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Grove City, Pennsylvania - Making a fortune is simple. All you need to do is find something worthless and give it value.

I met a man this week who has done just that. He's taken something we all throw away and found a process that converts it into something useful.

He is part of a great American tradition because finding ways to add value to things is what business is all about and America has always been good at business.

Until now America's businesses have been powered by energy from fossil fuels. This week President Obama said that had to end: "the only way this century will be another American century," he told Congress, "is if we confront at last the price of our dependence on oil".

It is not going to be easy. Weaning America off fossil fuels is going to require a new generation of low-carbon technologies, innovative new technologies with the power to transform the way almost everything is done in America. It is going to require innovators like the man I met this week.

Big American companies like General Motors can innovate but truth is that most of the best inventions - the ideas that truly changed the world - come from ordinary people.

There's a term for these people here in America: garage inventors. Garage inventors tend to be crazy, single-minded people, obsessed with some wild vision of how they can reshape their world.

These are people who vanish into their garages for days and nights on end, working to make their vision real. Some are geniuses, some are genuinely mad.

By my reckoning the first garage inventor is none other than . Ford is famous for inventing the first mass production car. He is never celebrated for another world-changing invention.

Ford created the prototype for his first car in a little brick shed on his farm in Greenfield, Michigan. Surely he is therefore also the inventor of the garage itself and - simultaneously - the world's first garage inventor.

America needs to mobilise its army of Henry Fords, of garage inventors, if it is going to create a low carbon economy.

These inventions could be in almost any field. The man I met this week has developed a new system for dealing with one of the most fundamental processes on earth. By doing so he has become an inspirational leader for tens of thousands of people around the world. He has - how shall I put this? - started his own movement.

The man I went to visit in his cabin in the Pennsylvania woods is none other than Joe Jenkins, the author of "The Humanure Handbook", the world's first guide to composting your own poo.

It sounds like a joke, but human sewage is a real problem, polluting water and spreading disease. Millions of people die every year from illnesses spread by sewage.

It is expensive too. Joe estimates that we each produce a thousand pounds of the stuff every year. That is three billion pounds of sewage every single year in America alone. Disposing of all that waste costs billions of dollars a year.

That's where Joe's system comes in. Instead of regarding human excrement as a waste product Joe sees it as something that can be useful. It is full of nutrients: "faeces and urine," writes Joe in his book, "are examples of natural, beneficial, organic materials...they are only waste when we discard them."

What Joe's composting system does is capture those valuable nutrients and return them to the soil. Joe collects his and his family's waste and converts it into a rich compost which he uses to fertilise his garden. Thereby, says Joe, "closing the human nutrient cycle."

I ate a venison chilli Joe prepared with "humanure" fertilised tomatoes from his garden. Delicious!

Of course the idea of composting human excrement is not new, people have been doing it for millennia. What Joe has done is brought a scientific approach to the process. He has shown that, when composted properly, all the pathogens in poo are destroyed.

He has also demonstrated that "humanure" composting can be done almost anywhere. There are composting toilets based on Joe's system everywhere from Manhattan apartments to yurts on the Mongolian steppes.

I first heard about Joe's work from Britain's "king of compost", . John lives in the suburbs of York and describes The Humanure Handbook as a book that "changed his life".

And Joe's experiments with "humanure" can cut carbon emissions. It takes huge amounts of energy to fix the nitrogen used in most commercial fertilisers so large-scale "humanure" production could become an alternative source of low-carbon fertility for the soil. It could also reduce the 3.4% of the world emissions generated by waste processing.

Joe has already started to explore how his composting processes can be scaled up. He has an intern from a local university working full time on the project. The ultimate aim is to make composting human waste into an industrial process.

The truth is Joe Jenkins wants to be nothing less than the Henry Ford of "humanure". Then he would be able to achieve his dream, spreading "humanure" across the world.

Detroit, Michigan - Ever since the first rolled off Ransom Olds' production line in Lansing Michigan in 1902, we have relied on a single technology to power virtually all our cars: the internal combustion engine.

The design has been improved, it's been made more efficient and powerful over the years, but the basic process has remained the same; harnessing the explosive power of fossil fuels.

On Tuesday I was shown a technology that could signal the beginning of a revolution in the way we travel around. By coincidence, that very evening, President Obama proposed a policy that, if adopted, would give this emerging technology what could be a critical boost.

