Candidate Criticizes Ethanol

  • An ethanol distilling plant under construction. Democratic candidate Mike Gravel argues that producing ethanol is a strain on water resources. (Photo by Lester Graham)

A presidential candidate says ethanol subsidies jeopardize water resources. Democrat
Mike Gravel says producing the alternative fuel could cause over-use of water in some
areas. Samara Freemark has that story:

Transcript

A presidential candidate says ethanol subsidies jeopardize water resources. Democrat
Mike Gravel says producing the alternative fuel could cause over-use of water in some
areas. Samara Freemark has that story:

More corn is being grown for ethanol. Some corn growers pump water from
underground to irrigate their crops. And it takes about four gallons of water to distill a
gallon of ethanol.

Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel says that means subsidizing ethanol
could threaten some water resources.

He says Congress is jumping on the ethanol bandwagon without taking the time to look
at harmful side effects. And he says in areas that have seen water loss such as the
Great Lakes, that’s a mistake:

“The farmers who are going to be draining out their aquifers to satisfy the corn needs
are going to find themselves assaulting the Great Lakes. That is a national policy that
doesn’t get any stupider.”

Gravel blames that policy on lobbying by ethanol producers such as Archer Daniels
Midland. ADM has received more than ten billion dollars in federal ethanol subsidies
since 1980.


For the Environment Report, this is Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Hydrogen: A Pollution Shell Game?

  • A Honda FCX Concept and Honda's hydrogen refueling station. Critics say fossil fuels are still used to produce hydrogen, meaning there's still pollution. (Photo courtesy of Honda)

Lots of people in the automotive industry expect hydrogen to be a major
fuel source in the future. Cars that run on hydrogen don’t emit
greenhouse gases from the tailpipe. In fact, they don’t emit anything
except water. It might sound like magic, but there are some costs to
fueling the future on hydrogen. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Lots of people in the automotive industry expect hydrogen to be a major
fuel source in the future. Cars that run on hydrogen don’t emit
greenhouse gases from the tailpipe. In fact, they don’t emit anything
except water. It might sound like magic, but there are some costs to
fueling the future on hydrogen. Julie Grant reports:


There are a lot of young guys checking out the hybrid cars on display at
this exhibit. Sales associate Chris Beckham is putting on his tie as
he walks over to the sleek, futuristic cars Honda hopes to lease to
consumers as soon as next year:


“It’s a fuel cell-powered vehicle. It runs on hydrogen. The only
emissions it has is water. So, it’s a really great vehicle for the
environment.”


Beckham hopes he gets a chance to lease one:


“What do you think, are you ready to drive one of these?”


“Absolutely. I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these. If you ever get thirsty,
just stand behind the car with a cup.”


Most cars available today, even those that run on alternative fuels,
still emit at least one kind of pollution: carbon dioxide.


David Robillard and his two sons are looking at cars at this exhibit.
He’s worked at Ford Motor Company for 36 years. He thinks hydrogen
will be the long-term energy solution because it doesn’t emit any pollution
from the tailpipe:


“All leaders in market going to try to be first in that segment, and I think
it’s going to be huge. I think 10-15 years from now, it’s going to be a
revolutionary mass transportation system that we have.”


That’s music to Steve Ellis’s ears. He’s Honda’s manager of fuel cell
marketing and says there’s a need to transition from an oil-based
transportation system to hydrogen. Ellis says hydrogen will be a
cleaner alternative:


“Only hydrogen offers the opportunity to have zero carbon emissions from
the vehicle – zero CO2 emisssions AND zero CO2 emissions from the
fuel.”


Ellis sees research and development of hydrogen cars as a noble goal.
But not everyone thinks hydrogen is going to be the climate change savior:


“From one standpoint, I think it’s great. From another standpoint, I
think we also need to check other options as well.”


Paul Erickson is a leader of hydrogen research at the University of
California at Davis. He’s director of the school’s Hydrogen Production
and Utilization lab
. Erickson remembers curling up on the couch as a kid, his lungs burning from all
the ozone pollution in southern California, and he wanted to clean up the
air. But he doesn’t think hydrogen is the best solution that’s
currently available:


“There may be other options that are not as say, politically saavy, but
are options that from a technological standpoint make a lot more
sense.”


