When Bloomberg writes that in the United States “ Big Oil Is About to Lose Control of the Auto Industry ” you know there is something going on, especially when they rely on solid BNEF study and data.
Transport
South Korea enacts its cap and trade market
The world’s seventh carbon emitter started earlier this month the second biggest cap and trade program. As we have seen previously, South Korea is willing to cut its emissions by 30 percent by 2020. This cap-and-trade programm will enable it to do so.
Crazy air pollution levels in Paris
Last week and earlier this one, the French capital was hit by important levels of air pollution. The situation was so out of hand on Monday that the city of Paris decided to ban half the cars off the roads as TreeHugger reported. According to the local ADEME, France is a severe offender regarding air … Read more
South Korea confirms its 2020 climate targets
According to RTCC : ” South Korea remains on course to meet its target of a 30% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 (…) It says the total reduction in climate warming greenhouse gases will be equivalent to 233 million tonnes. “ ” Specifically, the country plans transportation emission cuts of 34.3%, 26.9% in … Read more
Ford to boost start-stop systems
According to TreeHugger, ” a Ford representative is saying that they are “going to be aggressive rolling [stop-start] out”. As we have seen previously, such innovation enable cars to stop automatically their engines when not moving. Such a simple system could cut the oil consumption by ten percent for urban driving while only costing around … Read more
Bike sharing is booming too
Last week I was reporting that biking is booming in cities around the world. Grist wrote about how bike sharing is an essential component of this phenomenon as they are more than 500 cities in 49 countries with bike-sharing programs. Collectively, they represent as many as 500,000 bicycles combined. This just might be the beginning … Read more
Peugeot to introduce Hybrid Air car
Your next car could run on air (and gas). The French carmaker Peugeot is working on a vehicle that could run partially on air. Highly efficient, the car will be doing approximately 2.9 liters for 100 kms or 81 MPG.
As the New York Times, the Guardian and Le Figaro [Fr] reported, the Hybrid Air combines a hydraulic drive that recovers energy each time the car brakes or decelerates as well as a conventional thermal engine.
These models would be ideal for urban driving. Due to be sold as early as 2016, it would be cheaper -and more efficient in city driving – than a Toyota Prius.
Prepare yourself ! Climate resilience
Some people prepare for Judgment Day, some others for a Zombie apocalypse. A few prepare for an alien invasion or when their government will start going dictatorship on them. I won’t discuss here these eventualities.
However I seriously advise you to increase your climate resilience. With a warming and weirding climate, as well as with increasing resource scarcity, all kinds of disruptions are due to occur sooner rather than later.
This is why the first step is to slash the amount of resources you use. Whether we are talking about basic commodities or gizmos and gadgets, consuming less is always a good idea.
Oil prices will just keep on increasing
It had been a long while I hadn’t blogged on oil prices. This came to me as last week I found two pieces of news showing how oil prices are just going up and up and how they will just keep on increasing in the next months and years.
First and foremost, according to PeakOil.com, US drivers are paying in 2013 higher gas prices than in 2012, which were higher than 2011, which themselves were also higher than in 2008, when oil prices reached their all time high of $147 a barrel.
Still to this website, the annual average for 2012 for Brent crude – one of the benchmarks for oil prices – was higher than in that fateful year of 2008.
A climate change to do list
Yesterday I published an lengthy article on how business leaders and elected representatives of the so-called ” developped countries ” are awakening slowly to the threat of climate change.
While these are great news, we are still waiting for concrete actions that could actually have a chance to avoid catastrophes such as flooded cities, extreme weather events and so on.
So I had a look at what would consist of an urgent to do list for the future UNFCC conference of parties. Of course, this is a not exhaustive list.
Food waste : a HUGE issue
According to a new study by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers “Between 30 and 50 percent of all the food that’s produced on the planet is lost and wasted without ever reaching human stomachs.”
Treehugger wrote a compelling article on how this is such a huge and awful waste as there are still hundred of million people around the world that are starving as I write those lines. This problem as many other implications.
Indeed, all this wasted food leads to methane emissions, the excessive production to more carbon dioxide and to less water in our water tables.