What I was shown was General Motors' $1bn prototype electric car, the . What the President of the United States proposed was a market-based limit on carbon dioxide emissions, an economy-wide "cap-and-trade" system.

GM makes some grand claims about the Volt. It says it represents a "change in the DNA of the car". I was sceptical. After all, the idea of electric cars has been around almost as long at the car itself, and Japanese companies have been selling hybrid electric cars for years.

The Volt doesn't look like anything special. It looks like another sleek, solid, modern car. But that's the reason it could be revolutionary. General Motors says it is the world's first electric car designed to appeal to a mass market. It is revolutionary, the company claims, precisely because it looks just like any other car.

It is different from the Japanese hybrid vehicles. Existing hybrid cars are powered by an internal combustion engine assisted by an electric motor. The Volt is powered exclusively by the 111-kW electric motor. In that sense, it is a true electric car.

It is powered by a battery which you charge by plugging the car in to the mains, to the grid. There is a gasoline engine on board which kicks in if the battery runs out. However, unlike traditional hybrids, the gasoline engine is only used to generate electric power. It is the electric motor that always drives the car.

It is, by European standards, at least, a big vehicle. It comfortably seats four people. And it performs like a big vehicle. It has a top speed of 100 mph and - crucially - is designed to be fun to drive.

The engine is not powerful: 111 kW = 150 hp. But the performance of an electric motor is very different from that of a gasoline engine. It delivers all its power as soon as you put your foot down, making it what petrolheads call "torquey".

Torque is what makes a car accelerate. It is the "pulling power" of the engine -"the grunt that gets you going" one motoring website calls it. In terms of driving experience, torque means the car can accelerate fast--a key part of what makes driving fun.

So how will President Obama's plans to establish a market-based limit on America's greenhouse gas emissions help the Volt?

The Volt has two weaknesses. The first is the price. GM would not confirm figures but the estimate is that it will cost around $40,000. Not cheap. The second weakness is the battery. The Volt can only squeeze 40 miles out of each charge of its battery. After that, you have to rely on the petrol engine.

President Obama's proposed cap-and-trade system will increase the cost of any activities that result in the emission of carbon dioxide (which I wrote about recently). It makes using fossil fuels more expensive and therefore makes alternative energy sources relatively cheaper.

A lot of people who responded to my blog on the subject believed this was a bad thing but here is the upside: by making businesses and individuals pay a charge for polluting the atmosphere, a cap-and-trade system creates a powerful incentive for people to invest in low-carbon technologies like the Volt.

It costs around 2 cents a mile to charge the Volt at current electricity prices. The fuel consumption of the average US car is 25 mpg (although my research suggests it might be less) which, at $2 a US gallon, comes to 8 cents per mile. By pushing up gas prices, cap-and-trade will increase the savings Volt drivers will make.

And it could increase battery range by the same process.

Battery design is all about energy density. The Volt's 40 mile range is actually a real achievement. But even so, its six-foot long, 400lb Lithium Ion battery contains just 16kW - the same as a mere half US gallon of petrol.

If we want to get better battery performance, we need industrial giants like General Motors in the game because they can bring all their technological might to the task.

To build the Volt, General Motors bought the best battery technology it could find, honed it in a brand-new $35 million research lab, and sculpted the car in a wind tunnel to make it as aerodynamic as possible. Bob Boniface, who led the design team, described how shaving a 5mm lip on the spoiler increased the range by a quarter mile.

Big companies like General Motors will only make investments like these in developing low carbon technologies if there is money in it for them. A cap-and-trade system helps ensure that there is.

Two years ago, General Motors joined the US Carbon Action Partnership, which advocates market-based systems for cutting carbon. The potential profits from cap-and-trade resolve the apparent paradox of a car company pushing for a system that makes it more expensive for customers to drive its products.

Those profits are also why President Obama makes such grand claims for what a cap-and-trade system could do for America. He believes that by changing incentives throughout the economy, this system will do nothing less than harness the power of capitalism to remake America.

For him, the policy is as much about creating jobs here in America as it is about tackling climate change. The President sees cap-and-trade a way to re-establish America's industrial might by creating a low-carbon economy able to sell its innovative products around the globe.

Do you agree about the transformative power of cap-and-trade or, for that matter, about GM's claims for the Volt? Let us have your comments below and if you want to continue the debate, join the Ethical Man . You can also follow my progress on . I've been posting a quiz. Sign up and join in!

