1st, Los Angeles

In this Sustainable Transportation Club newsletter:

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Meeting Reminder

- Sustainable Transport Club Meeting April 8^th

EARTH DAY Saturday, April 15.

Green Drinks – Good idea for building the Green Community

April 6^th

Article on Ethanol production - *Carbon cloud over a green fuel**

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You can find the subject you want by looking for the separator bars

with the row of XXXXX’s in this document.

Please send any relevant information for inclusion in this

newsletter.

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Meeting Reminder

Sustainable transport Club Meeting Saturday April 8th

10:00AM

Unurban Café, 33RD & PICO (across from Trader Joes)

Santa Monica, CA 90405

Agenda

Preparing for EARTHDAY

– The Sustainable Transport Village is on and should be

great – see details below.

– The Earth-day Coordinator will be with us to help get

details sorted out for a smooth day.

– We need to plan the literature and handouts

Next Step in Developing the Sustainable Transport Primer

(The outline for the Primer and a draft of a few sections is online at

www.sustainabletransportclub.com. Feel free to put your contact

info in the sign up while visiting – It helps get the newsletters out)

How to get the Primer to help other communities

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EARTH DAY Saturday, April 15.

The Earth day event is becoming an incredible thing. The

Sustainable Transport Club is joining forces with other groups

to show what is possible for an environmentally sound solution to

our addiction to oil.

We are putting together a Sustainable Transport Village.

PARTICIPATING GROUPS INCLUDE: the Sustainable

Transport Club, Green Depot, the Westside Greens, Los Angeles

County Bicycle Coalition, TRANS-PORT+STATION inc, Flexcar,

the Sierra Club, Santa Barbara Electric Bicycle Company and Big

Blue Bus and local residents who have been driving alternate fuel

vehicles for years.

DISPLAYS WILL INCLUDE: bio diesel vehicles, a RAV4

Electric SUV, a Gem Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, several

electric motor scooters including the Electric Vehicle Technologies

(EVT), electric bikes and skateboards and unique bicycles

including commuter, load carrying and folding bikes. This will be

the LA début of the German engineered electric motor scooter

called the E-Max. It is possible that we will have a preview of the

Vectrix, a full size, freeway legal electric motor scooter scheduled

for release later this year.

This should really get people’s attention and give us a chance to

get people on the Sustainability band wagon – or is that the bus –

or is that the train….

Please let us know if you can volunteer to help people by showing

up to help answer questions and get more people on our mailing

lists etc. email us at electric@sustainabletransportclub.com

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SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT PRIMER

The Primer is intended to be a way to get people to start working

on building sustainable solutions to:

Oil Addiction

Environmental issues of air and water pollution

Traffic Congestion and

Parking Problems

Here is part of the description of what the solution might look like:

“The roads are filled with a wide range of vehicles. They include

everything from lots of bicycles and scooters up to cars and trucks

running on renewable clean fuels. The young people and the

physically vigorous ones are using everything from standup

scooters, skates, skateboards and bicycles to get what they need

from within their communities. The busy moms and dads are

getting their errands done more quickly and easily with things like

electric mopeds, the Seqways and neighborhood electric vehicles

that go up to thirty miles an hour. The seniors and those with

physical challenges are using a range of mobility scooters.”

You can help to create this primer and build this vision into a

compelling factor that helps create the changes we need. The

current draft of what we are working on is online to get you up to

speed. It includes the outline and some of the draft text.

We will need help not just with the ideas but with the production

as well. Professional level editing, photo’s and layout help will all

be welcome. What part can you play to help bring this together?

Check it out and see what you can do to help. www.sustainabletransportclub.com

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Green Drinks – Good idea for building the Green Community

Last Month's West side Green Drinks was huge!

Be sure to be there Thursday as LA Green Drinks continues to

grow!

West Side LA Green Drinks

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

6pm-???

Duke's Hideaway at the Culver Hotel

9400 Culver Blvd.

Culver City, CA 90232

www.culverhotel.com

310.838.7963

West Side Green Drinks is 1st Thursday of every month.

East Side Green Drinks is 3rd Thursday of every month.

Remember-

If anyone wants to bring literature to promote their green issue

please do so-

we will have an area for brochures, business cards, etc.

We will also take back any extra literature back and bring them to

the next Green Drinks.

The main thing is just to relax and have a good time.

Bookmark this blog for future updates

http://lagreendrinks.blogspot.com XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

*Carbon cloud over a green fuel**

An Iowa corn refinery, open since December, uses 300 tons of coal

a day to make ethanol.*

by Mark Clayton

The Christian Science Monitor

Thursday, March 23, 2006

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0323/p01s01-sten.html

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is

distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior

interest in receiving the included information for research and

educational purposes.

Late last year in Goldfield, Iowa, a refinery began pumping out a

stream of ethanol, which supporters call the clean, renewable fuel

of the future.

There's just one twist: The plant is burning 300 tons of coal a day

to turn corn into ethanol - the first US plant of its kind to use coal

instead of cleaner natural gas.

