The utilization of renewable energies as an alternative for fossil fuels is considerably growing due to an increasing environmental concern and exhaustion of fossil fuels [1-3]. Transportation electrification is one way to replace or reduce fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Several propulsion systems including hybrid electric vehicles and plug in hybrid electric vehicles have been int...

Mitigating the global warming greenhouse effect while maintaining a fossil fuel economy, requires improving efficiency of utilization of fossil fuels, use of high hydrogen content fossil fuels, decarbonization of fossil fuels, and sequestering of carbon and CO2 applied to all the sectors of the economy, electric power generation, transportation, and industrial, and domestic power and heat gener...

Geoengineering is the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment. The term has usually been applied to proposals to manipulate the climate with the primary intention of reducing undesired climatic change caused by human influences. These geoengineering schemes seek to mitigate the effect of fossil-fuel combustion on the climate without abating fossil fuel use; for example, b...

Alternative energy is any energy source that is an alternative to fossil fuel. These alternatives are intended to address concerns about such fossil fuels. Today, because of the variety of energy choices and differing goals of their advocates, defining some energy types as "alternative" is highly controversial. Most of the recent and existing alternative sources of energy are discussed below. K...

High fossil fuel prices have rekindled interest in nuclear power. This paper identifies specific nuclear characteristics making it unattractive to merchant generators in liberalized electricity markets, and argues that non-fossil fuel technologies have an overlooked ‘option value’ given fuel and carbon price uncertainty. Stochastic optimization estimates the company option value of keeping open...

There is now a sense that the world community has achieved a broad consensus that: 1.) the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is increasing, 2.) this increase is due largely to the combustion of fossil fuels, and 3.) this increase is likely to lead to changes in the global climate. This consensus is sufficiently strong that virtually all countries are involved in trying to achiev...

Past research on the disproportionality of pollution suggests a small subset of a sector's facilities often produces the lion's share of toxic emissions. Here we extend this idea to the world's electricity sectors by calculating national-level disproportionality Gini coefficients for plant-level carbon emissions in 161 nations based on data from 19,941 fossil-fuel burning power plants. We also ...

Combustion-derived black carbon (BC) aerosols accelerate glacier melting in the Himalayas and in Tibet (the Third Pole (TP)), thereby limiting the sustainable freshwater supplies for billions of people. However, the sources of BC reaching the TP remain uncertain, hindering both process understanding and efficient mitigation. Here we present the source-diagnostic Δ(14)C/δ(13)C compositions of BC...

We present a concept for a small satellite mission to make systematic, global observations of night-time lights with spatial resolution suitable for discerning the extent, type and density of human settlements. The observations will also allow better understanding of fine scale fossil fuel CO2 emission distribution. The NASA Earth Science Decadal Survey recommends more focus on direct observati...

As we transition from fossil fuel reliance to a new energy future, innovative microbial biotechnologies may offer new routes to maximize recovery from conventional and unconventional energy assets; as well as contributing to reduced emission pathways and new technologies for carbon capture and utilization. Here we discuss the role of microbiology in petroleum biotechnologies in relation to addr...