GM says the Volt will get 230 miles per gallon in city driving. More astounding, Nissan says its electric car (the Leaf) will get 367 mpg. Of course the carbon cost of electricity generation (*cough* *cough* coal plants) needs to be accounted for, which will make the Volt roughly equivalent to a 55 mpg vehicle—still a potential gamechanger in a nation addicted to the automobile.

Friday politics roundup.

* Early returns from the Iranian elections suggest things could get heated, with both sides declaring victory.

* On the day Jon Kyl threatened a Republican boycott of the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearing, George H. W. Bush cautioned his party not to go overboard.

"I don't know her that well but I think she's had a distinguished record on the bench and she should be entitled to fair hearings. Not - [it's] like the senator John Cornyn said it," [the elder former President Bush] told CNN. "He may vote for it, he may not. But he's been backing away from these...backing off from those radical statements to describe her, to attribute things to her that may or may not be true.

"And she was called by somebody a racist once. That's not right. I mean that's not fair. It doesn't help the process. You're out there name-calling. So let them decide who they want to vote for and get on with it."

* Kos analyzes party ID, empathy, and the generation gap.



* High-school student discovers plastic-eating microbe. We're saved!

Getting everything together for the big roundtable this Friday is keeping me fairly busy, so it's just links tonight.

* Sad news: Eve Sedgwick has died.

* Matt Yglesias luxuriates in the deliciousness of Richard Burr's low approval ratings. So say we all.

* 'Pentagon Prioritizes Pursuit Of Alternative Fuel Sources.' With the military-industrial complex at our back, we can't fail!

* St. Augustine vs. the pirates.

In the "City of God," St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, "How dare you molest the seas?" To which the pirate replied, "How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was "elegant and excellent."

* The mutants walk among us: 'Woman has developed an imaginary, but useful, third arm.'

* New fiction on the way from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.

* 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs. What could possibly go wrong?

* Can poetry save the Earth?

Tuesday!

* Cold fusion is back. More here. We're saved!

* Radiology art. (Hat tip: Neil.)

* My pursuit of all Wes Anderson-flavored cultural ephemera has led me to this video from Company of Theives, as well as Tenenbaum Fail. Via Fimoculous.

* The first eleven episodes of Quantum Leap are up at NBC.com.

* Anarctica travel blog.

* Who was dead at your age?

A rare treat: good news on climate change. A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said. Of course, it's good news on an objective level, but perhaps bad news politically, as this is just now other isolated data point for the ignorant, the deluded, and the actively dishonest to latch onto in their efforts to deny real progress.

Toyota secretly developing solar-powered green car. We're saved!

Here comes fusion: While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun. We're saved!

The headline reads, 'Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes.' What could possibly go wrong?

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

We're saved!

The person I'd most like to see with a cabinet-level position in the new Obama administration is Al Gore, who should be made all-purpose Eco-Czar. Here he is in the New York Times laying out an energy agenda for the next ten years.

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.

With carbon in the "danger zone" and humanity increasingly running out of biocapacity to exploit, Obama comes into power at just about the last possible second to save us all from the eco-apocalypse—I hope.

We're saved, part 2? Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a new way of storing energy from sunlight that could lead to ‘unlimited’ solar power.

(Here, I suppose, was part 1.)

No joke, we may actually be saved this time:

Researchers at Ohio State University have accidentally discovered a new solar cell material capable of absorbing all of the sun's visible light energy. The material is comprised of a hybrid of plastics, molybdenum and titanium. The team discovered it not only fluoresces (as most solar cells do), but also phosphoresces. Electrons in a phosphorescent state remain at a place where they can be "siphoned off" as electricity over 7 million times longer than those generated in a fluorescent state. This combination of materials also utilizes the entire visible spectrum of light energy, translating into a theoretical potential of almost 100% efficiency. Commercial products are still years away, but this foundational work may well pave the way for a truly renewable form of clean, global energy.

The House has approved the bailout, 263-171. We're saved!

EcoTuesday!

* Kim Stanley Robinson, hero of the environment.

* People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.

* We're double-saved! 'New Facility Uses Algae to Turn Coal Pollution Into Fuel.'

* Except we've already destroyed the oceans and the rainforests.

"Peak oil is wrong. We really don't know how much oil there is in most of the oil reservoirs of the world. Oil reservoirs are complex geological structures, and most of the data is in private hands, or in state governments, and they are not particularly forthcoming about how much is there."

So claims environmental futurist Peter Schwartz in New York City. Before you click that "we're saved" tag, though, read the fine print:

"We are not going to run out of oil before the issue of climate change drives change. It'll be costly oil. But it'll be climate change catastrophes [such as sudden, unexpected displacement of large numbers of people, and massive property damage], and more expensive oil, not the fact that we're running out of oil, that will drive change," according to Schwartz.

