Climate Technology
All Stories
-
![]()
![]()
Toyota to make all Prius hybrids plug-in by 2014
This is how the century-long dominance of gas-powered vehicles ends: not with a bang, but with a widget. By 2014, the world's best-selling hybrid vehicle will have plug-in capability, standard, which means every trip up to 14 miles will be all-electric, all the time. This move to plug-in-standard vehicles is a harbinger of a future […]
-
![]()
![]()
Daylight-mimicking LEDs save power, might reduce symptoms of Alzheimer’s
All the cool kids know that CFLs are merely a bridge technology — and now students at Drexel University have a grant to enhance their successor, which are household lights comprised of light emitting diodes. LEDs aren’t new tech — they’re already used in your monitor, television, Christmas tree, throwies, etc. They're super efficient, plus […]
-
![]()
![]()
Baddest-ass hybrid in the world to become a reality
Jaguar has announced plans to build a hybrid-electric supercar that goes from 0 to 60 in three seconds — proving once again that green cars aren't just better for the environment; they're also substantially more bad-ass than the belching, muck-fueled dinosaurs they replace. The C-X75 will have an ultralight carbon-fiber chassis and an all-electric range […]
-
![]()
![]()
Offshore wind power to explode to 17 times its current capacity in just six years
Offshore wind will reach 70.1 GW of capacity by 2017, says Pike Research. That's 17 times its current capacity, which is 4.1 GW, and amounts to several times the current maximum solar capacity of the most solared-out country in the world, Germany. Europe is currently in the lead on offshore power, but by 2017, China […]
-
![]()
![]()
How the internet is saving the physical world by making it disappear
In 2009, a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford made the case that the switch to downloading music from transporting physical CDs had significantly reduced the carbon footprint of Americans' music consumption. That's just one of countless examples of "ephemeralization," which is the process by which new, post industrial-revolution technology tends to lead to […]
-
![]()
![]()
Warren Buffett doesn’t believe CO2 is a real risk for Berkshire Hathaway
The wise man responsible for all those Geico ads may not be so wise when it comes to climate issues.Photo: JavierBillionaire investor Warren Buffett appears seriously confused about the risks posed by greenhouse gases. Two years ago, the sage of Omaha wrote, “Doubling the carbon dioxide we belch into the atmosphere may far more than […]
-
![]()
![]()
Green doesn’t sell to mouth-breathing Americans, says CEO of GE
GE is making billions of dollars selling the world wind turbines and energy-efficient technology, so it's a little surprising to hear that the biggest regret of its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is all that hippy-dippy talk at the center of the company's Ecomagination campaign. "If I had one thing to do over again I would not […]
-
![]()
![]()
How to profit from the coming ecopocalypse
While a quarter of Americans have a net worth of zero, Jeremy Grantham controls a hedge fund worth $107 billion, and he has a message for the world: Resource scarcity, peak oil, and climate change could mean big bucks for those who can get out ahead of the disaster. Well, okay, not BIG bucks — […]
-
![]()
![]()
Better Place taps China in bid to take over the world, more or less
If a supervillain wanted to roll out a plan to turn the planet's car infrastructure on its head, he could hardly do better than the deal that Israeli company Better Place just announced with the China Southern Power Grid Co. Better Place is a company that wants to replace filling stations with battery swapping stations. […]
-
![]()
![]()
Portland, Maine, to save 50,000 gallons of oil a year with geothermal heating and cooling
Portland, Maine's new airport expansion is to be the first in the country to use a dead-simple but often overlooked technology to significantly reduce its heating and cooling bills. They're calling it a geothermal system, but it's not like the kind that produce power in Iceland; it's more properly called a "ground-source heat pump." The […]
