. Biofuels like ethanol or biodiesel are one option. They're touted as being carbon neutral because the CO2 they emit comes from crops which had previously sequestered them in the atmosphere. In contrast, petroleum produces CO2 emissions that had previously been buried deep in the earth's crust, adding to the other green house gases in the environment. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy – citing research by the Argonne National Laboratory – states that ethanol derived from corn emits 25% less greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum and that the savings with cellulosic ethanol, made from a feedstock like switchgrass, are much higher, in effect producing no additional greenhouse gases.

So when QUEST decided to move forward on producing a story about biofuels, I welcomed the opportunity to assist Series Producer Josh Rosen in its crafting. Being QUEST, we weren't content to merely renumerate the different kinds of biofuels and how cellulosic ethanol is more efficient than corn-based ethanol. Instead, our story focuses on the pioneering work being done by researchers affiliated with the Joint BioEnergy Initiative (JBEI), a multi-billion dollar research initiative based in Emeryville, as they look beyond ethanol to the next generation of biofuels. So not only is JBEI looking at various feedstocks like switchgrass, rice, poplar and innovative ways to “deconstruct” the cellulosic material, it also attempts to synthesize fuels that work more efficiently in America's automotive fleet, still overwhelmingly reliant on gasoline.

But even top researchers at JBEI like Jay Keasling and Blake Simmons caution that this next generation of biofuels won't be coming online for years. Moreover, new research suggests that the net production cycle of biofuels, from the clear-cutting of trees to grow the crops to their transport to markets far away, may yield as many or more emissions as the use of petroleum-based fuel. A recent Op-Ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by UC Berkeley Alex Farrell cites the reason for this as primarily one of production– the way we clear land for growing biofuels, as well as our emphasis on the use of food-based crops like corn and soybean, which aren't terribly efficient sources of ethanol to begin with.

Tad Patzek, also at UC Berkeley, has been an ardent critic of the carbon-neutral reputation of biofuels, garnering controversy for conducting studies that some other researchers have criticized for their calculations of emissions arising from biofuel production. (See Patzek's co-authored article on page 19 of the March 2007 edition of Energy Tribune). Earlier this year, a study by researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute suggests that biofuels are not created equal, as those made from U.S. corn, Malaysian palm oil and Brazilian soy yield more emissions than their petroleum-based counterparts, given the environmental damage they reap when grown for fuel. The study cites recycled cooking oil and biofuel made from grassy and woody cellulosic material as being more intelligent choices for cutting down on emissions.

And so the debate continues, struggling to keep pace with the technological progress made by scientists toiling away in their quest to find the holy grail of an efficient, cheap and environmentally-friendly biofuel.

Watch the "Biofuels: Beyond Ethanol" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

When football fans tune in on Super Bowl Sunday next weekend, they'll be watching a greener Super Bowl, according to the NFL. Demand for carbon credits is booming, with companies from Dell Computer to Enterprise Rent-a-Car offering their customers offsets with their purchases. But critics are concerned that consumers don't know what they're buying – or might not be getting what they're promised.

The 2006 Word of the Year was "carbon netural" in the The New Oxford English Dictionary. But there's still a lot of debate about what it means. Many people compare the U.S. carbon offset market to the Wild West. Since there is no regulation, how do you know what you're buying?

There are several guides to carbon offsets that have been created by non-profit organizations, designed to help the average consumer (see related resources). But part of the problem is that many people are still debating what a carbon offset should be. And that's a debate that can be found in the blogosphere.

One place you can find it is on the Grist.org blog which has many bloggers writing about green issues. Forestry offset projects, which sell credits based on the fact that trees sequester– or hold carbon dioxide, have come under fire. You can read about a few of the critiques here, here and here.

Another blog, Treehugger.com, has followed the issue as well. They posted this comparison of offset providers to help their readers do their homework and this more in depth guide on the issues buyers should be aware of.

Of course, one of the earliest debates over offsets was whether offsets would act as "indulgences", distracting consumers from making concrete changes in their lifestyles to reduce their carbon footprint. Terrapass, one offset retailer, has tried to investigate this by surveying their customers. They found that the majority of them had already had green habits. Still, the virtues of offsets are a matter of personal opinion.

You may listen to the "Cashing in on Carbon" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Lauren Sommer is an Associate Media Producer for QUEST.

latitude: 37.325510, longitude: -120.640341