The scale of our energy challenge can be overwhelming. In his TED2010 talk “Innovating to Zero,” Bill Gates discusses current energy and climate issues, insisting that temp

eratureswill continue to rise until our carbon emissions get close to zero.  In his speech, Gates claims we need energy miracles to discover technology  with zero carbon emissions in order to avoid the destructive and deadly consequences of climate change. Our concern is global and our timeline is tight.

Our energy challenge can seem so daunting that it can be difficult to know where to start. What can you do? Do one thing. One thing at a time.  Carpool to work three days a week. Configure your monitor to power-save mode. Shorten your shower time by one minute. Whatever it is you choose, pick one thing and stick with it until it becomes common practice.

The Do One Thing (DOT) campaign has empowered millions of people to choose one action to help create a sustainable future for the environment. To date, over 32 million people have pledged to Do One Thing for the planet. Click here to join them!

Your one action alone may seem futile against the magnitude of our energy challenge. But together, if we connect the DOTs, we can achieve significant energy savings.

Remember how, in Back to the Future, Doc dug through the garbage to run his time-traveling car? Pretty smart idea, to use a fairly reliable fuel source that was going to waste anyway (pun intended.) Now, imagine the same idea—only cleaner, more efficient, and without the smell of week-old bananas.

Cyclone Power Technologies of Pompano Beach, Florida, has unveiled their working prototype biomass power generator, which produces power from burning dry plant matter (think wood pellets, grass clippings, corn stalks, and wood chips.) The generator system works fairly simply. Burning dry plant matter in the biomass combustion chamber produces heat. This heat runs an attached external heat engine, producing mechanical energy.  An alternator then converts this mechanical energy into as much as 10kW of usable electricity.

This engine could power homes, farms, or other small buildings that have plenty of “vegetative waste and byproducts” lying around—as in the grass clippings from mowing the lawn or fall leaves. The only catch appears to be the availability of dry plant matter—this technology probably won’t spread in urban or highly developed areas, where yards are small or non-existent. Those areas, like Manhattan, will just have to wait for the engine that runs on chewed gum, cigarette butts, and discarded Starbucks cups.

Watch how the engine works here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLst-kslKio&feature=player_embedded#t=195.

Gliocladium roseum. Say it three times fast.

Major businesses and universities are racing on a variety of research fronts to see who can harness fuels from natural sources cost-effectively, and Gary Strobel at Montana State University may have found a unique two-pronged solution in the form of a small mushroom.

G. roseum potentially changing the world in a petri dish.

Nicknamed “superfungus,” this mushroom, found on the Ulmo trees in Patagonia, Gliocadium roseum has been discovered as potential source of bio fuel by accident in an experiment originally designed to test how different fungi responded to antibiotics. Researchers were surprised to find G.roseum had not only survived, but thrived after exposure where every other fungi was dying. Naturally absorbing carbon dioxide? Prong one check.

The unusual benefit to G. roseum is not in the input, but what it puts out: diesel. Or something very close to it, dubbed “mycodiesel.”

This is where the fungus’s potential lies. In eliminating many of the additional steps typically needed to harness fuel from plants like corn, G. roseum is appearing to already be cost-effective. Scientist’s ability to synthesis the benefit parts of the mushroom in the lab also nip fears of new found business interests in the rain forest in the bud.

Most biofuels, even when very efficiently harnessed, are not a magic bullet to the growing energy crisis. Discounting often-harmful hydrocarbons as a byproduct, biofuels in a perfect world still produce carbon dioxide. G. roseum, by directly taking in carbon dioxide and excreting mycodiesel, is like few other organisms that are coming to be seen as potential golden eggs. That produce diesel gas.

And if that weren’t enough, secondary rounds of research are revealing that the mushroom also produces potent antibiotics as a byproduct.

As G. roseum is moved into the lab and researchers begin testing it to the demands of a level of fuel output useful to our needs, it is yet to be determined if “Superfungus” will live up to its name.