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How I Reduced My Natural Gas Use 75 Percent for Less Than $1,400

(Photo credit VA5LF via the Flickr Creative Commons license). Cross Posted from Biodiversivist This is an update to a post I did last winter titled: Weatherization Nation–How I reduced my natural gas use 60 percent for less than $400 In that post I speculated that getting the next 20 percent reduction (for my goal of […]

Electric Bicycle Rules

Cross Posted from Biodiversivist This is the battery pack that I built for my electric bike. It fits into a standard trunk bag behind the seat. I get a lot of emails from people who want to do the same thing (hook Dewalt 36 volt batteries up in a parallel-series configuration for 72 volts). I […]

All Aboard the Biomass Bandwagon

(Photo credit cindy47452 via the Flickr Creative Commons license). Cross Posted from Biodiversivist Books extolling the wonders of the coming hydrogen economy turned out to be works of fiction, as have several books about food-based biofuels. In fact, entire books have been written specifically to critique what is found in such books. Are we about […]

Wild and Scenic

If you are reading this, you are likely sitting in front of a computer.  Which will make it easy to do yourself this favor: open your calendar, scroll forward about a year, and circle the date of the next Wild and Scenic film festival.  I just spent the past few days in Nevada City, CA–and […]

America's Century-Long Love Affair with the Car May Be Coming to an End – Data Highlights

Between 1950 and 2008 more cars were added to our roads virtually every year as the total fleet expanded steadily from 49 million to 250 million vehicles. In 2009, however, 14 million cars were scrapped while only 10 million cars were sold, shrinking the fleet by 4 million vehicles, or nearly 2 percent. With record […]

Friday music blogging: Todd Snider

Todd Snider has been around a long time, flying under the mainstream radar but beloved by fans who appreciate what Amazon’s editors aptly call his “signature wit and amiable pathos.” That wit and pathos are in evidence all over the singer-songwriter’s latest, the understated (and ironically titled) The Excitement Plan. If you like laconic, wry, […]

Battery in the House

This is huge. Cross posted from Biodiversivist According to Physorg, Panasonic will market a battery for home use beginning next year. They claim it will  power a house for a week, which does not tell us much. Your average American house consumes far more energy than your average Japanese house. At some point they will […]

Huff Po Green Blog or a Corn Ethanol Lobby Press Release?

  Why does Bob Dinneen, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association (an organization that just spent almost a quarter of a million dollars last quarter lobbying for corn ethanol) have a blog in the Huffington Post’s environmental forum? Why not give a spot to the ACCCE so they can use it to tell us how […]

Another Review of Climate Cover-up

Coss-posted on Biodiversivist This review follows on the heels of what the media has dubbed climtategate–a textbook example of how to make a mountain out of a mole hill. A few weeks prior to that brouhaha, the media was awash with reports that the world is actually cooling, which upon closer inspection also amounted to […]

Senate’s chief climate denier makes Copenhagen cameo

The great leader of the Copen-deniers, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R), showed up on the Danish island of Copenhagen for a fly-by press event here at the international climate treaty. Sen. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican, speaking at an impromptu news conference in the media center at climate talks, said there is no chance of climate […]