Detroit, Michigan - Can markets save the earth from climate change? That is the question I posed yesterday. Today the answer came back loud and clear from none other than the President of the United States himself.

"To truly transform our economy, to protect our security and save our planet from the ravages of climate change" , "we need to ultimately make clean renewable energy the profitable kind of energy. So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America".

Now I'm not for a moment suggesting that the President has been reading my blog (though I don't rule it out) but the system that he referred to last night is exactly the kind of market-based carbon pricing mechanism that I was discussing yesterday.

He could not have been more forceful about his commitment. It was top of his list of priorities: "The only way this century will be another American century is if we confront at last the price of our dependence on oil", he said.

It is a truly radical policy. Europe has had a for years but what Obama is proposing is an economy-wide system.

The idea is this: the government sets a cap, a limit, on the total amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted. It then issues permits to emit that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The permits can be bought and sold on a market - that's the trade bit - and companies can only emit carbon dioxide if they buy a permit.

The reason President Obama supports cap and trade is because it harnesses carbon reduction to the most powerful motivating force ever developed - the power of capitalism, the power of human ambition.

Businesses won't seek to cut carbon emissions to save the earth they will do it because it will save them money and therefore increase their profits. Cap and trade creates the "carbon price" we were discussing yesterday because it makes emitting carbon just another cost in a business' production process.

Just think how powerful a change that could be. What it does is enforce the principle that the polluter should pay for the damage they create.

Tackling pollution is a subject close to the hearts of many of the residents of Muskegon, the little city in Michigan I have been staying in.

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Muskegon, Michigan - How can we wean ourselves off our addiction to the easy energy fix of fossil fuels? That is the cliff-hanging, planet-saving question I left at the end of the last blog.

At our Muskegon climate change meeting I asked the crowd what would persuade them to stop using so much energy.

A single answer came back loud and clear. It is the same one given by most of the great economists, campaigners and politicians who have studied how to solve global warming.

The answer is green, but not green in the environmental sense of the word. In Muskegon money is the answer, it all comes down to good old greenback dollars, plain and simple.

Everyone at the meeting seemed to agree that raising the price would stop them using so much fossil fuel energy. They did not necessarily like the idea of prices rising, but they were certain that it would change their behaviour.

That is because just a couple of months ago fuel prices were more than twice what they are today, $4 a gallon instead of $1.80. That had made everyone at the meeting think more carefully about the journeys they made, how hot their houses were, how much power they used.

The idea of depending on markets to make decisions has become very unfashionable in recent months, but if the men and women at our meeting in Muskegon are right it may just be that the market will provide the mechanism which will help us save the world from global warming.

The best way I have seen of thinking about it is in 's book on how to tackle global warming, . He quotes the environmentalist who compares the way we use fossil fuels with a kind of fraudulent accounting.

As a society, says Brown, "we have been behaving just like Enron, the rogue energy giant, at the height of its folly". We rack up stunning profits and GDP numbers each year and they look great on paper "because we've been hiding some of the costs off the books".

What he believes is that mankind has been cooking the books on a monumental scale. The costs he's talking about are the potentially catastrophic impacts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on the atmosphere.

It is true that virtually everywhere companies and individuals can generate as much carbon dioxide as they want and emit it into the atmosphere absolutely free of charge. You can then argue that the cost is being picked up by the Earth itself, .

So, if the people at our Muskegon meeting are right, what is needed is some kind of mechanism by which a price can be set for the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

President Obama believes that is the way forward and so does Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both have argued that we need to find a way of ensuring that people who pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide pay for the privilege.

It is a radical position. If you set a price for carbon you begin to force businesses to take account of those costs they have been keeping off the books. The idea is that the carbon price would be gradually increased over the next couple of decades until it reflects the real cost of those emissions on the environment.

Then we as a species wouldn't be guilty of false accounting anymore.

That's the argument anyway. But is it right?

Do you agree that the best way to green the earth is to use the power of the green in our wallets, or do you think there are other ways of persuading us all to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions?

Tell me what you think. These are, after all, some of the most important questions on earth so you should have a say.

Muskegon, Michigan - Did you know that a tonne of oil contains ten times the energy of a tonne of TNT? Ten times! It is a remarkable statistic isn't it? And it goes a long way to explaining why we are so dependent on the stuff.

