carbon
EcocentricTransportation
How Climate-Friendly Is Your Electric Car? It Depends On Where You Live
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 …
EcocentricEcocentric
Air War: U.S. and Europe Clash Over Proposed Carbon Reductions for Airlines
Depending on the calculations, air travel accounts for perhaps 3 to 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, far below sources like deforestation, coal-fired electricity and automobiles. Yet I’ve always thought that airplanes play …
EcocentricEcocentric
Bienvenue au Canada: Welcome to Your Friendly Neighborhood Petro-State
I spent a year in Canada as a teenager in 1993 and ’94, living in the metro Toronto neighborhood of Scarborough, which for some reason Canadians think is hilarious. Aside from the unfortunate 1993 World Series — damn you, Joe …
EcocentricOil
Standing Against Oil Sands—and Standing for the Climate
Back in 2008, former vice president Al Gore decided that it was time to take the fight against climate change to a new level. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, Gore said that the world had “reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience,” and called for young people to take the lead. The …
EcocentricOil
A Quiet Green Win for Obama on Auto Efficiency
Many of President Obama’s progressive supports have soured on him in recent months, as the debt crisis and a Republican House has forced him to embrace deep spending cuts, and environmentalists are among them. There’s still unhappiness among greens over the White House’s perceived failure to push hard for carbon cap-and-trade …
EcocentricOil
The Real Price of Gasoline
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 a single gallon of gasoline, …
EcocentricWater
Retro Environmentalism: Is Plastic the Next Carbon?
Back in the day, before Al Gore informed us about a certain inconvenient truth, before we started to calculate our commutes in carbon, and before people in the South Pacific had to start heading for higher land, there were beach clean ups. People walked along the sand — maybe sometimes only on Earth Day, like once-a-year churchgoers …
EcocentricUncategorized
Why Can’t We Turn Away From Coal As Japan Has Turned Away From Nuclear?
Krista Mahr posted a great item this morning on Japan’s decision to stop building new nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Atomic power already supplies some 30% of Japan’s electricity—considerably larger than nuclear’s share in the U.S.—and the Japanese government had plans on table to add another 14 reactors …
EcocentricCoal
The Planet’s Natural Air Filters
The Earth as one great organism has always been one of the most appealing metaphors of the green movement. From the moment environmentalist James Lovelock first articulated his so-called Gaia hypothesis—after the Greek goddess of the Earth—in the 1970s, the theory has continued to charm environmentalists.
It doesn’t stand up to …