The primary feature of this phase of the 2020 West Coast Fire Season is the smoke. There are unprecedentedly huge wildfires burning, and a new front on the horrors opened a few days ago with several large wildfires in Oregon and Washington State. While the fires are threatening immediate destruction…
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced today that the La Nina pattern has developed. This phenomena involves a cooling of the surface of the Pacific Ocean near the equator. This pattern is known to cause a series of chain reactions resulting in a longer hurricane season in the…
The 2020 wildfire season in the Western USA (California, Oregon, etc) started early. Dozens of fires ignited one weekend in August leading to wildfires all around the state, and today four of the largest wildfires in California’s history are burning simultaneously. More recently a heatwave sparked other wildfires in not…
With the COVID-19 pandemic, one thing we notice is the higher fatality rate for elderly patients, or for those with impaired health, or for those who are smokers. It seems that those with weaker immune systems have a harder time fighting off COVID-19, and therefore are more likely to result…
The Republican party that’s in control of the Federal Government is stuck in Grover Norquist’s paradigm – that he famously wanted to shrink Government to be small enough to drag into the bathroom and drown in a baththub. What a violent fantasy that is! Yesterday the US Environmental Protection Agency…
SunSpec, the leading organization developing standards in the Solar industry, has launched an initiative aiming to train folks for jobs in the distributed energy resource (DER) sphere. Thanks to the decreasing cost of renewable energy systems, DER’s installation is apparently still increasing. Thanks to Internet-of-Things technology, renewable energy systems are…
The Trump Administration has been taking all kinds of actions to undermine environmental regulations, coddle polluters, and support fossil fuels, but at the same time the Administration continues to fund research into clean energy technologies. In January, the Dept of Energy announced a funding opportunity for up to $133 million…
Last week, on the eve of instituting a tax on polluting cars entering the central area of Bucharest, the Mayor of Bucharest, Gabriela Firea, abandoned the so-called Oxygen Tax plan. Under the plan cars not meeting the Euro 3 criteria would be banned from the center of Bucharest, and overall…
Dacia, the Romania-based car maker owned by Renault, has announced its first all-electric car, the Dacia Spring. It is a 4-seat city car, meaning it is a very small car, but Dacia says those are “real seats”, which one supposes to mean they’re full size. It should have a 200…
The big news right now is the Coronavirus outbreak that began in China last fall. CoVID-19 as it is more formally known is a relatively highly infectious disease, that the human population has no immunity against, and a relatively high (2%) mortality rate. Given those figures, governments around the world…
Ever since General Motors killed the electric car, we’ve had doubts over GM’s seriousness about EV’s. In almost the same breath as the EV1 program was canceled, GM ramped up sales of the Hummer. In 2008, GM announced a plug-in hybrid (the Chevy Volt) while stating that over the long…
In December, the European Union announced the European Green New Deal that is intended to greatly speed up the EU’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The new goal is for Europe to become Climate Neutral (no net greenhouse gas emissions) by 2050, and to reduce emissions by 55% by…
Hyundai and its sister company Kia announced today an investment in UK-based Arrival, an electric vehicle startup company. The plan is to use Arrival’s scalable electric vehicle skateboard platform to develop several new vehicles for a range of target markets. In a statement sure to infuriate American fans of Kia…
About 10 years ago the US Dept of Energy started a project to identify the cost for installing solar equipment, to drive down those costs, and therefore accelerate adoption of solar power. According to a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute a similar effort is needed for electric vehicle…
Last weekends news that GM plans to resurrect the Hummer caused my jaw to hit the floor – “Oh no, GM is killing the electric car AGAIN“. But reading on, learning that GM does NOT plan to resurrect the Hummer Of Old, the gas guzzling behemoth that it was, but…
