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…
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…
As we’ve been covering for awhile, the US Environmental Protection Agency has been threatening to yank California’s ability to set its own emissions standards. California and many other states have a long-standing precedent to set emissions standards and other environmental regulations. Under the Trump Administration everything that threatens the fossil…
It’s been a tumultuous weekend for the Volkswagen Group. Last weeks announcement that the EPA and CARB are investigating the company over allegations that VW had fabricated TDI Diesel car emissions results has thrown a monkey wrench into the credibility of not only the VW Group but the whole system of validating emissions…
Back in 2009-10 the VW Group released a series of TDI Diesel vehicles with excellent emissions results. Those emissions were so good that at that time I wrote a piece saying VW’s TDI vehicles are not your grandfathers dirty diesel, and even raised the question whether VW would need hybrid vehicles…
It seems I missed out on something in childhood – Snow Cream – a treat that’s supposedly common for children to eat like Ice Cream. While I’m sure I ate some snow here and there, it wasn’t flavored with anything – so far as I recall. Only now did I…
Is your electric car powered by coal? Routinely, electric cars are dismissed as being coal powered, and therefore the environmental fruitcake treehuggers flocking to electric cars are delusional. That critique is really saying electric cars externalize all the negative environmental harm over to a power plant. Is that true? If…
There’s a movement afoot aiming to drastically reduce driving, the need for driving, and the need for parking, all in the name of environmental goodness. The theory is that reducing vehicle miles traveled will reduce the negative environmental impact (like greenhouse gas emissions) from transportation, and there will be additional…
Fuel cell’s seem like this magic technology – you pour in a clean fuel (hydrogen and oxygen) and out comes clean energy (electricity) and water. Make a fuel cell big enough to power a car, or truck, and you’ve got a “clean” vehicle that can go a few hundred miles…
How can anyone whose job creates lots of problems in the world live with themselves? The problems created by some jobs are obvious. For example gasoline station attendants are enablers to all the ills that come from burning gasoline. The job of an “insect/pest control” workers is spraying poison in…
