efficiency
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CAFE still saves money
Sam Smith at the Progressive Review was taken by a press release that shouted “New gas MPG rules will cost over $6000 per car.” Mostly Sam knows that a basic rule of good journalism (as opposed to what the corporate media does) is think a bit about such press releases and looks for the flaws. […]
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Revival of 117-year-old canal cuts cargo emissions 65 percent
Turns out shipping by barge is crazy efficient. It's also kind of picturesque! (According to this video from CNN there are no mules anymore, but we choose to imagine mules to up the picturesqueness factor.)
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Animated film from 1957 predicts explosion in energy use
The only thing about this 1950s educational cartoon that’s more remarkable than its stylishness is how badly it botches its core prediction. It projects that between 1957 and 1975, electricity use in the U.S. would increase four-fold. But America's electricity consumption didn't quadruple from 1950 levels until 1989. Cartoons, we trusted you! How could you get it so wrong?
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What wind turbines can learn from fish
Wind turbines are loners. They need to give each other space to be effective. But a new design for wind farms, using a different type of turbines than the giant-fan kind going up all over the place, takes a page from a very social group of animals -- schooling fish -- to create the same amount of energy with shorter turbines, in a smaller area of land.
These wind farms use vertical-axis turbines, which are often described as looking like egg-beaters.
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Everything that's wrong with our oil-soaked industrial economy, in one amazing poster
Max Temkin is a brand designer for, among others, Barack Obama. You can buy prints of this poster here, or at least you could until it sold out because it is f*cking amazing.
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Thanks to the recession, recycling is booming
A few years ago, the only people who came in to Alliance Recycling in Emeryville, Calif., were were pushing shopping carts. Now, the same center is seeing people pull up in late model cars.
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Passive house mini-boom in NYC heralds furnace-free future
New York City and the rest of the tri-state area are getting their first wave of "passive houses," a type of construction in which a building is so well-insulated that it doesn't require heating in the winter.
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What we can learn from drought-proof El Paso
It hasn't rained in El Paso in 119 days, and its water manager says it doesn't much matter if it doesn't rain next year, either. "We're basically drought-proof," he told the Guardian.
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How better window glass will extend electric cars' range
As you already know if you’ve tried to chug your car up a hill on a really hot day, cranking the AC reduces fuel efficiency. In an electric car with a limited range to begin with, that's a big deal, and can mean shaving dozens of miles off the distance a vehicle can travel on a single charge.