Fossil fuels are a biological and geological miracle - an incredibly condensed form of sunlight. That was explained brilliantly in a programme that happened to be on the day I left on this trip.

We all know the process. Over millions of years plants captured the light of the sun, locking away carbon in their bodies. They rotted away and - if the geological conditions were just right - were cooked up into oil, coal and natural gas; into fossil hydrocarbons.

What we often fail to appreciate is just how extraordinary the concentrated energy fix delivered by fossil fuels is.

Think about oil, for example. You can drill a hole and pump out vast quantities of this incredibly energy-rich stuff out of the ground. And what's more you can burn it and it leaves virtually no residue behind. Burn most things and you get a heap of ashes but with oil you get water, some waste gases and carbon dioxide, which until very recently we dismissed as harmless.

The incredible energy density of fossil hydrocarbons is nothing less than the foundation of modern civilization. It is harnessed to power almost everything we do.

Fossil fuels keep our homes warm, whisk us effortlessly to work, let us to fly off to distant beaches, allow us to eat tropical fruit in winter and to buy a new television every couple of years.

Without fossil fuels we would not be able to enjoy the almost unimaginable plenty - by historical standards - that is the hallmark of our society.

We did an experiment on Ethical Man where I had to cycle to power a single 100-watt incandescent light bulb. After a minute or so I was sweating profusely after five I was livid and breathless and that was just to light a light bulb.

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Muskegon, Michigan - I think I am going to like Muskegon. Snow fell on my first night, six inches of the stuff. That was enough to bring London to a complete standstill, Muskegon shrugged it off effortlessly.

What's more, everyone we meet has been really helpful and friendly. They seem pleased to have a team from the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ in their town poking around and asking prying questions.

In fact, the receptionist at the hotel said we were the first guests from abroad she had ever had, which made me feel very exotic.

As you know we are here to see if America can show how we might make the cuts in carbon emissions that scientists say are necessary if we are to stop

I like that. It's what one pillar of the business community said in the 1950s. I saw it quoted in an article in the and looking around the city today I'd say this was still a hard working place.

I've already experienced the difficulties of travelling in this city without a car, hence my mea culpa yesterday and my Mazda 6. Down by the lake there's another problem, Muskegon's coal and gas fired power station.

We braved the minus 17C wind chill to go down to the lake shore and get a shot of it across the ice.

The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't require power companies to disclose carbon dioxide emissions so we don't know how much the Muskegon plant produces, but coal emits more carbon dioxide for every unit of energy generated than any other fuel (Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 1985-1990, DOE/EIA-0573) and .

The worldwide average is 41% and because Americans use more electricity per person than almost any other nation, coal is a key reason why the average American's carbon footprint is so high.

But in the coming years the biggest barrier to cutting emissions may be the economy.
America's unemployment rate stands at 7.6%, Michigan's at 10.6% and rising. It is not an easy time to be asking people to change the way they live their lives.

The truth is carbon emissions are going to fall anyway as the economy slows. I can't help but wonder whether we can wait for recovery to start building a low carbon future.

Can we?

Muskegon, Michigan - We flew in to Muskegon airport late afternoon. The temperature was hovering just below freezing and snow was forecast. There was an unforgiving wind blowing in off Lake Michigan.

We had heavy luggage and we needed to get to our hotel. It is relatively close by US standards, a couple of miles away so how do we get there?

We'd missed the last bus but there is a taxi service or there are hire cars. So what do we do?

We booked a hire car, that's what we did. That's right, the very first day of my trip and I am tooling through the streets of Muskegon at the wheel of a shiny black Mazda 6.

Is that a cop out?

We say no because, as Sara says, the "car- and plane-free challenge" only applies to long distance travel around America. And let's be clear, Sara set the challenge so she should know.

The point is this: we are here to work. Our cameraman Peter, who arrived on a later plane, has lots of heavy equipment. We have a full diary of people to meet and things we need to film. If we were to depend on buses we simply wouldn't get anything done.

Like most American towns and cities Muskegon is one great big sprawl. There is a bus service, the , but it isn't that regular and isn't well used - 94% of Muskegites, Muskegons, Muskegonites (can anyone help here?) drive. Check the website, MATS runs a to encourage more use!

To give you an idea of the problem take the family we're visiting here, Gary and Cheryl Howard. They live in a suburb of the city. The nearest bus stop is literally miles from their home. The only practical way to use the service would be to drive to the bus stop which would rather defeat the point.

