Is your bracket busted? Perhaps you should have looked at that fourth seed’s carbon footprint instead of counting seniors and freshmen.

There are dozens of methods to filling out a March Madness bracket. You can pick based on the combat abilities of team mascots. Or by colors, or your devotion to the schools, or how much you like each city or region. Some people have even watched a game or two, and try to base their choices on a studied understanding of college basketball.

There’s a new approach that tries to answer the question, “What bracket would expend the least amount of greenhouse gas emissions?” It tells you which teams could get to the championship using the most carbon-neutral path.

Hint: going to school near tournament sites helps a lot. The analysis, conducted by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, bases their calculation on projected team and fan travel between the school and the tournament site, combined with the assumption that higher seeds will draw larger fan bases. Though traveling by plane rather than coach bus means a higher carbon footprint, fan travel represents a much higher impact than team travel.

So how’d they do? Louisville, Davidson, Northwestern State, and Mississippi filled out this bracket’s Final Four, with each team’s journey projected to emit nearly 152,000 metric tonnes of CO2. St. Mary’s had the largest projected footprint, with a little over 166k. Florida Gulf Coast ranks 50 out of 68. Both Wichita State and Lasalle snuck into the top half of the pool ranked 33 and 31, respectively.

The women’s bracket got the same treatment as the men’s, with Maryland, Tennessee Chattanooga, Baylor, and LSU representing the carbon-friendly Final Four and UCLA bringing up the rear.

I spoke to Joe Marriott at Booz Allen, who worked on this analysis, to ask him more about how he did the analysis and what it means.

Q. Did you find yourself rooting for teams based on their carbon footprint?

A. After doing the analysis, it’s hard not to. I taught at the University of Pittsburgh for a few years, so I was rooting for them until they lost in the first round. Ironically, I’ve been so busy with our carbon footprint analysis of the tournament that I’ve paid less attention to my own bracket. The Louisville story, being a tournament favorite and having a small carbon footprint, has made following them pretty compelling.

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Climate Progress recently reported on a study that found both economic and environmental benefits if homes in the northeastern United States upgraded older heating systems by moving from heating oil to switchgrass. However, one point to emphasize was the findings were specific to those circumstances — the region, the homes, and that particular use.

Switchgrass was not nearly as good an idea for electricity generation or transportation fuel. Further confirming the need for a diversity of renewable solutions to our energy needs, a recent study determined that electricity generated by solar beats out biofuels for powering cars under myriad scenarios.

The report, put together by a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and published in Enviornmental Science and Technology, compared five different approaches to see what was the most efficient way to power a compact passenger vehicle for every 100 kilometers driven:

1. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) run on electricity from solar power.
2. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from switchgrass.
3. Internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) run on switchgrass biofuel.
4. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from corn.
5. Internal combustion vehicles run on corn-based biofuel.

The analysis considered land-use, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel use, and took into account the production and use life cycles of both the fuels themselves and the vehicles they power.

In terms of land-use, solar significantly out-performed all other options. It performed modestly better than switchgrass in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and significantly better than corn-based biofuel. Solar was actually equal or slightly worse than switchgrass when it came to fossil fuel requirements over the totality of the life cycle, but it still out-performed corn-based internal combustion. (And, of course, gasoline.)

So all things considered, a pretty clear win for solar-powered electric battery vehicles:

A write up over at Green Car Congress has more details on the assumptions and variables in the study’s modeling.

“PV is orders of magnitude more efficient than biofuels pathways in terms of land use — 30, 50, even 200 times more efficient — depending on the specific crop and local conditions,” Roland Geyer, a UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management Professor, told Science Daily. “You get the same amount of energy using much less land, and PV doesn’t require farm land.” The central bottleneck, as the report notes, is the low efficiency of photosynthesis:

Biofuels for ICVs and bioelectricity for BEVs use photosynthesis to convert solar radiation into transportation services, that is, they are sun-to-wheels transportation pathways. While photosynthesis has a theoretical maximum energy conversion efficiency of 33 percent, the overall conversion efficiency of sunlight into terrestrial biomass is typically below 1 percent, regardless of crop type and growing conditions.

“Today’s thin-film PV is at least 10-percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity,” Geyer explained — hence solar’s superior performance. In fact, the WWF’s Solar PV Atlas found that as far as land-use goes, solar is so efficient that less than 1 percent of global land areas would be needed to supply all the world’s electricity needs in 2050.

Traditional corn-based biofuels are problematic on all sorts of levels: Carbon emissions from agricultural production over their full life cycle largely wipe out any carbon benefits at the point of actual vehicle use. They compete with human food supplies and food cropland, driving up global prices and contributing to global poverty and instability. And new cropland sequesters less carbon from the atmosphere than the grassland or forest it typically displaces.

Switchgrass and other cellulosic biofuels, while they avoid disrupting food supplies, are not immune to these other flaws either. On top of that, their commercial viability at any time in the near future is far from certain.

For the clean car fleet of the future, electrical and hybrid vehicles relying on a grid powered by solar — and presumably wind, hydroelectric, and such — still appears to be the way to go.

The McLaren P1: 663 pounds of torque on a hybrid engine

Yesterday, EPA released a new report that showed major fuel efficiency gains in American vehicles.

EPA’s annual report that tracks the fuel economy of vehicles sold in the United States is signaling a significant 1.4 mile per gallon (mpg) increase for 2012 cars and trucks – along with a continued decrease in carbon pollution.

The expected 1.4 mpg improvement in 2012 is based on sales estimates provided to EPA by automakers. EPA’s projections show a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions to 374 grams per mile and an increase in average fuel economy to 23.8 mpg. If achieved, these would be among the largest annual improvements since EPA began reporting on fuel economy. These improvements would more than make up for a slight 0.2 mpg decrease in 2011 that resulted primarily from earthquake and tsunami-related disruptions to vehicle manufacturing in Japan. From 2007 to 2012, EPA estimates that CO2 emissions have decreased by 13 percent and fuel economy values have increased by 16 percent.

