Obama Proposes $10 per Barrel Oil Tax to Fund Clean Transportation

As reported by Engadget: President Obama has proposed a $10 per-barrel tax on oil to fund cleaner mass transit and cleaner vehicle research. The plan, laid out in a fact sheet, is a "smart, strategic integrated investments to help reduce carbon pollution, strengthen economy" according to the White House.

The fact sheet notes that 30 percent of the nation's green house gas emissions come from public transportation. The proposed tax is expected to increase investment in a clean transportation by 50 percent.

That includes $20 billion per year raised by the new tax being used to fund public transportation to reduce traffic and pollution. While approximately $10 billion per year will be used to fund cities and states that come up with solutions for cutting emissions. About $2 billion will be allocated for clean and autonomous vehicle research.

As expected, the oil industry is not amused. American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard issued the following statement: "The White House thinks Americans are not paying enough for gasoline, so they have proposed a new tax that could raise the cost of gasoline by 25 cents a gallon, harm consumers that are enjoying low energy prices, destroy American jobs and reverse America's emergence as a global energy leader." He continued,"On his way out of office, President Obama has now proposed making the United States less competitive."

The proposal will have a tough time in the Republican controlled House and Senate. Actually, there's a good chance it's going to die rather quickly once it leaves the White House.

Scientists in Germany Take Another Major Step Towards Nuclear Fusion

As reported by Gizmodo: Physicists in Germany have used an experimental nuclear fusion device to produce hydrogen plasma in a process similar to what happens on the Sun. The test marks an important milestone on the road towards this super-futuristic source of cheap and clean nuclear energy. 

Earlier today in an event attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel (herself a PhD physicist), researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald turned on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, an experimental nuclear fusion reactor. (Actually, the researchers let Merkel do the honors.) This €400 million ($435 million) stellarator is being used by physicists to test the technical viability of a future fusion reactor.

Unlike nuclear fission, in which the nucleus of an atom is split into smaller parts, nuclear fusion creates a single heavy nucleus from two lighter nuclei. The resulting change in mass produces a massive amount of energy that physicists believe can be harnessed into a viable source of clean energy.

It’ll likely be decades (if not longer) before true nuclear fusion energy is available, but advocates of the technology say it could replace fossil fuels and conventional nuclear fission reactors. Unlike conventional fission reactors, which produce large amounts of radioactive waste, the by-products from nuclear fusion are deemed safe. 

Via Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Tino Schulz - Public Relations Department, Max-Planck-Institut.

Back in December, the same team of researchers fired up the donut-shaped device for the first time, heating a tiny amount of helium. During today’s experiment, a 2-megawatt pulse of microwave was used to heat the hydrogen gas and convert it into an extremely low density hydrogen plasma. “With a temperature of 80 million degrees and a lifetime of a quarter of a second, the device’s first hydrogen plasma has completely lived up to our expectations,” said physicist Hans-Stephan Bosch in a press statement.

W7-X isn’t expected to produce any energy, but it will be used to test many of the extreme conditions that future devices will be subjected to in order to generate power. Temperatures within the device could conceivably reach 180 million degrees F (100 million degrees C). 

As noted by John Jelonnek, a physicist at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in a Guardian article, “It’s a very clean source of power, the cleanest you could possibly wish for. We’re not doing this for us but for our children and grandchildren.”

China Launches New MEO BeiDou Navigation Satellite

As reported by Inside GNSS: China successfully completed its first BeiDou launch of the year, lifting a new-generation satellite into orbit yesterday (February 1, 2016) and adding to its 17 operational spacecraft in the nation’s GNSS (GPS-like) constellation.

The fifth of the new series, the middle-Earth-orbiting (MEO) satellite will join its four predecessors in testing inter-satellite crosslinks and a new navigation payload that will set the framework and technical standards for global coverage, according to the Xinhua state news agency.

Designated BDS M3-S, this is the first of two BeiDou satellites scheduled for launch in 2016, according to China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. The spacecraft contains a technology demonstator —identified as a “chip” by program officials — that will, if proved successful, help in the design of smaller, better integrated, more reliable satellites, BeiDou deputy commander-in-chief Li Guotong said. It also contains a particle detector to assess radiation conditions in the BeiDou constellation's environment.

According to Libin Xiang, commander-in-chief of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) project, the latest satellite is crucial to implementing a transition from the regional system declared operational in December 2011 and a full-fledged system expected to be completed by 2020.

"Our new intersatellite crosslink system, featuring strong disturbance resistance and high-level privacy, is the core technology to compete with other countries' navigation networks. The new satellite will fully verify our technology," said Baojun Lin, the satellite's chief designer.

Lin said the satellite will operate without the help of ground control and broadcast continually, key requirements for navigation services.

According to Xinhua, China plans to expand the Beidou services to most of the countries covered in the Silk Road Economic Belt (also knowns as the “Belt and Road”) initiative by 2018, a swatch of countries stretching through Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

The Beidou Phase III system of which BDS M3-S will be a part will migrate its civil B1 signal from 1561.098 MHz to a frequency centered at 1575.42 MHz – the same as the GPS L1 and Galileo E1 civil signals.  The former quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation will be a time-multiplexed binary offset carrier (TMBOC) modulation similar to the new civil GPS L1C and Galileo's Open Service signal.Meanwhile, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 will place the final GPS follow-on block satellite (IIF-12) into orbit for the U.S. Air Force on Friday (February 5, 2016) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. A 19-minute launch window opens at 8:38 a.m. EST. On Sunday (February 7, 2016), Russia is scheduled to launch another GLONASS-M satellite from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome north of Moscow.