It takes energy to create the hydrogen used to run a car. With today’s
technology, that energy is almost always natural gas, but it could be
any fossil fuel. Erickson says those cars don’t reduce energy use or
pollution:

“You’re taking, let’s say some fuel – that could be coal, that could be
any type of energy source – and you convert that energy into hydrogen
and you ship that to the user… it gives you a nice warm fuzzy feeling
saying I’m not part of the problem. But you know what? All you’re doing is
shifting that pollution upstream.”


Some engineers say that’s not necessarily a bad thing – that it would
be easier to control pollution coming from a few power plants than
from the millions of cars emitting greenhouse gases today. But Honda’s
Steve Ellis says hydrogen cars don’t create as much pollution as gas-powered vehicles. Even though nearly all of them need fossil fuels to
produce the hydrogen:


“Even with that method of doing it, we have over 50% reduction when you
factor in in wheel-to-well emissions compared with today’s gasoline cars.”


(Grant:) “50% cleaner?”


“50% CO2 reduction.”


Ellis says hydrogen can be made using renewable fuel sources such as
solar, ethanol, and methanol, but so far it’s not cost-effective. In
the meantime, Honda and other companies expect to start producing some
consumer model hydrogen cars that use fossil fuels in the next few
years.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Hydrogen Explodes Onto Car Scene?

  • A Honda FCX Concept and hydrogen refueling station. There is concern about the safety of handling hydrogen. (Photo courtesy of Honda)

Within the next few years, you might see a new type of car in dealer
showrooms… one that runs on hydrogen. Many engineers and car company
officials predict that hydrogen vehicles will replace gasoline power in
the next 10 to 15 years. But lots of people think hydrogen is too
explosive and wonder if a hydrogen-based economy will be safe.
Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Within the next few years, you might see a new type of car in dealer
showrooms… one that runs on hydrogen. Many engineers and car company
officials predict that hydrogen vehicles will replace gasoline power in
the next 10 to 15 years. But lots of people think hydrogen is too
explosive and wonder if a hydrogen-based economy will be safe.
Julie Grant reports:


Sales associate Chris Beckham hears a lot of concerns about the new
Honda fuel-cell car on display at a recent car show:


“I know a lot of people are kind of worried about the safety of the
hydrogen vehicle because it’s basically like running on an atom bomb.”


Honda fuel cell marketing specialist Steve Ellis rolls his eyes when he
hears comments like that. The Cold War-era hydrogen bomb comes to mind
for people because it’s one of the few times they’ve heard the word
“hydrogen” used in conversation. Another time is when people talk
about the hydrogen-filled blimp, the Hindenburg. Ellis wants to
clear the air about the Hindenburg disaster.
The huge zeppelin burst into flames, and a lot of people blame the hydrogen:


“But history has now shown that it was the coating, the covering of the
material that actually was sustaining the fire. The hydrogen itself of
course being flammable, whatever that cause was, it did ignite. But
the flame was sustained by the coating. That’s what people see.”


Ellis says hydrogen has gotten a bad rap:


“When in reality, science has proven that it wasn’t the guilty party.”


(Grant:) “But it is a very flammable substance?”


(Ellis:) “Sure. As is gasoline.”


There’s still controversy over whether the hydrogen or the coating
caused the Hindenburg to burn. Regardless. Many energy experts say
hydrogen is more flammable then gasoline, but Ellis says the dangers of
a hydrogen fire aren’t any worse then a gasoline fire, they’re just
different.


He says people are used to dealing with liquid gas at the fueling
station. But in some ways, hydrogen could be considered less dangerous
then gas. When gas spills it pools up on the ground, and if someone
drops a cigarette – yipes! – it could be a long day for firefighters.


But hydrogen goes into cars in gaseous form. If there’s a hydrogen
leak, Ellis says it’d be easy to put out a fire:


“So with, you know, fire systems at the station, if there’s any
detection of a flame or any incident like that, as soon as the source
is shut off, the fire’s out, it’s gone. First responders and many fire
departments have said they feel like responding to a hydrogen fire…
it’s like, by the time they’ll get there, they’ll be nothing to put out.
It’ll likely have taken care of itself.”


