Passage 5 2009 review: In Green Tech We Must Trust
2009年的绿色科技 《新科学家》

[00:01]Although the world's governments meeting in Copenhagen struggled to
[00:05]agree on a plan of action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,
[00:10]the green technology innovations reported by New Scientist
[00:15]during 2009 suggested reasons for optimism.
[00:20]Transport continued to be a big target for green ideas
[00:24]despite tough economic times. In the US the sector
[00:29]is the second largest contributor to emissions,
[00:33]responsible for 28 per cent of the country's total.
[00:38]Of those, 60 per cent are from road vehicles indeed,
[00:43]a study this year concluded that the average fuel efficiency of
[00:48]the US vehicle fleet has risen by just 1.3 kilometres per litre
[00:55](3 miles per gallon) since the days of the Ford Model T.
[01:01]That looks set to change soon though.
[01:05]A wide range of possible solutions were on show in Las Vegas, Nevada,
[01:11]last month as the teams competing in this year's Automotive X Prize
[01:16]were announced. The prize challenges teams to make a production-ready vehicle
[01:22]able to travel 100 miles on the equivalent energy of a gallon of petrol.
[01:30]It's been a good year for the electric car.
[01:33]Governments helped the largest auto companies get rid of their difficulties
[01:38]with the extra condition that they pump resources into battery-operated vehicles,
[01:44]and as a result 2009 was the year that battery chemistry became cool.
[01:52]Such is the rumor around electric cars that some researchers
[01:57]are even developing ways to convert gas guzzlers to electricity.
[02:04]Elsewhere, the quest to power transport using hydrogen continued.
[02:11]One team showed that existing gas power stations could be
[02:16]easily modified to pump out hydrogen, but transporting and storing hydrogen
[02:22]still have major technological difficulties.
[02:26]Perhaps the methanol economy is more achievable the alcohol
[02:32]is a liquid at room temperature, like petrol,
[02:36]so the existing infrastructure could be easily adapted, according to some.
[02:42]Ways to make the aviation industry
[02:45]leaner and greener were also on show in 2009.
[02:51]They included the suggestion that aircraft wing tips
[02:55]could change mid-flight to give extra lift and cut fuel consumption.
[03:02]But greening air travel is also about land operations.
[03:07]Plane manufacturer Airbus started to study
[03:12]if robotic trucks to tow aircraft could reduce the $7 billion
[03:18]and 18 million tonnes of CO2 that resulted from using jet engines
[03:26]designed for flight to move heavily from runway to terminal and back.
[03:33]Of course, finding ways to avoid travel - videoconferencing, for example
[03:41]will also cut transport emissions.
[03:44]A system to project your alive features onto a blank-faced dummy
[03:50]was one method suggested to make virtual travel closer to the real thing.
[03:56]But sending data through the internet has a carbon footprint of its own.
[04:02]Junk-email is not only an inconvenience to the individual,
[04:07]but globally produces emissions equivalent to burning 9 billion litres
[04:14]of petrol annually. Yahoo's proposed email postage stamp system
[04:20]could take a large amount out of the net's carbon footprint
[04:25]if users can be persuaded to start giving money for charity
[04:30]for every email they send.
[04:34]IBM and Google also unveiled plans to cut the environmental damage done
[04:40]by internet infrastructure,
[04:43]but individual web users could have their own part to play in creating
[04:49]a green internet. One of the world's biggest manufacturers of routers
[04:55]is trialling a system to store some web data in the homes of
[05:00]broadband subscribers to cut the power use of the huge data centres
[05:06]on which the internet currently relies.