WASHINGTON (Reuters - Sun Jul 27, 2008 9:03am EDT) - What if cutting greenhouse emissions could also save the lives of soldiers in Iraq, where fuel-laden convoys make them targets? The U.S. Army says it is happening now in a push to reduce its carbon “bootprint.”

From forward areas like Iraq and Afghanistan to training ranges in the United States, the Army has been working to limit its use of fossil fuels and make its operations more environmentally sustainable.

The goal is to bring Army emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide down by 30 percent by 2015, said Tad Davis, deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety and occupational health.

“What I’m interested in doing is finding out what the greenhouse gas emissions, this carbon bootprint, are for the Army in two to three years at the latest,” Davis said by telephone. “We want to emit less that do that, hand in hand with reducing energy consumption from fossil fuels.”

The Army has pushed for environmental sustainability at all of its bases, starting with the giant Fort Bragg in North Carolina in 2001, Davis said.

In the first years of the Iraq war, the long supply chain stretching from Kuwait to the battlefield put convoys at risk from makeshift bombs called IEDs. Much of the cargo was fuel, Davis said.LESS FUEL, LESS RISK

The more vehicles in the convoy, the more soldiers were vulnerable so it made sense to cut down on the amount of fuel required on the front line.

“If we can reduce consumption on our forward operating bases by using renewable energy, let’s say wind or solar instead of a diesel generator outside the tent … then we can reduce the number of these supply convoys that need to come forward that are getting hit by these IEDs,” Davis said.

Limiting greenhouse emissions from Army vehicles presents a different challenge, since making a Humvee or Bradley fighting vehicle more lightweight to save fuel would offer less protection for troops. But this could change, Davis said.

“There’s emerging technology that is providing lighter-weight armor, so I think at some point … you’re going to see more hybrid vehicles in the tactical military fleet,” he said.

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NEW YORK (Reuters Thu Jul 24, 2008 2:31pm EDT) - Facing a crippling increase in fuel costs, some rural U.S. schools are mulling a solution born of the ’70s oil crisis: a four-day week.

“For rural school districts where buses may travel 100 miles round-trip each day, there certainly are transportation savings worth considering,” said Marc Egan, the director of federal affairs at the National School Boards Association.

Egan said about 100 schools in as many as 16 states have already moved to a four-day school week, many to save money on transportation, heating and cooling.

Nevada’s White Pine School District switched just one of its schools to a four-day week three years ago. Now, with energy costs soaring, four other schools in the district are following suit.

MACCRAY Public Schools in Minnesota, which voted to switch to a four-day week in May, expects to shave 10 percent off transportation costs, which have risen unexpectedly in recent years as fuel costs have shot up.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Oil prices will hit $300 a barrel in 10 years if the United States fails to reduce its dependence on foreign imports, billionaire oil investor T. Boone Pickens said on Tuesday.

The United States imports nearly 70 percent of its oil now and Pickens said the world’s top energy consuming nation would import 80 percent in a decade if it does not aggressively tap its own natural gas and renewable resources.

“If we continue to drift, oil will hit $300 a barrel in 10 years,” Pickens said during testimony at a Senate hearing.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sunday, July 20, 2008. The world’s wetlands, threatened by development, dehydration and climate change, could release a planet-warming “carbon bomb” if they are destroyed, ecological scientists said on Sunday.

Wetlands contain 771 billion tons of greenhouse gases, one-fifth of all the carbon on Earth and about the same amount of carbon as is now in the atmosphere, the scientists said before an international conference linking wetlands and global warming.

If all the wetlands on the planet released the carbon they hold, it would contribute powerfully to the climate-warming greenhouse effect, said Paulo Teixeira, coordinator of the Pantanal Regional Environment Program in Brazil.

“We could call it the carbon bomb,” Teixeira said by telephone from Cuiaba, Brazil, site of the conference. “It’s a very tricky situation.”

Some 700 scientists from 28 nations are meeting this week at the INTECOL International Wetlands Conference at the edge of Brazil’s vast Pantanal wetland to look for ways to protect these endangered areas.

Wetlands are not just swamps: they also include marshes, peat bogs, river deltas, mangroves, tundra, lagoons and river flood plains.

Together they account for 6 percent of Earth’s land surface and store 20 percent of its carbon. They also produce 25 percent of the world’s food, purify water, recharge aquifers and act as buffers against violent coastal storms.

Historically, wetlands have been regarded as an impediment to civilization. About 60 percent of wetlands worldwide have been destroyed in the past century, mostly due to draining for agriculture. Pollution, dams, canals, groundwater pumping, urban development and peat extraction add to the destruction.

Mon Jul 14, 2008 12:57am BST.   MARACAIBO (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday oil prices could hit $300 per barrel if U.S. oil company Exxon Mobil again freezes Venezuelan assets in a dispute over a nationalized oil project.

Exxon won court orders freezing $12 billion in assets held by Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA after the OPEC nation took over a multi-billion dollar oil project, heightening tensions with the United States and helping to raise oil prices.

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Sat Jul 12, 2008 12:44pm BST. LONDON (Reuters) - There will be “spectacular casualties” in the airline industry over the next 12 months, billionaire Richard Branson, the owner of Britain’s No. 2 long-haul airline Virgin Atlantic, was quoted as saying on Saturday.

The U.S. airline industry — including Virgin America — has been battered by soaring fuel costs that are pinching even the healthiest airlines.

“The financial state of the world is just about the worst I’ve ever known it,” Branson told The Times newspaper in an interview. “It’s getting perilously close to being worse than the 1990s.

“You have the perfect storm — you’ve not only got the banking crisis and the housing crisis, you’ve got the soaring fuel prices as well. One of the big American carriers will almost definitely go.”

ZED Comment: ZED engines are powered by locally produced hydrogen for true zero emissions, as well as low fuel cost. For more information contact: corpcomm@zedpower.com