Batteries or Biodiesel or Both?

Batteries or Biodiesel or Both?

I spend a lot of time researching and thinking about our transportation infrastructure. The fact is we Middle Americans have built kind of an ugly world. A world for cars, spread out wide and covered with pavement.

Throughout most of human history the vast majority of mankind had to walk everywhere it went, all the time. I think our bodies miss walking on some basic level.

The good news is that people have begun to talk about urban sprawl like it’s a bad thing, and to talk about food miles, and to talk about the positives of walkable neighborhoods. Maybe we can avoid paving over more of the earth as we move forward, and maybe we can walk a tiny bit more than we do now.

But we are where we are, and we move into the future from this point forward. We cannot go back and unmake our cities and start over. It is prohibitively expensive and difficult to do so. It’s not going to happen.

Which means we need the means to get around the sprawl in which we live. We can bicycle whenever possible, but cars, buses, scooters, trucks, and airplanes will still be needed to move us and our stuff from place to place.

But our cars, buses, scooters, trucks, and airplanes don’t have to be powered by oil, foreign or domestic. They can be powered in a number of different ways, including compressed air and hydrogen fuel cells. Still, the most likely ways we’ll power our non-human-powered conveyances are batteries and biodiesel.

I’ve written before about the potential of emission-free electric cars. If charged by wind power at night then emission free they will truly be. That’s darned exciting.

There’s still going to be a need, though, to carry people and objects farther than an electric car’s 40 mile (or maybe even 200 mile) charge will go. And that’s where biodiesel comes in.

There are a lot of exciting ways to produce biodiesel. Palm oil is one of the cheapest ways. But one of the most exciting ways - to me, personally - is algae.

Algae has the singular advantage of not taking up land that we would otherwise use for food production. It has the further advantage of being able to draw down CO2, which algae needs as a feedstock. Another feedstock for algae biodiesel production is wastewater. The water that goes down our toilets and drains can be used as a link in a chain that can fuel our long-distance transport needs, while drawing down CO2! How cool is that?

Of course, none of this is as easy as it sounds, but compared to electric cars, biodiesel starts to look easy.

The batteries necessary for electric cars are problematic because of size, weight, duration of charge, quickness of recharge, recycle-ability, scarcity of materials, and other factors besides.

Biodiesel isn't simple either, mind you. But the battery issue begins to seem insurmountable after a while. Biodiesel appears to be just a matter of ongoing tweaking to produce better results.

Biodiesel isn’t emission-free, but it does have the potential to be net zero emission. That is, if the process of creating biodiesel draws down as much CO2 as we put into the atmosphere by burningthe biodiesel then we’ve reached a net zero emission solution. Still, I'd rather not emit the CO2 and other pollutants in the first place. All things being equal, I'll take true zero emission over net zero emission.

The big problem, then is that I don’t know where to invest my money. Should I invest in batteries, and vote for the daily electric world I want to see? Or should I invest in biodiesel - possibly algae produced biodiesel - and vote for the solution that appears to cause the fewest changes to our infrastructure?

Truth be told, I wouldn't mind the 40 mile charge that limits the range of a lot of electric cars, as it would suit my needs and maybe cause some urban shrinkage.

(Urban shrinkage is a great name for a caucasian rap act that sucks.)

I'd still want to be able to rent a biodiesel car on the occasional long weekend, though, and drive a bit outside of my electric zone.

The good news is that we can vote for both.

Now if I can only find publicly traded companies that operate in these areas, that appear to be on the forefront of the technology, and that have good fundamentals.

I'll let you know when I do.

Voting with your money - part III: Coca-Cola

For the last couple of days I've been writing about the potential of large corporations to become engines for positive change. So it seemed serendipitous that I found some interesting links today about an effort to use Coca-cola's distribution channels (which are ubiquitous) to distribute medicine (which is not). The name of the organization pushing this idea: ColaLife

I try to avoid linkblogging, but I also want to give credit where it's due. I found out about this by reading an article on the worldchanging site.

Evidently this guy - Simon Berry - had this great idea and started a facebook group. I'm not sure how he and his group managed to take the idea from Facebook to approaching reality (Coca-cola is at least talking about the idea now) but that's what they did.

Evidently Coca-cola does more than just talk about this kind of stuff.

That being said, at the end of the day Coca-cola profits by plying people with caffeine and either high-fructose corn syrup or aspartame. No one puts a gun to anyone's head and forces them to buy the drinks in question, but still.

Discolosure: These days my caffeinated soft drink of choice is tea, but on too many occasions it's still more convenient to buy a plastic bottle of Coke (or maybe a plastic bottle of tea) than it is to brew a pot of tea.

At least it's good to know that when I occasionally indulge in a Coke that I'm voting for a corporation with either (A) a conscience, or (B) the business sense to see that helping to keep their customer base alive is good for the bottom line.

Voting with your money - part II: Wind Power

In a previous post I began my spiel about Voting with your money. The basic concept is easy, so I’ll not belabor the point.

The thing is, it can be surprisingly difficult to determine if you’ll be Doing Good while also doing well by investing in a given stock.

Wind Power is my example in this case.

Investing in Wind Power is theoretically Doing Good, as wind power is good for the environment.

And investing in wind power should allow the investor to be doing well, as all indications are that it’s a serious growth industry.

But are either of these things absolutely certain?

Let's focus first on my quest to do well with my money.