The Oil Crash is Kicking Off One of the Largest Wealth Transfers in Human History: $3 Trillion per Year

As reported by Yahoo Finance: Economists are still hotly debating whether the oil crash has been a net positive for advanced economies.

Optimists argue that cheap oil is a good thing for consumers and commodity-sensitive businesses, while pessimists point to the hit to energy-related investment and possible spillover into the financial system.

A new note from Francisco Blanch at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, however, puts the oil move into a much bigger perspective, arguing that a sustained price plunge "will push back $3 trillion a year from oil producers to global consumers, setting the stage for one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history."

Blanch and his team already see evidence that the fall in the price of crude is having a positive impact on demand, and say that it could accelerate even further if prices don't pick up. 

Says Blanch: "Alternatively in a lower oil price scenario, e.g. if prices were to average just $40 over the next five years which is close to the current forward curve, demand would grow by 1.5 million barrels per day, which is 0.3 above our base case. Finally, at $20 oil demand would grow by an explosive by 1.7 per year on average, 0.5 above the base case, on our estimates."

Meanwhile, in emerging markets, where much of the story of late has been about disappointing economic growth, Blanch still sees huge upside potential in terms of automobile penetration and consumption.

Take China for example, where the strategist sees the oil plunge helping to fuel a boom in SUV sales: "Moreover, the low oil price is encouraging Chinese consumers to buy increasingly larger cars. Sales of SUVs, the heaviest passenger vehicles category, are up 60 percent year-on-year in the last three months, while overall passenger vehicle sales are growing robustly at 22 percent."

And it's not just emerging markets where the impact of cheaper gasoline is being seen. 

After years of stagnation, vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. clearly ticked higher in 2015.

Combine these trends with the decline in, say, Saudi Arabia's foreign exchange reserves, or the stock price of any oil company, and you can see the dramatic wealth shifts now taking place in the world. 

MIT Hyperloop Team Rockets Past Competition

As reported by the Boston Herald: It may seem like so much pie in the sky right now, but a globally embraced dream of creating a levitating, 700-mile-per-hour public transit system is already coming true for enterprising engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who learned Saturday that their design of a futuristic bullet train bested 100 others submitted from around the world for the SpaceX Hyperloop.

“Wow! We are beyond excited to announce we just won 1st place in the SpaceX Hyperloop competition!!!!!!!!” the MIT Hyperloop team posted on Facebook from the weekend competition at Texas A&M University, along with a video showing them erupting in screams, whistles and applause as their winning entry was announced.

MIT’s team of more than two dozen graduate and undergraduate students will receive $50,000 from Hyperloop Technologies Inc. to build their creation.

Powered by renewable energy, Hyperloop aims to rocket floating passenger pods through elevated tubes at nearly the speed of sound. California-based aerospace company SpaceX, which sponsored the design competition, is planning to start testing human-scale pods on a specially designed track as early as this summer.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s billionaire brainiac, told the awards ceremony his inspiration for Hyperloop comes from being stuck in Los Angeles traffic and being an hour late for a speech.

“I’m starting to think this is really going to happen,” Musk said. “It’s clear that the public and the world wants something new, and it’s clear that you guys are going to bring it to them.”

Army Demonstrates Autonomous Vehicle Capabilities at Detroit Auto Show

As reported by Popular Mechanics: The military is continuing to experiment with autonomous vehicle technologies. Earlier this month, the U.S. Army successfully deployed a fully-autonomous ground vehicle by having it flown in by a fully-autonomous helicopter. Now the Army has revealed that autonomous driving technology can be used in a number of their trucks and military vehicles.

At the Detroit Auto Show, the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development, and Engineering Center (TARDEC) showed off one of its autonomous vehicles. In addition to cutting down on required personnel by having a convoy of autonomous vehicles follow one human driver, driverless vehicles could also navigate areas with a high number of IEDs or other hazards without risking human life. A new video from Stars and Stripes takes a look at the new driverless Army trucks. 

Just like Google's driverless cars, the autonomous military vehicles use a LIDAR system to create a three-dimensional world map and navigate around obstacles. The Army's large autonomous trucks are still being developed—they're a little harder to fine tune than the little pods that Google has out on the roads—but finding new ways to perform wartime operations while keeping soldiers out of harm's way is one of the Army's top priorities.

Droneboarding: The Sport We Should Have Seen Coming

As reported by The Verge: Okay, there's a lot going on here so let's break things down. Is it impractical to use quadcopters to tow a toddler on a snowboard? Yes, very. Did the battery on the drone in this video last long? Probably not. Did the kid go very fast? He's barely moving. Is this a great idea? Of course, of course, of course.

Using a consumer grade drone to tow people on snow (or on water?) makes about as much sense as strapping a giant fan to someone's back while they're paragliding — but people do that and it looks like great fun. And while drones may be pretty weak with batteries that only last tens of minutes, they are at least getting stronger, and we can definitely imagine a team of drones pulling a fully-grown human. Maybe they could do it on a sled? Like huskies? Hunting down rogue robots through the future-frozen wastelands of middle America after the coming Ice Age / AI revolt??

Okay, that's too far, but this is still pretty alright.