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After decades of waiting and wishing, 2011 really is shaping up to be the year of the electric car. GM’s Volt—an electric car with a gas-powered “range extender”—and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf will soon be appearing in Americans’ garages. (Ads for the cars—Nissan has the one with the polar bear—are already almost impossible to avoid.) With [...]
Gasoline is like the circulatory system of the American economy. When it’s working fine, you barely notice it. But if something goes wrong, you end up in mortal trouble really fast. Is the struggling U.S. economy headed towards a gasoline-induced heart attack? A report by the Lundberg Survey of American cities found that gas prices—which [...]
When executives from General Motors visited the trading floors of JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley—the two firms handling the auto company’s initial public offering—they were given a standing ovation from the bankers. Maybe the rest of us should join in. Less than a year and a half after the company declared bankruptcy and seemed headed [...]
Welcome aboard the cruise ship of the future: shuffle board, casino, ballroom, and….nuclear reactor? Today Lloyd’s Register, the international standards organization for the classification and design of ships, announced that it has begun a two-year project with a consortium of companies to look into the feasibility of nuclear-powered commercial ships. The primary application will be [...]
Though Congress has been (self-)stymied on climate change this term, the Obama Administration has taken steps of its own to deal with rising U.S. carbon emissions. And nowhere have they been more aggressive than in promoting—mandating, really—better fuel efficiency on our roads, as I wrote earlier this month: In May 2009 Obama brokered a deal [...]
Environmentalists can take President Obama to task for more than a few disappointments over the first two years of his Administration—and some of them have—but one area where the White House has fulfilled its green pledges is in auto fuel efficiency. In May 2009 Obama brokered a deal with the auto industry that saw Corporate [...]
Ask Shai Agassi how his electric transportation startup Better Place is doing, and the Israeli-American entrepreneur will offer up an endless supply of good stories. The company’s trial in Tokyo—running several electric taxis in the Japanese capital, which can recharge and switch their batteries at a Better Place station—was recently extended for an additional three [...]
One of the unwritten rules of the industrialized age is that the more humans get to move around, the less animals do. Humanity’s unprecedented migrations – to look for jobs, escape from wars, mine for natural resources and visit new places – are, in fact, creating more and more roadblocks for the animals with which [...]
I was on a Qantas flight in eastern Australia last week when a flight attendant handed me what looked like a fancy barf bag. It was, in fact, not a fancy barf bag, but a fancy recycling bag, in which I was instructed to place everything that was not a can, plastic cup or a [...]
In their eternal war against the scourge of carbon emissions, greens have had a tough year of it, what with the near collapse at Copenhagen, the controversies at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the slapstick comedy that is the U.S. Senate’s attempts to deal with energy policy. But environmentalists have had some good [...]