That’s one advantage of using a light-weight fuel like hydrogen: it
dissipates quickly into the air because it’s lighter then air. But
because it’s so light, each cubic foot doesn’t pack that much energy.
That’s why cars can’t store that much hydrogen in the tank.


Hydrogen-expert Paul Erickson says that low energy content also creates
other safety problems. Erickson is director of the Hydrogen Production
and Utilization Lab
at University of California-Davis. In order to
make cars that hold enough hydrogen to travel a respectable distance
between re-fuelings, he says they have to use a lot of pressure to
squeeze enough hydrogen into a tank:


“It’s just very difficult to get the range out that you’d like. And so you
end up having to pressurize the hydrogen to 3,000, now we’re up to
5,000, now up to 10,000 pounds per square inch. I wouldn’t want to sit
on a 10,000 psi tank of anything, much less hydrogen.”


Erickson says car companies understand the dangers of combining
hydrogen’s high flammability with high pressure in the tanks. They
don’t want any hydrogen to escape from the tank if there’s a collision
and they don’t want the tank to blow up. So, the tank is probably the
strongest component on the hydrogen vehicles being built today.


That’s not the case with regular gas cars. Steve Ellis at Honda says
they won’t release too many consumer vehicles to start. One reason is
to slowly get people used to handling hydrogen safely.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Auto Show Shows More Green

This week, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit opens to the public. Every year, the event is a showcase for the newest trends for tomorrow’s cars and trucks, and this year, the big trend is fuel-efficient vehicles. Cleaner cars have been promised before, but Dustin Dwyer reports that this year’s green car concepts could be more than just an attempt to polish up a dirty image for the auto industry:

Transcript

This week, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit opens to the public.
Every year, the event is a showcase for the newest trends for tomorrow’s cars and trucks,
and this year, the big trend is fuel-efficient vehicles. Cleaner cars have been promised
before, but Dustin Dwyer reports that this year’s green car concepts could be more than
just an attempt to polish up a dirty image for the auto industry:


The press previews for this year’s Detroit auto show were made up of three straight days
of back-to-back new product launches. Dozens of new vehicles were unveiled. Hundreds
of glossy brochures were offered to reporters, and nothing generated as much interest as
the new Chevrolet Volt concept vehicle:


(Sound of buzzing)


A packed crowd gathered for the flashy and noisy unveiling. GM executives announced
that the concept car could run up to 40 miles without using a single drop of fuel. It runs
instead on electricity cranked out by its next-generation lithium-ion batteries. When the
liquid fuel system eventually does kick in, it recharges the battery for better fuel
economy, getting up to 150 miles per gallon.


And as GM CEO Rick Wagoner told the audience, the Chevy Volt represents a new way
of thinking for the world’s largest automaker. It comes from a realization that oil alone is
highly unlikely to supply enough energy for all of tomorrow’s vehicles:


“For the global auto industry, this means that we must as a business necessity, develop
alternative sources of propulsion based on alternative sources of energy in order to meet the
world’s growing demand for our products.”


GM wasn’t the only automaker to unveil a fuel conscious vehicle at this year’s auto show.
Ford’s Airstream concept, and Toyota’s FT-HS sports car concept both featured hybrid
style powertrain systems, backed by a lithium-ion battery.


It might not be all that surprising for automakers to release such vehicles after a year in
which gas prices surged beyond three dollars a gallon, but analyst Jim Hall of Auto
Pacific says gas prices aren’t the reason for automakers to get into low or no emission
vehicles.


“You do it for two reasons, one, the potential of getting out of the business of making a
mechanical engine that has to be machined and made of multiple pieces and assembled,
and the other part of it is, you never have to spend another penny on emissions controls,
and emissions research, and emissions development and emissions engineering, which, at
every major car company is billions of dollars.”


So, basically, greener technology will eventually be cheaper technology. That means that
for perhaps the first time in the history of the auto industry, the interests of
environmentalists and the interest of business-minded bean counters are finally in line.


