Link Banana

In a thorough summary of the basics of hybrid auto technology, The Economist’s Tech.view column sees a future that may favor less-efficient (but cheaper) mild hybrids over “stronger” ones like the Prius.

The complexity and cost of such drive-trains has made many in the industry think twice about strong hybrids. Mild hybrids like Honda’s may offer only modest fuel savings, but they are considerably cheaper to make. Selling for less than a Toyota Prius, the new mild-hybrid version of the Chevrolet Malibu has been a runaway success, despite having only 2mpg better fuel economy than a conventional Malibu.

This Green.view column raises some valuable points about Canada’s supposedly brutal seal hunts:

Still, groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) call it inhumane, and they have successfully lobbied politicians across Europe. In 2007, Belgium and the Netherlands banned trade in seal products. Other countries—perhaps even the whole European Union—may soon follow suit.

IFAW records hundreds of hours of video footage of the annual hunt, in which seals are killed either by shooting or with a hakapik, a heavy wooden club with a pick. Although IFAW feels the hunt is inhumane, a study published in the Canadian Veterinary Journal in 2002 concluded that most seals (about 98%) were killed in an acceptably humane manner.

Though I have no idea where this falls is proportion to America’s total consumption, it’s interesting to see that wind dominates among currently planned methods of power generation.

The local city council has been talking about this topic, and today a scattershot but related essay appears on Slate:

My chickens, I like to think, are the most highly entertained chickens in the world. I sunbathe with them, hang out in the bushes with them, and sing to them. When they hear me sing my one cover, “St. Louis Blues,” they know to be nervous. “I hate to see … that evening sun go down,” I croon. And they get goose bumps. They seem to know that when that evening sun does go down, one of them will lose her head.

It’s the way of the future according to David George Gordon. I find myself surprisingly interested in it. The crucial component is this:

Insect lovers like Gordon argue that entomophagy — the scientific term for consuming insects — could also be a far greener way to get protein than eating chicken, cows or pigs. With the global livestock sector responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions and grain prices reaching record highs, cheap, environmentally low-impact insects could be the food of the future — provided we can stomach them.

(via Slate)

Wired Science has an approachable look at this report which measured the per-capita emissions of the 100 largest US metro areas. There’s not much terribly surprising — density is good, public transportation is good, coal is bad, mild weather is good — but the map’s still interesting to see.

Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer:

Virtually no fuel is wasted during startup, and only a thimbleful is burned as the car roars to life. So forget about the 30-minute axiom you were raised on—the threshold at which it makes more sense to shut off rather than to idle should be expressed in seconds, not minutes.

A lot of environmental organizations advocate the 10-second rule: If you’re going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, it’s best to shut off your engine.

Firm evidence that high gas prices really make people think more and drive less.

At 11 billion miles less in March 2008 than in the previous March, this is the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Grist compiled some interesting numbers recently. For example:

Less than 1: Percent of the earth’s surface covered by cities (1)
75: Percent of global energy consumed by cities (2)
80: Percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions contributed by cities (1)

(via GOOD Blog)

The much awaited and debated decision was finally made, but because this is still the George W. Bush administration, no action will be permitted to actually protect the animals.

But in both cases, the Bush administration has parried this legal thrust, saying it had no obligation to address or try to mitigate the cause of the species’ decline — warming waters, in the case of the corals, or melting sea ice, in the case of the bears — or the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, refineries, factories and power plants that contribute to both conditions.

The Economist’s Tech.view columnist thinks that the time is ripe for disappearing ink (or erasable paper) to replace the old-fashioned kind:

But once we’ve finished with the hard copies, they are often dumped in the recycling container, rubbish bin or even shredder. In a survey of its own printers, copiers and waste-paper bins, Xerox found that two out of five sheets printed were used only once and then discarded after a day.

That seems an awful waste. It takes around 200,000 joules of energy to make a sheet of paper. The average office worker in America prints out 1,200 sheets a month. The energy consumed in manufacturing that amount of paper—not to mention the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process—is equivalent a 100-watt light bulb burning for a month.

