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Up close, an electric vehicle is clearly cleaner than a gasoline-powered car. No matter how efficient a combustion engine becomes—and some gasoline-powered cars can be very efficient—it still, well, combusts, spewing carbon and other exhaust gases into the atmosphere. But nothing at all comes out the tailpipe of an electric car. It’s as clean as [...]
Every day, the world burns through more than 87 million barrels of oil—and every year, that number gets bigger and bigger. We use oil to power our cars, planes and trucks; our tanks, bombers and rockets. Oil is irreplacable, which is why we remain addicted—even though we hate it. And it’s why the oil industry—represented [...]
That’s the number of trips that Americans took on mass transit in 2011, a 2.3% increase over 2010, according to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). That’s the second-highest number of trips taken since 1957, after only 2008, when gasoline had hit a record average high of $4.11 a gallon. The increase in transit ridership [...]
Like a lot of Brooklynites—just about 54%—I don’t own a car. In fact, I’ve never owned a car. Before New York I lived in Hong Kong and Tokyo, two cities that are even denser and easier to get around car-less than New York. In college there never seemed much of a need for a car, [...]
That’s the net amount of petroleum products that the U.S. exported in 2011, marking the first time since 1949 that the country exported more petroleum products than it imported, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Imports fell to 2.4 million barrels per day (bpd)—the lowest level in 11 years—while exports rose to 2.9 [...]
That’s the average fuel economy of new vehicles purchased in the U.S. during the month of February, according to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. The good news: that’s a record for the highest fuel efficiency of newly purchased cars, just besting the figure from the month before. The bad news? 23.7 mpg is [...]
2011 was supposed to be the year of the electric vehicle. All kinds of people said it—including this guy. And in some ways it was. After years of anticipation—and piles of presumptuous magazine stories and unending commercials—2011 saw the commercial introduction of GM’s extended-range electric Volt and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf. The tax credits were ready, gasoline [...]
If you’ve ever looked up at the sky when you hear the hum of an airplane, chances are you’ve seen the channels, streaks, and halos that sometimes pattern the sky in the aircraft’s wake. These cloud constellations can happen because of temperature changes as airplanes pass through certain clouds, as we learned in 2010. But [...]
I’m on a deadline today for the magazine (that thing that shows up sometimes at your house), so blogging is going to brief. But wanted to link to a neat video from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) on the true price of gas. CIR tallies up the environmental, climate, health and security costs of [...]
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 [...]