The big question now is how to get to that greener future. The concepts at this year’s
Detroit auto show all point to lithium-ion batteries as the next frontier. These batteries
are more powerful, and potentially cheaper than the batteries in today’s hybrids, but
they’re also less stable, and don’t last as long.


GM executives say they think they can resolve those issues and have a lithium-ion
powered vehicle by the end of the decade, but Jim Hall says no way:


“I worked on an electric vehicle program when I was employed in the auto industry
directly, and I learned that there are three kinds of liars in the world. There are liars,
damn liars and battery engineers.”


Of course, not everyone agrees with Hall’s assessment. Some lithium-ion proponents
even argue that the technology could be ready to go right now. Ford, General Motors and
the Chrysler Group have asked the federal government for more funding to speed-
development of lithium-ion batteries.


They say the Japanese government is giving its car companies several hundred million
dollars for battery development, and they want a comparable effort from the US
government. But even if Detroit automakers don’t get the money, almost everyone agrees
that big changes are coming for the auto industry, and that decades-long battle between
the good of the environment and the good of carmakers could be coming to a close.


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

Related Links

Powering a Town With Pig Manure

With skyrocketing crude oil prices much of the nation’s attention has turned toward alternative fuels. While many people are focused on ethanol production, one small town is looking at turning waste from humans and hogs into electricity. In a few months, the town will break ground on a 10-million dollar processing plant. It hopes to become the first town in the nation to run completely off renewable resources. The GLRC’s LaToya Dennis reports:

Transcript

With skyrocketing crude oil prices much of the nation’s attention has turned toward
alternative fuels. While many people are focused on ethanol production, one small town
is looking at turning waste from humans and hogs into electricity. In a few months, the
town will break ground on a 10 million dollar processing plant. It hopes to become the
first town in the nation to run completely off renewable resources. The GLRC’s LaToya
Dennis reports:


To get where we’re going, you have to pass through small town after small town and
acres and acres of cornfields. Reynolds, Indiana is a farm town of about 500 people. It’s
hard to find on most maps. And it’s pretty easy to overlook. After all, there’s only one gas
station and three restaurants. But what Reynolds is doing is hard to overlook. Charlie
Van Voorst has lived there for a long time and is now the town president. He says the town is
going to provide its own electricity and it’s not going to burn fossil fuels like coal or
natural gas.


“Town board meetings went from talking about the neighbor’s dog in your yard to now
talking about million dollar decisions about what we’re building.”


What the town of Reynolds is building is a new power plant powered by the by-products
of the surrounding farms, chiefly, pig poop. The plant will use technology to pull
methane and other gases from animal and human waste. The gases will then power
engines and steam turbines. Coming out on the other end is electricity, and leftover solids,
which can be used for fertilizer.


(Sound of pigs)


Within just a few miles there are around 150 thousand pigs. That makes for a lot of
waste:


“Well, this is the bacon.”


Bill Schroeder is a local pig farmer. He’s standing in the middle of a thousand hogs.
They’re about knee high and weigh around 300 pounds each. They’re constantly eating
and pooping.


“It don’t smell to me, does it smell to you. When you walked in here, did you smell?”


Actually, it did smell, but Schroeder thinks it smells like money. He says he’s willing to
give the waste his pigs produce to the town to turn into electricity. After the waste is
processed, farmers will get a higher quality fertilizer back for their fields. But Schroeder
says some farmers still might hesitate because they’re not being paid for their pig waste.


“There should be return. Anytime you invest money, you expect a return. I mean if
you’ve got a CD in the bank you expect a return on that CD. It’s no different from
investment in machinery, hog buildings or anything else.”


Obviously, some of the financial incentives still have to be worked out, but Reynolds
town officials say there are good reasons besides money to take the town off the existing
power grid. Right now, Reynolds gets its energy from coal. That puts a lot of carbon into
the air. Methane processing produces less carbon dioxide than coal.


Jody Snodgrass is managing director for Rose Energy. That’s the company building the
processing plant. He says the project has another environmental benefit. It reduces the
amount methane from pig manure that’s released into the atmosphere because it’s
captured and used to make electricity.


