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As anyone who read the blog on electric cars below will know, I’m skeptical of just changing the symptom without addressing the cause.  The big problem with electric cars (as with computers, phones, and even wind and wave power) is that batteries, to date, are uneconomical in terms of the energy that is lost in storage.  A team at Boston’s MIT university have come up with a solution that is part terrifying and part exciting.  These braniacs have genetically engineered a virus that builds rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in the form of a plastic film. 

Whatsmore, these nanocreatures were created using green processes: the researchers bred the viruses to self-assemble nanoscale battery films by creating billions of random variations, then using the survival-of-the-fittest principle to select those that best performed desired tasks. (One man’s breeding is another man’s genetic engineering…!) And the batteries can be constructed in an environmentally-friendly manner, avoiding toxic solvents and energy-intensive procedures:  “Because the viruses are living organisms, we had to use only water-based solvents, no high pressures and no high temperatures,” says Angela Belcher, the study coauthor.

The viruses were selected from common bacteriophages, which infect bacteria but are harmless to humans. To the Buddhists in the house who say “But what about the bacteria?  Aren’t they living creatures too?”  I can only answer – if we keep using the old batteries there won’t be any bacteria left to care…!

In demonstrations, batteries made using the micro-contact printing method were able to be recharged hundreds of times with no detectable drop in performance – now that truly is incredible. We still have the problem of how the charge will be created, but this is extremely interesting news for greeniacs everywhere who can overlook the Frankenstein element of living creatures creating things – but wait!  Isn’t that what farming is all about?  In this case, the farm is just nano size – not as picturesque, but then global warming isn’t too pretty either…

Eventually, they plan to commercialize the printable battery films. Last week, MIT President Susan Hockfield demonstrated the prototype to U.S. President Barack Obama.  This wasn’t just a courtesy: funding for the research was provided by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute and the U.S. National Science Foundation.  Here’s hoping Obama will use it for the right purposes….

The proposed city centre car ban, and its opposition, are examples of the adversarial thinking that is becoming out of date. People need to drive into the city, and businesses need them to do so. The problem isn’t the number of people coming in, or that they need to drive: the problem is that they’re driving alone. Facilitating carpooling would solve the problem: the park-and-ride facilities at the Red Cow roundabout and Sandyford industrial estate could easily handle carpoolers as well as Luas users, and there are plenty of industrial estates that could handle a little more parking now that less employees are coming to work. The same conditions exist at most cities across Ireland. Why don’t businesses and city councils cooperate to promote carpooling? Shoppers and workers could save on petrol and parking, as well as sharing information on good deals…Who knows, maybe someone would even carry your shopping!

A report in today’s London Independent suggests that over the past few decades the sun has quietened its sunspot activity, thereby cooling the earth, at exactly the same time as greenhouse gasses were heating the planet to dangerous temperatures.  Is this pure coincidence, or could it be that the Gaia theory doesn’t just hold for the earth but for the entire solar system? How comforting and awesome to imagine that this system, and who knows, perhaps the whole universe, is a sophisticated organism, self-regulating and self-healing – much as our microcosmic little bodies are…?

At first glance, the idea of everyone in Ireland driving electric cars sounds great.  But when looking at Minister Eamon Ryan’s announcement of his ambition to have 10% of the cars in Ireland electric by 2010, one has to notice his collaborators: ESB, Nissan and Renault.  None of these parties can or should be expected to serve anything other than their own interests.  The minister provides very little detail on how this new demand for electricity is to be met.  If this announcement were linked to new wind or sea-power farms, or animal methane, or the dairy by-products and cooking oils that are already fuelling cars around the world, that might be something to get excited about.  But hoping that electric cars will be the magic bullet for our climate change problems, and that an electricity company and car manufacturers are going to be the saviours, sounds at best naïve.  The roads are already overcrowded and making the shift from oil to electricity is like a heroin addict switching to smoking instead of shooting: the greater problem remains.  Is the minister going to require all civil servants to carpool by 2010?  Or offer free tolls, discounted insurance and/or motor tax to carpoolers? That would make a big difference to the energy usage and carbon footprint of this country, but no profits for ESB, Nissan and Renault.  Who’s running this government, anyway?