Global Warming In the News

That's the advice for environmentally conscious drivers in a report released this week by Environment New Jersey, a nonprofit group.

Add up the emissions from growing or making as well as burning various alternatives to gasoline, the report concludes, and the best way to go is electricity.

The report, "Beyond Oil: The Transportation Fuels That Can Help Reduce Global Warming," discusses the pros and cons of a number of alternatives to gasoline, including ethanol made from corn.

"Because electric motors are far more efficient than internal combustion engines," Environmental New Jersey said in a statement introducing its report, "vehicles that use electricity almost always produce less global warming pollution than gasoline vehicles, even when the electricity used to fuel them is coal."

The report takes a surprisingly dim view of ethanol made from corn, an alternative fuel that has received a good deal of attention and investment in recent years.

By the time you grow the corn, refine it into ethanol and burn it as an automobile fuel, the report concludes, you will have released more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than if you stuck with gasoline, the report argues.

"It takes a lot of energy to run the machinery and produce the fertilizer to cultivate corn," said Matt Elliott, a global warming analyst for Environment New Jersey.

Hydrogen holds out great promise, the report said, referring to a fuel that burns clean and can be extracted from water, but is "still a long way from being available to American consumers."

Hybrid-electric vehicles are already here, the report points out, in the form of the Toyota Prius and other vehicles powered both by gasoline and electricity.

In these vehicles, an electric battery is charged by the gasoline engine and through the re-capture of energy from braking and deceleration.

Plug-in hybrids, which have larger batteries and can be charged by plugging into the electric grid, are also available, albeit in smaller quantities, smaller sizes or less attractive prices.

A plug-in sports car made by Tesla, a California company, gets good reviews for performance and appearance but retails for more than $100,000.

Toyota, Nissan and General Motors all expect to have less expensive electric cars on the market by 2010.

Reach Richard Pearsall at (856) 486-2465 or rpearsall@courierpostonline.com