Articles by Biodiversivist

A coalition plugs (ha ha) for plug-in hybrids

How did everybody miss this?

Declaring the country's economy, environmental health and national security at risk, a grassroots coalition of cities including Austin, Baltimore, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle as well as electric utilities and national policy organizations today kicked off a nationwide campaign to urge automakers to accelerate development of plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Click on the webcast if you want to see a bunch of stuffed shirts give speeches. Even Senator Hatch (the ultra conservative Republican from Utah) shows up late to throw in his two cents. The only real expert on the panel was Dr. Andrew Frank, the mechanical engineering professor at UC-Davis who has been studying this concept for decades.

The goal is to convince automakers to build plug-in hybrid electric cars by promising to subsidize purchases of such cars. The usual excuses are given as to why it is OK for government to subsidize, namely, because everybody else does it! Sometimes government drives me crazy. The tax credit for buying hybrid cars is completely unnecessary. I trip over a Prius every time I go out my door. Note in this link that an all-electric car would get a tax credit of $4,000. This would knock about $1,200 off the purchase price of one of these $14,000 high-end golf carts (if you are in the 33% tax bracket).

Will probably soon die out

The smallest vertebrate on record was just discovered in the swamps of Sumatra and Borneo. Squabbling over important details ensued. Is it the smallest fish or just the shortest?

Weight also has to come into this ... If a snake was longer than an elephant, would you say the elephant was smaller than the snake?

Damn good question. I will have to think about that one.

This is all the more serious because the habitat of this fish is disappearing very fast, and the fate of the species is now in doubt.

Huh, sounds familiar. Did you know that more than 360 new species have been discovered on Borneo in just the last ten years? When completed, the world's largest palm oil plantation in this same area (about half the size of the Netherlands) will undoubtedly be responsible for the extinction of untold undiscovered species.

Biodiversity reduces in proximity to humans — so let’s stuff the humans in cities

I mentioned in an earlier post a friend of mine who had caught 14 non-indigenous gray squirrels in her backyard in one week. Well, I have another couple of friends who, upon hearing strange noises on their roof at night, had traps set to catch whatever was up there. The first thing caught was a rat large enough to trip and stay inside of a trap designed for squirrels, followed a few days later by a possum, which looks an awful lot like a giant rat. Neither species are native to the area, of course.

As a kid playing in the woods of Indiana, I would, on occasion, stumble upon dead opossums. One day it occurred to me that they might just be playing dead, like I had always heard they do. I went back once to check and sure enough, he was gone. You would swear they were dead. Stiff as a board, you could prod them with sticks and even pick them up by the tail and toss them. Playing dead is an involuntary reaction similar to a seizure that apparently has enough evolutionary advantages to remain in the gene pool. They don't all play dead, so I suspect that this genetic trait is more common in some areas of the country than others.

And it just might save us

This is a great story demonstrating how new technology just might get us out of this mess. Coincidentally, I saw the coolest flashlight in a hardware store yesterday. It had a wind up crank instead of batteries and diodes instead of a light bulb. You wind it up for one minute to get about an hour of really bright light. It also had a red and white flashing emergency mode. I bought two and mounted them on my hybrid electric bike, which now looks like a cheap Las Vegas light show on wheels. Cars pull over to let me pass. (Well, not actually pull over. Or let me pass. But they do see me coming!)