Entertainment and the Environment

By Lauren Selman of Reel Green Media One of the most influential players in the success of this new environmental movement is entertainment and media. From movies to plays, to magazines and webisodes, entertainment and media frame what is happening in the world in a creative way in order to make the message more available. Entertainers by nature are our society's storytellers and have the unique talent of raising social issues, showing the unseen and challenging us to think differently. Believe it or not, as the recession creeps at a petty pace, people are still going out to the movies and catching a play here or there. As the world gets harder to face, entertainment serves as a means for us to escape realty and look at our world a little differently. When it comes to the environment, entertainment serves as an integral vehicle of change and information. Think about it. When the message of global warming went to the silver screen with "An Inconvenient Truth,"…
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Is Hydrogen Fuel the Answer?

Today, powering fuel cells with hydrogen can create more greenhouse gasses than powering directly from fossil fuels, because hydrogen is most often made using traditional gas- or coal-fired electricity. Today, renewable sources produce only 2% of the world’s electricity. Consider the math for a PEM based fuel cell car: Burning coal to generate one megawatt-hour of electricity produces about 2100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Using that electricity to make hydrogen would yield enough fuel for a fuel-cell [PEM] car to travel about 1,000 miles. But driving those 1,000 miles in a gasoline-powered car that gets 40 miles per gallon would produce just 485 pounds of carbon dioxide. From “Hell and Hydrogen”, David Talbot, Technology Review, March/April 2007

Of course, most cars today do not get 40 mpg, either…The point is, fuel-flexible SOFCs using traditional fuels like natural gas make less CO2 than hydrogen-burning PEMs (PEMs cannot operate easily from hydr…

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