Articles by Grist staff

Maybe Steps

Shell and ExxonMobil power gas platform with wind and solar The cognitive dissonance! It hurts! A new gas platform in the North Sea will be run entirely on wind and solar power. The tiny (26 by 26 feet) platform, co-owned by Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, cost about $143 million to develop and was built […]

Things That Go Lump in the Night

Coal makes a comeback As oil prices rise, coal will emerge as the fuel of the future. This depressing assessment is the collective judgment of international power company executives, expressed in a recent survey. Interestingly, the same execs cited greenhouse-gas emissions as one of their top concerns, and assumed there would be a push to […]

Fools Rush In

Melting Arctic leads to black-gold rush A quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves may lie beneath the Arctic Ocean. For centuries they’ve been stuck under a thick layer of ice, but luckily, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and all that bothersome ice is melting! […]

1,000,000,000 cars

One billion. By 2020 or sooner, that's how many cars and light trucks there will be on the road around the world. That's one for every 6 1/2 people on the planet -- and over 25 percent more vehicles than we have today.

So begins a piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, which, I know, you can't access without a subscription. The story continues a paragraph later, setting up the general premise: What does that one billion figure mean for the future of cars?

The auto boom will only add to the congestion in major cities, as well as deepening the world's thirst for petroleum and spewing even more carbon dioxide into the air. That will leave drivers facing rising costs and traffic headaches, and force the auto industry to deal with rising demands for fuel efficiency, pollution control and a host of other rules and regulations ...

Longer term, the struggle to accommodate one billion autos on the planet may lead to a rethinking of the car's place in society.

Rethinking the car's place in society? Not an easy task, for sure. And one that the industry, environmentalists, and others are pondering at this very moment. (And will continue to ponder, to the point that their heads hurt. And then they'll ponder some more.)

The article goes on to talk about measures already under way: taxes on cars entering city centers during rush hour, fancy-pants traffic lights that sync to traffic patterns, alternative fuels, hybrid development, and even a flying car in the works.

Says one GMer, "the next 10 years will be fascinating." Indeed.