Of course we could get taxis but would that offer any carbon saving? Taxis tend to be older bigger vehicles. Our Mazda 6 lists its city/highway fuel consumption (in US gallons) as 21/30 mpg. That's well below the 35 mpg fuel emissions targets . He implied current fuel consumption of American cars is 25 mpg but the best figures I could find show the average of 17.2 mpg .

And we mustn't lose sight of why we are here in America in the first place. We're here because I was disappointed in the 20% cut in emissions my family achieved having done absolutely everything within reason we could think of to cut carbon ().

We're here to search for the big answers, to see how our whole society might be able to make the huge cuts in emissions the scientists say are necessary.

To those who say we should be trying harder "because every little bit helps," I quote Professor David MacKay of Cambridge University. He says in his book Sustainable Energy - :
"if everyone does a little, we'll achieve only a little".

So when we leave Muskegon it'll be on a Greyhound bus but in the meantime we'll be keeping the car.

Oh and by the way, I had a steak for dinner.

London, UK - The most amazing thing I have found in the more than 3 years I've been reporting on climate change for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is how unafraid most people seem about it.

Yet global warming is widely reckoned to be the most serious threat mankind has ever faced. The warns that unless we make dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures could rise by six degrees centigrade this century alone. That is enough to destroy many of the ecosystems that mankind depends on for food and water, the stuff of life itself.

The stakes really could not be higher. We are talking about something that could wipe man off the face of the earth, and take out most other species while it's about it. So, why are we not all convulsed with fear?

We all know what real fear feels like. Today, the Ethical Man team (me, the producer Sara, and cameraman Peter) will begin our month-long odyssey across America, flying to , the starting point of our journey. If we hit serious turbulence, everyone on the plane, apart from those with the constitution of a , will feel their pulse quicken, their stomach clench, their body tense.

That fear we feel is a vital instinct but also a truly ancient one. The human fear response has evolved and honed itself over hundreds of thousands of years to serve a very specific function, to prepare us for fight or flight.

Fear pumps our muscles full of oxygen, focuses our attention and primes our nervous system with adrenaline ready for violent action. It is designed to help us respond to immediate dangers, a bear attacking, a rock fall above us, a rival human wielding a club.

What it does not do is help us deal with a slow and insidious danger like climate change, because for human beings climate change simply is not frightening enough. It is happening too slowly, over decades. And it is also hard for individuals to link their role in causing the problem (driving, flying, heating their home) with the effects (changing weather patterns).

Maybe the sorry truth is that as a species we are just not psychologically capable of dealing with the threat.

did his best to bring home to America why we should all be afraid in a recent interview. Nobel Laureate Stephen Chu warned that unless action is taken soon, California could be reduced to a dust bowl and its great cities destroyed.

He said he hoped America would wake up to the danger of climate change.

"We're looking at a scenario where there is no more agriculture in California. I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going."

This is nothing less than a disaster epic set to consume Hollywood itself!

And it is not just California. The south of Australia is aflame, the north is flooded and China is experiencing its worst drought for 50 years. Meteorologists rightly warn that no single "extreme climate event" should be taken as evidence of global warming, but surely all these separate calamities occurring simultaneously is enough to send a shiver of fear down even the most sceptical spine?

So, how about a little exercise in global climate awareness? This blog is appearing simultaneously on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s World, America and UK websites. Let's try to paint a worldwide picture of our changing climate.

Take a look around your local area. Is your climate changing and, if so, how?

Do you think it can be put down to global warming or do you look at the harsh winter parts of Europe have experienced and conclude all this talk of global apocalypse just a scientific fad?

Please get in touch. The more people who respond the more interesting the results will be. And, if you live in America, who knows, the Ethical Man team might just pop by to take a look at what is happening in your area.

And, one last thing, please sign up to our RSS feed. I will post a blog like this every couple of days. It would be really interesting to spark an international discussion of the issues.

London, UK - We all know the green mantras. Change your lightbulbs, recycle, fly less, buy a hybrid car, turn down the thermostat. The list goes on and on.

But here's the rub. On their own they are never going to be enough to stop global warming.

I know it is green heresy but it is true. How do I know? Because I am the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Ethical Man and my family and I spent a year doing everything we could think of to reduce our carbon emissions.

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