STUFF

1st director of DOE's ARPA-E leaving after 3 yrs. Dep. director taking over.

UK environment official has thrown support to expanding fracking.

Research links warming waters to Peru's seabird deaths. And warm, deep cureents are carving away at underside of W. Antarctic ice shelves, accelerating ice loss.

House Repubs made 2nd raid on climate change aid funds.

Euro Parliament to skip RIO+20 enviro conference next month, citing costs.

Solar beating wind and NG combined as Europe's top new el source.

Study: rising ocean acidity threatening crucial marine algae. Acidity, of course, comes from CO2 and other pollutants in atmos.

Obama overhauling or eliminating 5 regs - including a Clinton-era air pollution rule - to save $6B in unnecessary costs next 5 yrs. And new exec order to get fed agencies streamlining regulation.

USDA predicting record corn production.

Columbia, China inked deals for oil exports.

In '09, Deutsche Bank studied 270 major climate policies in 109 countries. Common denominators for successful programs: transparency, longevity, certainty. Isn't that just common sense?

DOE: US ethanol production now 897kb/d, back up to winter levels.

Renewable Energy Group Q1 revs up 80% v. '11. EBITDA up 140%. Production 39M gal of biodiesel v. 20M in '11. Stock (REGI) down 4% today. Down over 10% last 5 days.

Agri opened UK's largest biodiesel plant. Prod 16M liters/y from used cooking oil from restaurants, others.

Swede eth imports collapsing - 16.6M liters in Jan and Feb. Brazil imports fell to zero. 1.1M liters from France. Imports from Russia jumped to 7.5M liters v zero at this time last year, 13.8M all of '11.

DOE announced up to $5M available this year to help expand use of alt fuel vehicles, including EV's.

ESA declared Envisat dead. Collected data on Earth atmos, oceans, ice sheets, land masses for 10 yrs.

Fed judge in DC tomorrow will hear arguments in lawsuit of 5 teenagers v. fed govt. They want GHG's reduced to safeguard their future.

Gills Onions in Calif has 300K lbs/d of onion waste. (Imagine the tears.) Now it squeezes it into 30K gals of juice. They feed that into an anaerobic digester to prod methane gas, then feeds that to 2 fuel cells that convert it into 600KW of el. Remainder of waste goes to cattle feed.