Pundits reckon over 15 trillion pieces of paper are printed annually around the world—a figure that is expected to grow 30% over the next ten years. To feed our appetite for paper, whole forests have to chopped down. Surely it would be better if we could reuse our paper—in short, stick it back in the printer or copier rather than trash it.

It’s a hard question, and Salon’s Pablo Päster doesn’t give a broad answer — though he offers how to figure it out for yourself. For a 1986 Mercedes-Benz W126:

Given that your car is already built, we can write off the energy used in making it. We can also write off the emissions that it has already created from burning gasoline. That means that over the next 116,000 miles, your car’s greenhouse gas emissions will essentially break even with the emissions from the production and use of a Prius. I’m guessing your 22-year-old car probably has over 200,000 miles on it. If you’re lucky, you can get another few years out of it. So if you can afford a new Prius, you are better off switching now. And think of the fewer hassles of owning a new car.

In his overgrown plea that people grow at least a little of their own food, Michael Pollan eloquently expressed a theory of change I’ve been wrestling with for a while:

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

They meet in the zeroHouse.

(via Magnetbox)

The epic battle that accompanies every children’s toy.

(via clusterflock)

I hate presenting “yesterday’s Op-Eds today,” but that’s what happens with I get behind. Monica Prasad made some interesting — and sure to be controversial — claims in yesterday’s New York Times.

What did Denmark do right? There are many elements to its success, but taken together, the insight they provide is that if reducing emissions is the goal, then a carbon tax is a tax you want to impose but never collect.

This is a hard lesson to learn. The very thought of new tax revenue has a way of changing the priorities of the most hard-headed politicians — even Genghis Khan learned to be peaceful, the story goes, when he saw how much more rewarding it was to tax peasants than to kill them. But if we want lower emissions, the goal of a carbon tax is to prompt producers to change their behavior, not to allow them to continue polluting while handing over cash to the government.

This isn’t so much news as a reminder of long established facts. Americans can love driving far more than anyone else because gasoline here is so much cheaper than anywhere else.

Though you may think a column called Green.view would be unabashedly against the creation of vast artificial islands off the coast of Dubai, you’d only be partially right.

If one’s philosophy, for example is that the ocean should be largely left alone, then whether reclamation provides homes for more fish will not matter. Others, though, may take a more pragmatic view, thinking that the development has essentially created something from nothing. Indeed, many artificial reefs—scuttled ships and aircraft, sunken tyres and shopping trolleys—house marine life in otherwise empty waters.

That conclusion, however, risks oversimplification. While there may be more substrate for coral to grow, the question of whether there is actually more marine life is complicated. Do artificial structures in the ocean actually promote more life, or do they simply attract it? Dr Love reckons some reefs do one, some do the other and some do both. So while the artificial reefs have certainly created new habitats, it isn’t clear whether this is as a net benefit for the region.

The state legislators in Georgia went to the history books to try to cure their water problem:

SOON after James Camak demarcated the border between Georgia and Tennessee in 1818, he began to develop doubts about his work. Thanks to a faulty sextant and bad astronomical charts, he had drawn the line a mile south of the intended boundary, the 35th parallel. Were the error to be corrected, Georgia would find itself in possession of a short stretch of the Tennessee river.

Until recently, Georgia’s politicians did not pursue their claims to this sliver of territory very vigorously. But a bad drought, and the growing militancy of two other neighbouring states about the sharing of water, have prompted a change of heart. Last month Georgia’s state assembly passed a resolution calling on the governor to set up a commission to look into the disputed boundary.

Slate’s Green Lantern takes on the question of cans versus glass bottles and comes up with a typically nuanced answer:

If your chosen tipple is produced very close to home and your town has a robust recycling program, then glass bottles are probably the way to go. But if your preferred suds are brewed far away, by a company that’s even mildly eco-aware, aluminum cans are the wiser choice.

I should note that Salon’s Pablo Päster tackled a similar question over a month ago, deciding that plastic bottles are better than aluminum cans. Assuming both columnists’ logic is sound, that means: plastic bottles are better than cans, and cans are (generally) better than glass bottles.