An hour south of Goldfield, another coal-fired ethanol plant is

under construction in Nevada, Iowa. At least three other such

refineries are being built in Montana, North Dakota, and

Minnesota.

The trend, which is expected to continue, has left even some

ethanol boosters scratching their heads. Should coal become a

standard for 30 to 40 ethanol plants under construction - and 150

others on the drawing boards - it would undermine the

environmental reasoning for switching to ethanol in the first place,

environmentalists say.

"If the biofuels industry is going to depend on coal, and these

conversion plants release their CO2 to the air, it could undo the

global warming benefits of using ethanol," says David Hawkins,

climate director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in

Washington.

The reason for the shift is purely economic. Natural gas has long

been the ethanol industry's fuel of choice. But with natural gas

prices soaring, talk of coal power for new ethanol plants and

retrofitting existing refineries for coal is growing, observers say.

"It just made great economic sense to use coal," says Brad Davis,

general manager of the Gold-Eagle Cooperative that manages the

Corn LP plant, which is farmer and investor owned. "Clean coal"

technology, he adds, helps the Goldfield refinery easily meet

pollution limits – and coal power saves millions in fuel costs.

Yet even the nearly clear vapor from the refinery contains as much

as double the carbon emissions of a refinery using natural gas,

climate experts say. So if coal-fired ethanol catches on, is it still

the "clean, renewable fuel" the state's favorite son, Sen. Tom Harkin likes to call it?

Such questions arrive amid boom times for America's ethanol

industry.

With 97 ethanol refineries pumping out some 4 billion gallons of

ethanol, the industry expects to double over the next six years by

adding another 4.4 billion gallons of capacity per year. Tax breaks

as well as concerns about energy security, the environment, and

higher gasoline prices are all driving ethanol forward.

The Goldfield refinery, and the other four coal-fired ethanol plants

under construction are called "dry mill" operations, because of the

process they use. The industry has in the past used coal in a few

much larger "wet mill" operations that produce ethanol and a raft

of other products. But dry mills are the wave of the future, industry

experts say. It's their shift to coal that's causing the concern.

More plants slated for Midwest, West

Scores of these new ethanol refineries are expected to be built

across the Midwest and West by the end of the decade, and many

could soon be burning coal in some form to turn corn into ethanol,

industry analysts say.

"It's very likely that coal will be the fuel of choice for most of

these new ethanol plants," says Robert McIlvaine, president of a

Northfield, Ill., information services company that has compiled a

database of nearly 200 ethanol plants now under construction or in

planning and development.

If all 190 plants on Mr. McIlvaine's list were built and used coal,

motorists would not reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions,

according to an in-depth analysis of the subject to date by scientists

at University of California at Berkeley, published in Science

magazine in January.

Of course, many coal-fired ethanol plants on the drawing board

will not be built, Mr. McIlvaine says. Others in planning for years

may still choose natural gas as fuel to meet air pollution

requirements in some states.

Other variations on ethanol-coal are emerging in Goodland, Kan.,

and Underwood, N.D., where ethanol plants are being built next to

coal-burning power plants to use waste heat. Efficient, but still coal.

That could spell trouble for ethanol's renewable image.

"If your goal is to reduce costs, then coal is a good idea," says

Robert Brown, director of Iowa State University's office of

biorenewables. "If the goal is a renewable fuel, coal is a bad idea.

When greenhouse-gas emissions go up, environmentalists take

note. Then you've got a problem."

Ethanol industry officials say coal-power is just one possibility the

industry is pursuing.

"I think some in the environmental community won't be all that

warm and fuzzy about [coal-fired ethanol]," says Bob Dinneen,

president of the Renewable Fuels Association, the national trade

association for the US fuel-ethanol industry. "It's fair to say there's

a trend away from natural gas, but coal is just one approach. Other

technologies are part of the mix, too."

He cites, for instance, a new ethanol plant in Nebraska strategically

located by a feed lot, using methane from cattle waste to fire

ethanol boilers. Another new plant in Minnesota uses biomass

gasification, using plant material as its fuel.

Coal for now, wood in the future

Coal may end up being merely a transitional fuel in the run-up to

cellulosic ethanol, including switch grass and wood, says another

RFA spokesman. While ethanol production today primarily uses

only the corn kernel, cellulosic will use the whole plant.

Cellulosic ethanol, mentioned by President Bush in his State of the

Union speech, could turn the tide on coal, too, by burning plant

dregs in the boiler with no need for coal at all.

"It's a fact that ethanol is a renewable fuel today and it will stay

that way," says Matt Hartwig, an RFA spokesman. "Any

greenhouse-gas emissions that come out the tailpipe are recycled

by the corn plant. I don't expect the limited number of coal-fired

plants out there to change that."

Still, Hawkins insists that if ethanol is made using coal, the carbon

dioxide should be captured and injected into the ground.

"We favor getting ethanol production up," Hawkins says. "But we

obviously favor a cleaner process. We need large cuts in global

warming emissions from transportation. It's not good enough for

ethanol to simply be no worse than gasoline."

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