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Entries from March 2012

Daryl Hannah’s Splash at Home Performance Trade Show

March 28th, 2012 · 1 Comment

Actress and eloquent activist Daryl Hannah provided the star quality to the opening of the Affordable Comfort, Inc, annual trade show in Baltimore, MD (on why to attend ACI).  On stage with ACI director, Amy Fazio, Hannah talked about the importance of home performance for confronting the crises (climate crisis, ocean acidification crisis, water crisis, […]

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Tags: Energy

Coal Industry Should Celebrate New EPA Guidelines

March 27th, 2012 · 1 Comment

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced guidelines for new power plants for providing Americans electricity into the future. This move was required by a Supreme Court decision from five years ago. In short, these standards demand that new power plants be a bit less polluting, in carbon dioxide terms, than the average of current […]

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Tags: Energy

Naming Electric Vehicle Value Streams

March 26th, 2012 · Comments Off on Naming Electric Vehicle Value Streams

When it comes to discussions of the value of moving toward transportation fuel efficiency, all too often, the “return on investment” (ROI) calculation devolves down to “how much extra to buy fuel efficiency versus how fast the gasoline savings will pay for the extra cost”. This sort of stove-piped calculation creates a misleading discussion and […]

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Tags: Energy

March heat wave to cause panic buying?

March 23rd, 2012 · 1 Comment

When the tiniest bit of snow hits Washington, DC, area grocery stores can suddenly find their shelves (especially milk …) depleted with the hordes of panic buyers terrified of being caught without the liquid for their morning cereal.  Amid March Madness, with “mind-boggling” high temperature records outpacing low temperature records more about 35 to 1 in North […]

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Tags: agriculture · catastrophic climate change · climate change

Obama’s Four-Letter Words and Cushing, Oklahoma

March 22nd, 2012 · 6 Comments

President Barack Obama is barnstorming the nation promoting his “all-of-the-above” energy policy. Watching this parade reinforces that ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Global Warming’ (let alone climate chaos or catastrophic climate chaos or …) appear to be banned four-letter phrases in the Obama Administation lexicon. Yesterday, the President was in Boulder City, Nevada, standing in front of a solar electricity […]

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Tags: anti-science syndrome · catastrophic climate change · climate change · climate zombies · Global Warming · Obama Administration · political symbols · President Barack Obama

The Rotting Away of a Hero: Andrew Revkin on Peter Gleick

March 21st, 2012 · 2 Comments

For those entranced with the written word and learning, a truly painful life event is seeing the intellectual and ethical withering of someone whose work once had great meaning and merited true respect.  New York Times / Dot Earth journalist Andrew Revkin stands as  one of the more important and notable environmental journalists over the past several decades.  Revkin’s books […]

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Tags: journalism

ACI National: reasons to have it on your calendar

March 21st, 2012 · 1 Comment

I oft-times describe myself as a ‘systems-of-systems’ thinker (not engineer), fascinated by how (oft-times radically) different things interact in ways and for results unrealizable if we rest in a stove-piped consideration of some narrow part of a problem or the world.  While the domains I focus on, our e3 (economic, energy, environmental) challenges and opportunities, […]

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Tags: energy efficiency

Electric White Zombie Datsun Blows Corvette Away …

March 21st, 2012 · Comments Off on Electric White Zombie Datsun Blows Corvette Away …

Put a 1970s Datsun against a Corvette or a “pretty-quick BMW” on a speedway and what would you expect the result to be? That’s right. The electric car, an electric conversion of a 1972 Datsun, blows away fossil foolish competitor after fossil fool. The White Zombie is the “the first street legal electric car to […]

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Tags: advertising · automobiles

“If you can’t plug your car in …”

March 19th, 2012 · 2 Comments

This public service video — from an actual Chevy owner (as you’ll see by the production quality) and Plug-In America — speaks to many of the values and value streams that actual people look to when it comes to the return-on-investment from buying an electric vehicle (PHEV or EV).  Quiet enough to listen to birds […]

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Tags: advertising · automobiles · PHEV

ALEC lets Inhofe have it …

March 19th, 2012 · 2 Comments

No, we’re not talking about the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) efforts to push radically conservative corporative legislation through state legislative bodies (such as ALEC re climate change) but Alec Baldwin. Perhaps sparked by global warming denier Jim Inhofe’s recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show, Baldwin launched a series of tweets attacking Inhofe: […]

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Tags: catastrophic climate change · climate change · climate delayers · climate zombies · Energy · global warming deniers · James Inhofe