“The increase of methane causes increased cloud formation. Also causes decreased ozone
layer and basically contributes to global warming as does carbon dioxide and several
other compounds. And if you can reduce those or eliminate those, that obviously is a plus
for the environment.”


That’s the reason the town of Reynolds is getting the support of the state in its effort to
become energy independent. Although everyone’s not on board yet, town president Charlie Van
Voorst is excited about what’s to come. He says small town farming communities haven’t
seen a development this big in more than 100 years:


“Oh, my goodness. Since I’ve grown up, golly. I suppose you could talk about the –
something to this magnitude would be when electricity came into our community.”


Town officials hope Reynolds is powered by pig poop and other alternative fuels by
2008. They say if things go well, their town could become the model for other small farm
towns across the country.


For the GLRC, I’m LaToya Dennis.


HOST TAG: This piece was originally produced for NPR’s Next Generation
Radio.

Related Links

Feasting on Backyard Weeds

  • Peter Gail holds his favorite weed: the spinach-like lamb's quarters.

Your barbeque grill isn’t the only place to find food in your backyard. There are lots of plants out there to eat, but most of us call
them weeds. The GLRC’s Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Your barbeque grill isn’t the only place to find food in your backyard.
There are lots of plants out there to eat, but most of us call
them weeds. The GLRC’s Julie Grant reports:


Peter Gail of Cleveland loves food. He’s got a lot of meat on his bones.


“Gee, you can’t get me to stop. I start eating this stuff and I can’t stop. It’s terrible, it’s terrible, it’s addictive (laughs).”


But his favorite foods grow right in his backyard, and probably yours. Gail is what’s
known as an ethno-botanist. He’s on a mission to teach more people about how to eat the
plants growing all around their houses. His latest converts are a troop of boy scouts:


“My grandson was one of the boys in this Boy Scout troop. And when I got over to his
house three days after we got back from scout camp, he grabbed the bag, the plastic bag
of weeds that his mother weeded out of the yard that day and dragged it over to me on the
patio and said find the edible plants in here and show me them.”


Gail says the yard becomes more exciting to most kids when they can sit down and
munch. His own love of the backyard snack started when he was just a boy. His family
faced some tough times. They were saved by a common weed known as lamb’s quarters.


“My dad died and left the family with no money. A friend told my mother we could live
off lamb’s quarters. For six months we went out and every day my brother and I would
gather the young tops of lamb’s quarters and then bring them into the house and my
mother would make them into every kind of spinach dish imaginable, until she learned
how to make a living. And then after that she still, we still liked the plant so we still ate it a lot.”


These days you could pay a lot for lamb’s quarters in a gourmet food store. They’re sold
as Belgium spinach. Or, Gail says, you could just take a quick look around your yard.


Today we’re walking around a backyard in suburban Cleveland. We find lamb’s quarters
at the base of a tree. Some say you can recognize the leaves because they look like the
hindquarters of a lamb. Gail thinks they look more like the silhouette of a Christmas tree:


“You’ll notice it has, when you’re looking down on it, it looks like somebody spilled a
little bit of talcum powder on the very top. It has that little dusting of white that is right on the top and on the underside of the leaves you see the same dusting, but taste one leaf, taste a leaf of that.”


And it does taste like spinach, but the USDA reports it’s even more nutritious than
Popeye’s favorite treat.


“It doesn’t take any cooking. It can be eaten raw, or it can be cooked. It will interfere, if you eat too much raw, with the assimilation of both iron and calcium, so you usually want to cook it. It makes a great addition to omelets, great cooked green, great quiches. Any recipe you use spinach in, you can use lamb’s quarters.”


There’s a lot more than just lamb’s quarters in the yard to eat. This time of year, Peter Gail also recommends sautiing the buds or petals from orange and yellow daylilies. He’s also a big fan of dandelions. He suggests looking for the young, tender leaves because they’re less bitter. Gail says he believes dandelions were brought to America by Italian
immigrants. They’re used in lots of Italian recipes:


“80 percent of the things we call weeds were vegetables brought here by immigrants.
That’s one of the reasons most of the things we call weeds in our backyards aren’t
indigenous plants. They aren’t plants that were from America. They’re plants that are
from Europe and Asia and from South America.”