I’m very frustrated in my search for wind stocks in which to invest. Most wind stocks don't have good fundamentals. There's really only two wind-related stocks with good fundamentals that I can find being traded on American stock markets:

American Superconductor Corporation (NasdaqGM: AMSC)

and

Zoltek Companies Inc. (NasdaqGS: ZOLT)

AMSC looks pretty solid in the long term. Its P/B is a little high, but wind is expanding like mad in the US. Maybe it's worth it.

ZOLT has had some serious issues this quarter, so I'm waiting to see their new P/B before I invest. Really I'm waiting to see their revised balance sheet. (And, of course, I'm waiting to see if there's something else I'm willing to sell in order to buy some shares in ZOLT.)

I'm not certain enough of either of these companies. I'd rather invest in a more established player in the wind market.

There are a couple other companies out there to consider:

Owens Corning (NYSE: OC)

General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE)

These companies are big, established companies, which hopefully explains the fact that their debt outweighs their cash, while at the same time their assets outweigh their liabilities. These are stocks in which to take long positions.

OC makes a lot of building products, and as such they've been adversely affected by the housing bust. They seem to have adjusted, so it may be a good buy. Windmill-blades are made of fiberglass, so this is a wind play, although it’s not a purely wind play.

GE, on the other hand, is also not a purely wind play. In fact, GE is the poster-child for what Eisenhower was talking about when he coined the phrase "military-industrial complex".

This brings us around to my quest to Do Good with my money.

According to Yahoo! Finance "General Electric Company (GE) operates as a technology, media, and financial services company worldwide. It operates through four segments: GE Capital, Energy Infrastructure, Technology Infrastructure, and NBC Universal."

GE manufactures aircraft for the military, but I guess this falls under the general heading of “Technology”. This isn't an inherently bad thing, but it makes me question the impartiality of their media division.

GE’s aircraft manufacturing gives them a leg up in the wind business. I understand that GE is one of the biggest manufacturers of turbines for windmills. This is what makes them a good wind play, if not a pure wind play.

GE manufacturing's environmental record is not good, though. They’re moving slowly to clean up a section of the Hudson in which they were polluting for decades, and may be polluting still. This is just the biggest example of their environmental missteps.

GE has an ad campaign - ecomagination - that I would classify as Greenwashing.

And yet, when I go out and buy a compact fluorescent bulb, it will probably be a GE product that I buy. (I can't find dimmable CFBs from any other company). Also, I personally consume a lot of GE television through NBC Universal, which owns NBC and all NBC-branded channels, as well as USA Network and the SciFi Channel (just to name a few cable channels they own. There are more).

I guess GE is, at the end of the day, another company that has huge potential to change the world, one way or another.

And I'm sure that my portfolio would be doing well, long-term, should I invest in GE.

At present, though, I'm going to refrain from taking a long position in GE, even if it is one of the better bets in wind energy. I think that they may be doing more harm than good, overall.

I’ll still buy their compact fluorescent bulbs, though. I can still encourage them to Do Good.

Voting with your money - part I: Wal-Mart

No readers have pointed this out yet, but it strikes me that I started this blog with lofty ideals of changing the world, but then since then I've largely talked about investing (with the occasional diversion into the world of personal transport).

So what does investing have to do with changing the world for the better?

It's about voting with your money.

This is a concept I've been attempting to enact in my personal life for some years. Basically, I try not to give my money to people or corporations that I think are actively making the world worse.

I stopped going to McDonald's back when they were still using styrofoam containers for everything. When they moved to paper and cardboard I relented a bit, and I very occassionally go there now. There are times when you're hungry and there's nothing so fast and convenient as a McDonald's

Similarly, I didn't go to Wal-Mart for a long time, but now that Wal-Mart is becoming more environmentally friendly I've begun to shop there again, on occasion.

I'm known by some to have an anti-corporate stance, but that's largely because I see many corporations as doing more harm than good. When profit is their only goal then they are capable of doing a lot of damage in the process of realizing that goal.

Corporations have huge power to effect change. And often it's not a change for the better.

But if it is a change for the better, then that's very cool. Because - again - corporations have huge power to effect change.

At the end of the day, though, profit remains their main concern.

Amazingly enough, Wal-Mart appears to be not just greenwashing their corporate image (although I'm sure they don't mind the makeover), but they seem to be realizing some of the economic advantages of going green.

The link above mentions one area where Wal-Mart's behavior is not getting any greener, but it's an area where most retailers' behavior is not getting any greener, so I don't think it's fair to single out Wal-Mart for criticism.

The area in question? Bottled water.

Bottled water is intrinsically bad for the environment - really, any drink in a plastic bottle (that's likely to be thrown away instead of recycled) is bad for the environment. But retailers are going to keep selling it, because people will still buy it.

Really, all the retailers are just going with the flow on this one. The market currently dictates that they need to stock and sell bottled water.

But we are the market.

Here's another thing we can do to make a difference, then. Not only can where we shop make a difference. What we buy can make a difference. Most importantly, what we DON'T buy can make a difference.

We are the market. We dictate that stores need to stock and sell bottled water. And we can change this. We can stop buying it.

If people don't buy it, eventually they'll stop selling it.

This is intended as just one example. What I'm trying to say is this: How we spend our money (0r how we don't) is important, and it makes a difference.

What does this have to do with investing? Well, the same principle applies when buying stock.

Specifically, this same principle is involved in my decision to focus on cleantech stocks, and in my decision not to invest yet in Wind Power, even though every indication is that Wind Power is going to be huge, AND Wind Power is great for the environment.

There are some other factors in play.

Look forward to "Voting with your money - part II: Wind Power" for a full explanation.