As if the environmental record of the oil companies wasn’t bad enough, the World Bank estimates 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas are burnt off at oil fields around the world annually. In addition to being a terrible waste of resources, those gas flares contribute 400 million tons of CO2 emissions too.

Why this incredible waste? Turns out it is simple economics: it is cheaper for these companies to burn this gas, and pollute the atmosphere than it is to transport it to where it can be used. Perhaps some financial penalties for their polluting actions would help, but Synfuels thinks they’ve found another way to get these companies to clean up their act.

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Having had John McCain’s campaign use her in one of their ads, Paris Hilton is hitting back with her own political ad. Claiming that since the “white haired dude” mentioned her in his ad, she must also be running for president, Paris puts forth her own energy policy.

Not really anything new in what she proposes though, and she’s not backing either of the mainstream candidates. Instead, she’s proposing a “hybrid” approach with limited offshore drilling, and development of alternative fuel solutions. Others have indeed suggested the same thing.

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Via wecansolveit.org:

Last week Al Gore laid down a challenge to the US: generate 100% of all the country’s electricity needs from renewable sources within a decade. At the same time, Bush and his oil friends were pushing to expand off shore drilling for oil and continue the addiction that has made them rich, and made the US into the huge source of pollution it is today. Everybody agrees that even were these new areas opened for drilling, they would not produce a single barrel of oil for at least a decade. And since they would cost a lot of money to develop (leases need to be acquired, exploration & surveying happens, drilling rigs need to be built), what makes this likely to reduce the cost of fossil fuels?

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Here’s an amazing idea, and it came from watching sea otters suffering in the 1989 Valdez oil spill! Phil McCory, a hair stylist in Huntsville, Alabama, noticed while watching reports on the environmental impact of the oil spill that the otters’ dense fur sucked up the oil and held on to it. That got him wondering whether human hair would do the same thing, so he set up an experiment using hair cuttings from his salon, a pair of his wife’s pantyhose and his son’s paddling pool to see whether he could remove oil from water using human hair. Miraculously, it worked, and the OttiMat™ was born.

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