The report goes on to estimate that from 2007 to 2012, fuel economy increased 16 percent, with a 13 percent decline in carbon dioxide emissions. As Gina McCarthy put it, this saves money at the pump, reduces GhG emissions, and cleans the air.

We can expect the Obama Administration’s National Clean Car Program standards to double increase fuel economy by 2025, saving Americans $1.7 trillion dollars on gasoline. By the end of the program, this works out to $8,000 in savings per vehicle, and 2 million fewer barrels of oil every day.

Last year’s report only included data from vehicles power by gasoline or diesel, while this year’s report has a section on alternative fuels: electric, plug-in hybrid electric, and compressed natural gas. The report also includes corrected estimates following the probe into inflated fuel economy numbers from some automakers.

Some pertinent highlights from the executive summary:

CO2 emission rates and fuel economy values reflect a very favorable multi-year trend, beginning with model year (MY) 2005.

The U.S. personal vehicle market is diversifying, and consumers now have a much broader range of vehicle choices with respect to fuel economy/CO2 emissions performance and powertrain technology. The number of SUV, pickup, minivan, and van models that have combined EPA label values of 20 mpg or more have increased by 71%, from 38 in 2007 to 65 in 2012.

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By Felix Kramer and Max Baumhefner, via Switchboard

When it comes to consumer products, environmentalists generally don’t encourage people to buy new and buy now. But that’s what we’re about to do because electric cars are significantly cleaner than gasoline vehicles, and driving one can save you serious cash at the pump.

Perhaps you’ve already thought about buying an electric car, but dismissed the idea for one reason or another. Let’s look at some common misconceptions, and offer some good reasons why you might want to reconsider:

“I should drive my current car into the ground.”

“Hold on,” you say to yourself, “I already own a car that gets 25 miles a gallon. I want to get my money’s worth from the investment.” The sooner you start saving gas, the better it is for the planet and your pocketbook. There’s no use in throwing good money after bad at the pump, and the sooner you sell your current car, the less money you’ll lose to depreciation.

“I’d just be switching my pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant.”

If you want to go green, driving on electricity is a clear winner. Using today’s average American electricity mix of natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar, an electric car emits half the amount of climate-changing carbon pollution per mile as the average new vehicle. In states with cleaner mixes, such as California, it’s only a quarter as much. To find out how clean your electric car would be today, plug your zip code into the EPA’s “Beyond Tailpipe Emissions Calculator.” You should also know that, because old coal plants are increasingly being retired and replaced by cleaner and renewable resources, plug-in cars are the only cars that become cleaner as they age.

“What I save on gas, I’ll pay in electricity.”

On average US residential electricity rates, driving one of today’s electric cars is the equivalent of driving a 27 mile-per-gallon car on buck-a-gallon gasoline. It’s been that way for the last four decades, and is forecasted to stay that way for the next three decades. Experts basically throw up their hands when asked to predict the price of gas next year, let alone 30 years from now. One thing we do know: the price at the pump will jump up and down due to geopolitical events beyond our control. If you’re tired of that rollercoaster, call your local utility to ask about electricity rates designed for plug-in cars.

“I’ll hold off until prices go down and there are more places to charge.”

If you’re thinking you’d be better off waiting for a cheaper, better electric car, and a charging station on every block, consider the following:

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China is trying to get a leg up on the market for clean transportation by bulking up the rate it’s been filing patents. According to a recent report in Europe’s China Daily, China filed over 2,000 patents for alternative-energy cars in 2012, placing it just behind Japan and the United States, and dead even with Germany and South Korea:

With a worldwide push for sustainable, clean transportation, patents are vital to survival in the global new-energy vehicle industry, China Intellectual Property News reported.

China had filed more than 2,000 patent applications – 8 percent of the world total – for new-energy cars by the end of last year to share the third place with Germany and South Korea, according to the statistics from Thomson Reuters.

Japan ranks the first with nearly 9,000 patents, followed by the United States with 4,000, accounting for a respective 60 percent and 22 percent of the world total.

China has actually been in the patent game for sometime. In 2011, the country’s patent office received more applications — for all forms of invention, not just green technology — than any other nation. At the same time, very few Chinese investors seek to patent their ideas abroad — less than 5 percent between 2005 and 2009. As The Economist put it, if an inventor has a genuinely good idea, they’ll seek to patent it as many places as possible. Concentrating merely on China’s office could be an indication that other incentives are driving the patent, such as the chance to snatch up a government subsidy.

The race between various countries to accrue patents in alternative-energy also raises the possibility of “patent wars,” such as those that have riled the world of software. Companies and interests attempt to round up and hoard patents in order to corner sources of revenue. That is, of course, very profitable for them, but it also tends to dampen innovation in the relevant industry. The spread of patents forces companies and inventors to spend ever more time and money making sure every conceptual aspect of the technology they’re working on is in the legal clear, or is properly licensed. That drives up costs for the companies, for consumers, and slows down the creation of new products and technologies that can raise everyone’s well-being — like cars and other forms of transport powered by sustainable energy. It arguably even drives up inequality.

The problem is especially acute in the software world, where it’s especially difficult to organize who has the rights to what into a public and easily-searchable database. But in principle the inefficiencies and transaction costs that come with over-zealous competition for patents can afflict any industry, including green tech and green transportation.

In February of 2011, for example, Butamax Advanced Biofuels, a joint venture between BP and DuPont, sued another advanced biofuels company, Gevo, for infringing their patent on a process to produce microbial-based biofuel.