While Advanced Metering Infrastructure, which allows wireless communication between utilities and meters, has been going in across the country for over a decade, it is only recently that they have been developing into smart grid systems.
Could a smart grid system be popping up in your area?...
"Daddy the cat is out...you didn't start the mower did you?" "Has anybody seen the automatic lawnmower?" Just one of many questions people will have about a solar powered lawnmower that toodles about the yard like an escaped Roomba vacuum. Husqvarna's website describes the product this way:
Being the worlds first fully automatic, robotic lawn mower, the Auto Mower is the ultimate user friendly mower. You don’t have to lift a finger to get a perfect lawn.
I was riding my bike to the store last weekend when I saw a long line of cars waiting to fill up at the corner gas station. 87 Octane was going for $2.89, and it looked liked no one wanted to risk missing out on this “bargain” before prices shot back up. Though the reality is, gas prices will likely remain below $3.00 for just a little longer.
A great way to get all the testosterone soaked hard core engineers who hate whining environmentalists wound up is to say something nice about Jimmy Carter, but here is another eminently sensible thing he did: He capped the maximum speed on speedometers in cars at 85 MPH.
Anyone wondering if Beijing's azure blue skies would last after the "green" Olympics left town (hello) can breathe a small sigh of relief. It took a few weeks, but in an effort to keep the skies and roads relatively clear, the Beijing government is putting its big, authoritarian foot down on the brakes and launching a car ban like the one it used during the Olymp...
Mexico is emerging as a fascinating climate change case study.
Why do the American People -- needing the right information to choose a president whose policies will prevent Peak Oil and Climate Change from becoming society-destabilizing catastrophes -- believe the fantasy that domestic oil drilling is the right energy solution to bring down gas prices?
That's what Kris De Decker over at Low-tech Magazine claims. He writes:
If we cut the average speed of all vehicles by half, fuel consumption would decrease by a whopping 75 percent. We quote:
"Breaking speed records was an almost daily happening throughout the 20th century. Cars, ships, planes and trains became faster and faster, year after year. Because the power needed to push an object through air increases with the cube of velocity, this race to ever higher velocities raises energy consumption exponentially."
...
Kent Sepkowitz makes a very interesting point in his New York Times op-ed No Need For Speed about car design: They are all designed to go faster than the law permits.
Fertilizer use and climate change. Unfortunately, choice words you rarely hear used in the same sentence. With so much focus given to emissions from transportation and industry, lesser known, but equally important factors like fertilizer use are often overlooked. To place things in perspective, the overuse of fertilizers releases an estimated 2 billion tonnes of nitrous oxide (a GHG estimated to be 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere annually. What is also alarming is that agricultural activities in general contribute to 17 to 32 per cent of global GHG emissions.
We noted earlier a study from the Harvard Medical School that calculated that for every 10% increase in gas prices there was a 2.3% decline in auto deaths.
Now a new report from Michael Sivak of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan finds an even more dramatic fall. Associated Press reports that:
Over the previous 10 months, monthly fatalities declined an average of 4.2 percent compared to the previous year. Then, Sivak's data shows, fatalities dropped 22.1 percent in March and 17.9 percent in April of this year...The declines found by Si...
We noted earlier a study from the Harvard Medical School that calculated that for every 10% increase in gas prices there was a 2.3% decline in auto deaths.
Now a new report from Michael Sivak of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan finds an even more dramatic fall. Associated Press reports that:
Over the previous 10 months, monthly fatalities declined an average of 4.2 percent compared to the previous year. Then, Sivak's data shows, fatalities dropped 22.1 percent in March and 17.9 percent in April of this year...The declines found by Si...
Tom Friedman battles Michele Bachmann in the Quote of the Day Olympics with a tirade against McCain for missing all eight votes on the renewable energy tax credit extensions (and Obama too, for missing the last vote). Without this bill's passage, most investment in solar and wind in the US will grind to a halt.
On this week’s episode: Cheap gas prices in China bolster SUV sales. Find out how walk-able your neighborhood is. People Cube helps offices become sustainable.
Our favorite Member of Congress from the State of Minnesota is now in the lead with the most quotes of the day of anyone on TreeHugger, with her latest complaint about Nancy Pelosi and the fight against climate change:
""[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she's just trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet -- we didn't need Nancy Pelosi to do that." ::Think Progress
All Michele Bachmann a...
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