Biodiesel Congeals, School Buses Stall - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com

Biodiesel congeals at low temperatures, as John Jones, the transit director for the Summit Stage bus service in the Colorado mountains told me. He stopped using biodiesel in the winter after one of his buses filled with drunken revelers — and fueled by a biodiesel blend — stalled on the interstate in the middle of a frigid winter night.

Now a similar problem has hit Minnesota school buses, which also run on a biodiesel blend.

According to The Minneapolis Star Tribune, some school buses stalled in last week’s bitterly cold weather. Children got stuck in stalled buses or had a long wait in the freezing weather at their bus stops.

A few school districts were closed as a result of the problem.

Wind Watch: Wind power advocates play loose with the facts

A recent letter writer states that “The U. S. Department of Energy estimates that wind can safely provide 20 percent of our nation’s energy needs by 2030.”

The Department of Energy has made no such estimate. This popular misconception was mined from a May 2008 study heavily influenced by the wind power industry. The report was by no means an estimate or projection, but a study to determine if the 20 percent scenario is technically feasible, and it concluded that it is. It is also technically feasible that we could colonize the moon with millions of Americans by 2030, but that isn’t going to happen either.

British explorers to measure allegedly melting icecap - Taiwan News Online

They intend to clamber over ice fields and swim through open water to reach the pole, taking measurements on ice and snow levels in the Arctic as they go.

The data will be fed into supercomputers at the U.S. Postgraduate Naval School in Monterey, California.

The team hopes to have results ready for an international conference on climate change being held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.