by Biodiversivist
-
WWF, Global Warming, and the Point of No Return 0
Posted 3 weeks, 5 days ago
I put together a Microsoft Excel interactive pie chart that can be opened or downloaded (file downloaded from this link is guaranteed not to have a virus) that may help people to put into perspective various efforts (like doubling the efficiency of the US car fleet, or the elimination of coal for electricity generation) to reduce greenhouse gases.
I read the WWF study last night. At first I was a little shell-shocked, but as I read on I grew -
A2B verses A123 0
Posted 1 month ago
I’ve seen a couple of these A2B machines running around town. I finally spotted one on display at a scooter store. That’s my electric bike parked next to it. Some yahoo wanting to purchase an electric scooter to drive from his yacht at one end of a dock to the mailbox at the other end had waylaid the proprietor so I never got a chance to test ride it. You can find a video of a test ride done by the WSJ here.
From the above video:
”…after people ride it for a while… Read More -
Bicycles, Trauma Centers, and Injury Severity Scores 0
Posted 1 month ago
Two recent articles have motivated me to do another biking post. First up is this one, from Science DailyDespite the wide-spread attention paid to the importance of wearing helmets, helmet use did not change during the time period of the study, and more than 33 percent of 329 bicycle injury victims had a significant head injury. Even more alarming, the number of chest injuries increased by 15 percent and abdominal injuries rose three-fold over the last five years. “We were astounded by that data,”
“We’re talking about injured spleens and livers, internal bleeding, rib fractures, and… Read More -
Transgressing identified and quantified planetary boundaries 0
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago Apparently, we’ve punched through three of those boundaries already, two of them big time. See here. You can read the entire paper in the journal Nature here.Now, largely because of a rapidly growing reliance on fossil fuels and industrialized forms of agriculture, human activities have reached a level that could damage the systems that keep Earth in the desirable Holocene state.
Note that of the two causes listed, one of them is industrial agriculture, which is also wholly dependent on fossil fuels. I don’t have the answer but it surely isn’t mixing the products of industrial… Read More -
Corn Ethanol Hoses Police Fleet 0
Posted 2 months ago According to Green Inc., lab tests have confirmed that a high ethanol blend was to blame for taking about 70 police cars out of service in Baltimore. At first it was suspected that diesel had contaminated the fuel. Here is a video of the mechanics flushing out the fuel injectors. According to the maintenance supervisor in that video the cars were misfiring and some were running on only two cylinders resulting in low power. If you have ever fantasized about escaping from the police in a high-speed chase, you just missed your chance. I suspect that the ethanol… Read More -
Electric car sells out in Japan. It’s downhill from here. 0
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago According to the Edmunds Green Car Advisor blog, Mitsubishi has already sold out the first production run of it’s electric car, the i-MiEV. Here’s the real deal.
The i-MiEV is based on the Mitsubishi i. It’s expensive and will therefore have limited mass appeal. But envy, as is always the case, will drive a demand for similar cars that cost less and the market will meet that demand. I predict that the i-MiEV will do for the electric car market what the Prius (highest selling model in Japan, 14th out of 350 in U.S.) has done… Read More -
Another day, another cougar 0
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago A cougar was recently removed from a Seattle park just a few miles from where I live.
I poked around looking for cougar sign by some ponds in the park but found only raccoon tracks. The last time a cougar was in this park he left behind a cache of raccoon heads. I chased some growling raccoons away from our chicken coop earlier this summer. Had to buy a new frying pan because I broke the handle off the one I hit the raccoon with.
The cougar was of course, tranquilized, ear tagged, and radio collared.… Read More -
Are biofuels really worse than Canadian oil sands? 13
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago When several scientific studies began publishing reports that supported the common sense contention that food-based biofuels usurp farmland the Renewable Fuels Association (which just spent almost a quarter of a million dollars last quarter on lobbying) had to cobble together some kind of defense. Read More -
1, 461 MPG (e) 0
Posted 2 months, 4 weeks ago I gave Jo Borras over on Gas2.0 a rough time in my last post, but he really made up for it with his latest article. Read More -
Carbon Copies
Child Bearing and Carbon Footprints 0
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago Kate Galbraith put up a post in the NYT Green Inc. blog about the carbon footprint of child bearing. According to a study done at Oregon State University:
”…a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.”
In other words, if you think you can compensate for having a child by changing your… Read More