Elsewhere in the environmental apocalypse, the successful political wrangling from Democrats on the drill-baby-drill issue (blogged here and here) has apparently caused the so-called "Gang of 20" to withdraw their energy bill. Climate Progress says this means the Dems have "blown it," but I'm not so sure: the obstructionism is pretty clearly coming from just one direction here. It's just up to the Democrats to talk up the Republicans' unwillingness to live up to their "all of the above" rhetoric in practice.

Closing a few open tabs.

* The New York Times has an article on Fermi problems and the importance of intuition in mathematics. (There's a game.) (Via Boing Boing.) Kottke links to some such calculations at 3quarksdaily, saying they used to be part of the interview process of Microsoft and Google.

* Roger Ebert explains why some people say he gives movies too many stars.

* The new season of the Ricky Gervais podcast is out.

* More radio: an episode of This American Life from May that explains the origins of the mortgage crisis.

* And Bill Gates is investing heavily in algae fuel. We're saved!

We're saved! 'Melting ice caps could suck carbon from atmosphere.'

It's not often that disappearing Arctic ice is presented as good news for the planet. Yet new research suggests that as the northern polar cap melts, it could lift the lid off a new carbon sink capable of soaking up carbon dioxide.

The findings, from two separate research groups, raise the possibility - albeit a remote one - of weakening the greenhouse effect. The researchers say the process of carbon sequestration is already underway.

Hooray! Except:

Even so, the new carbon sink is unlikely to make a significant dent in the huge amounts of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by industrial activities.

Not to mention: it's the sort of thing that only works once.

Here come cyanobacterial fuels. We're saved!

Dramatic progress has been made over the last decade understanding the fundamental reaction of photosynthesis that evolved in cyanobacteria 3.7 billion years ago, which for the first time used water molecules as a source of electrons to transport energy derived from sunlight, while converting carbon dioxide into oxygen.

The light harvesting systems gave the bacteria their blue ("cyano") colour, and paved the way for plants to evolve by "kidnapping" bacteria to provide their photosynthetic engines, and for animals by liberating oxygen for them to breathe, by splitting water molecules. For humans now there is the tantalising possibility of tweaking the photosynthetic reactions of cyanobacteria to produce fuels we want such as hydrogen, alcohols or even hydrocarbons, rather than carbohydrates.

News roundup!

* Surprising sat: 2/3 of U.S. corporations pay no taxes at all.

* In the latest sign of trouble in the planet's chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved "dead zones" in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crabs and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released yesterday. More at Political Animal.

* 'Honeybee deaths reaching crisis point' in U.K.

* And they've finally, finally invented Mr. Fusion. For real this time. (We're saved.)

Thank God it's Tuesday.

* Were you watching the time-travel show Journeyman on NBC this year? You'll never get another episode, but at least you can find out how it all would have ended.

* Bush 'antagonizing environmentalists' on his way out of office.

Just months before President Bush leaves office, his administration is antagonizing environmentalists by proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants.

The proposal, first reported by The Associated Press, would cut out the advice of government scientists who have been weighing in on such decisions for 35 years. Agencies also could not consider a project's contribution to global warming in their analysis.

This is nothing we haven't seen before.

* Honda to debut hydrogen-fuel cell car in 2008. We're saved! Unless, you know, the debunkers turn out to be right about hydrogen...

* Fraggmented's John Seavey makes one his storytelling engine posts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explaining why the show was never the same (and could never have been the same) after the characters graduated high school.

* A Mac utility that automatically shuts down your Internet connectivity for any length of time you specify. I wouldn't be attracted to something like this if I had any willpower at all.

* Fred Pearce argues the Neo-Malthusian "population bomb" has been defused. We're saved!

Why then is the world’s population still rising? Currently at around 6.7 billion, it is 70 million higher every year. The problem is that the delivery wards are being visited by the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom. They may only have one or two children each. But that is still a lot of babies. Probably nothing will stop humanity reaching 8 billion by about 2040 and many demographers predict that world population will peak at around 9 billion by the end of the 21st century. But once those baby boomers have had their babies, the falling fertility rate will be translated into a real decline in the world’s population — the first since the Black Death of the 14th century.

The question remains, I think, whether 9 billion will be a Malthusian crisis all by itself.

* And it may be time to rethink climate change in the face of the polar bear menace.

Envirolinks!

* Climate Debate Daily, from the good (if too conservative) folks who bring you Arts & Letters Daily, is the latest addition to the ecology section of my sidebar.

* And from way back in February: the top 50 eco blogs, as ranked by the Guardian.

* 25 tips to make your apartment a green paradise.

* More from the the 55-mph wars: Nissan's new ECO pedal "presses back upward when it senses drivers are driving too quickly."

* 'Junk Mail Produces as Much CO2 as 7 States Combined.' Here's how to stop it.

* 'Prepare for global temperature rise of 4°C, warns top scientist.'

* Scientists predict that the disappearance of Arctic sea ice 'will lead to a large-scale transfer of shellfish, snails, and other animals from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.'

* But will algal ethanol save us? Virgin Airlines says yes!