Gail says over time those traditional foods escaped from gardens into the wild. After
World War II, things changed. Most people started buying food at the grocery store and foraging became unpopular. He says only the poor searched the yard for food:


“One by one, as generations went by, the kids didn’t learn as much the second generation,
the third generation they knew nothing. And by the time we reach where we are now,
almost everybody can walk right by the most nutritious plant going, the most commonly eaten
plant back in the 30s and 40s, and not even have a clue what it is.”


Gail is trying to change that. He wants people to become reacquainted with these plants
so we don’t recklessly destroy them. He travels around the country giving workshops,
taking people on neighborhood forages, and teaching cooking classes. Gail believes we
might need these plants again someday.


For the GLRC, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Study Finds Ethanol Not Efficient Enough

The ag industry, some politicians and now automakers
are pushing the idea that ethanol made from corn will help reduce reliance on foreign oil. But another study further indicates that
corn ethanol is not the best solution. The GLRC’s Lester
Graham reports:

Transcript

The ag industry, some politicians and now automakers are pushing the idea that ethanol
made from corn will help reduce reliance on foreign oil. But, another study further
indicates that corn ethanol is not the best solution. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:


Despite the huge push for corn ethanol, a new study adds to the growing body of
evidence that indicates ethanol from corn is not a viable answer to replace gasoline. New
research from the University of Minnesota has been published by the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences
. It shows that ethanol from corn only yields 25
percent more energy than it takes to produce it.


The study also found greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution improvements were
only slight using corn ethanol, a bit better using soy diesel. But, the researchers say even dedicating all U.S. corn and soybean production to bio-fuels instead of food would only
meet 12 percent of the demand for gasoline and six percent of the demand for diesel.


The researchers conclude that other more woody plants and wood by-products could
provide much greater supplies and environmental benefits than food-based bio-fuels.


For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Chicago to Trade Carbon Emissions

Chicago is the first major city in the U.S. to commit to a carbon emissions trading system. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Chicago is the first major city in the U.S. to commit to a carbon emissions trading system. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.


Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has announced that the municipality would join two-dozen private companies that have signed on with the Chicago Climate Exchange. The exchange will create a market in carbon dioxide emissions futures. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Daley is recommending the city take a new approach to energy; replacing the bulbs in traffic signals with new longer-lasting, brighter, but more energy efficient bulbs. He also wants the city to put in more energy efficient boilers, and increase the use of cleaner-burning alternative fuels in the city’s fleet of cars and equipment. The city will be able to trade any savings in carbon emissions for shares in carbon futures, supplementing city coffers. The mayor admonished business leaders to find creative solutions to energy and environmental problems, such as the Chicago Climate Exchange. Although the city government buildings and cars make up only a small fraction of the city’s pollution sources, the mayor’s initiative is expected to be an example for the private sector. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Lester Graham.

Usda Running on Alternative Fuels

The Department of Agriculture is expanding its use of alternative fuels generated by farms. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The Department of Agriculture is expanding its use of alternative fuels generated by farms. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.


The USDA is increasing the use of bio-diesel and ethanol. Bio-diesel is a fuel that can be made by refining natural oils such as animal fat, spent cooking oil or soy bean oil. Ethanol is a blend of gasoline and alcohol, usually derived from corn. USDA agencies such as the Forest Service will increase the use of the fuels in fleet vehicles, including cars, tractors, and even boats at agency offices across the nation. Donald Comis is a spokesperson for the Department of Ag.


“It’s a deliberate strategy of the whole federal government to have demonstration areas all over the country so that you won’t have to travel far to see a vehicle or operation like your own.”


While the USDA is promoting bio-diesel and ethanol, some environmental groups say the taxpayer subsidized fuels use too much energy to produce and only survive because of politics. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

The Cost of Alternative Fuels

While many motorists have enjoyed the lower gasoline and diesel fuel
prices the last couple of years… those lower prices have made
alternative fuels such as natural gas relatively more expensive. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… the managers of
one bus fleet are wondering if running less polluting buses is worth the
cost: