EU9C. Stay Current—Energy for Transportation

Latest articles (2024, 2023, 2022) 

2024-11-26. Yes, It ‘Looks Like a Duck,’ but Carriers Like the New Mail Truck. By Michael Levenson, The New York Times. Excerpt: For 19 years, Richard Burton, a letter carrier in Athens, Ga., drove the classic boxy mail truck, with only a fan on the dashboard to keep the cabin cool in the sweltering summer months. …about two months ago, Mr. Burton, 46, became one of the first letter carriers in the United States to get a long-awaited upgrade: a new electric mail truck with air-conditioning, a 360-degree camera and a sliding cargo door on the side that allows the unloading of packages directly onto the sidewalk. …The new mail trucks — 10 years in the making — have started rolling into American neighborhoods, and the early reviews from letter carriers are positive. Many have complained for years that the mail trucks they have been driving, which were introduced in the 1980s, break down frequently and are stiflingly hot, as climate change pushes temperatures to greater extremes. The rear cargo space is so small, they say, that they have to crouch inside to grab packages. …The Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, as the new truck is called, promises some long-overdue relief. …Mr. Burton said that people on his route have been stopping him to take photos and to ask if they can peek inside. …“It is the goofiest thing in the world when you first look at it,” said Douglas Lape, a special assistant to the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, a union that represents 205,000 postal delivery workers. “But I will tell you, it grows on you.” The mail trucks are the most prominent piece of the Postal Service’s plan to invest $9.6 billion to modernize its fleet of aging delivery vehicles and make them more efficient, safer and better equipped to carry packages. The Postal Service ordered 50,000 of the new trucks in March 2022, according to Oshkosh Defense, the Wisconsin company that won the contract to produce the vehicles at a plant in Spartanburg, S.C. …A month later, attorneys general from 16 states and the District of Columbia, along with five environmental groups and the United Auto Workers union, sued the Postal Service, complaining that most of the new vehicles would be gas-powered, undercutting the fight against climate change. In December 2022, the Postal Service changed course and announced that 75 percent of the new mail trucks would be battery-powered. The trucks are designed to travel about 70 miles on a single charge, more than enough for the 12 to 15 miles of daily driving that city letter carriers generally do, including frequent stops, Mr. Lape said…. Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/us/usps-new-mail-trucks.html.

2024-11-07. ‘Used like taxis’: Soaring private jet flights drive up climate-heating emissions. By Damian Carrington, The Guardian. Excerpt: Analysis of 19m flights between 2019 and 2023 reveals 50% rise in emissions, condemned as ‘gratuitous waste’. Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50%, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed. …Private flights, used by just 0.003% of the world’s population, are the most polluting form of transport. The researchers found that passengers in larger private jets caused more CO₂ emissions in an hour than the average person did in a year. The US dominated private jet travel, representing 69% of flights…. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK. …Industry expectations are that another 8,500 business jets will enter service by 2033, far outstripping efficiency gains and indicating that private flight emissions will rise even further. The researchers said their work highlighted the vast global inequality in emissions between wealthier and poorer people, and that tackling the emissions of the wealthy minoritywas critical to ending global heating. Prof Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, … led the research, …published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, took data from the ADS-B Exchange platform, which records the signals sent once a minute by transponders on every plane, recording its position and altitude…. Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/07/used-like-taxis-soaring-private-jet-flights-drive-up-climate-heating-emissions.

2024-09-27. Breakthrough sun-powered tech pulls lithium from seawater, redefining energy. By Jijo Malayil, Interesting Engineering. Excerpt: Researchers have developed a sustainable method to efficiently extract lithium from seawater, addressing the growing demand for renewable energy. The Solar Transpiration-Powered Lithium Extraction and Storage (STLES) device harnesses sunlight to extract and store lithium from brine. …According to researchers from Nanjing University and the University of California, Berkeley, the approach offers a cleaner alternative to traditional lithium mining, which often involves harmful chemical processes and significant land disruption. The work is similar to research done by a University of Chicago team using iron phosphate particles to efficiently extract lithium from seawater, groundwater, and flowback water. …Long-term tests have shown the device’s stability, compatibility, and scalability. Operating passively without extra energy input, the system is both cost-effective and eco-friendly. It can also integrate with existing evaporation ponds, reducing installation costs and enabling the treatment of hypersaline brines with high osmotic pressure…. Full article at https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/sun-powered-tech-pulls-lithium-from-seawater.

2024-09-17. This country is now the world’s first to have more EVs than gas-powered cars. By Nicolás Rivero, The Washington Post. Excerpt: Norway is the first country in the world with more electric vehicles than gas-powered cars on the road, according to vehicle registration data the Norwegian road federation, known as OFV, released Tuesday. Of the 2.8 million passenger cars registered in the country, 26.3 percent are fully electric, just edging out the share of gas vehicles. Diesel remains the most common vehicle type, making up more than a third of Norwegian vehicle registrations. …OFV Director Oyvind Solberg Thorsen … predicted EVs will outnumber diesel cars by 2026…. Full article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/09/17/norway-electric-vehicles-exceed-gasoline/.

2024-09-14. What Scared Ford’s CEO in China. By Mike Colias, The Wall Street Journal. Excerpt:
What the Ford Motor chief executive [Jim Farley] found during the May visit made him anxious: The local automakers were pulling away in the electric-vehicle race. …The Chinese carmakers are moving at light speed, he told Thornton, a former Goldman Sachs executive who spent years as a senior banker in China. They are using artificial intelligence and other tech in cars that is unlike anything available in the U.S. These Chinese EV makers are using a low-cost supply base to undercut the competition on price, offering slick digital features and aggressively expanding to overseas markets. …
Chinese brands have so far been kept out of the U.S. by steep tariffs, geopolitical tensions and regulatory hurdles. But some have established a toehold in Mexico, where China-built vehicles—both EVs and combustion-engine vehicles—now account for about 20% of sales…. Full article at https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ford-china-ev-competition-farley-ceo-50ded461. See also chart of worldwide electric car sales – https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electric-car-sales-2012-2024.

2024-08-27. Blue Bird Delivers its 2,000th Electric School Bus. By Bluebird—press release. Excerpt: MACON, Ga. – Blue Bird Corporation (Nasdaq: BLBD), the leader in electric and low-emission school buses, has delivered its 2,000^th electric, zero-emission school bus marking an industry-leading milestone. Clark County School District (CCSD) in Nevada received Blue Bird’s 2,000^th electric vehicle (EV) to help the nation’s fifth largest school district transition its school bus fleet to clean student transportation…. Full article at https://www.blue-bird.com/blue-bird-delivers-its-2000th-electric-school-bus/.

2024-07-23. ‘This is not a blip’: A quiet movement grows on San Francisco’s streets. By David Curran, SFGATE. Excerpt: “They love it,” my neighbor Ali Schneider tells me of her two sons, ages 3 and 7. “And we do, too. They don’t mind cars, but they love the bike. Pretty much all the kids on the block really like it.” At least three other families on our block also use electric cargo bikes to transport their kids. …In terms of competing with a car, the electric assist has allowed the cargo bike — first introduced in the U.S. by Xtracycle in 1998, Allen explains — to become a more mainstream product. And while the early years presented numerous challenges, a huge breakthrough came in 2015, when the German manufacturing giant Bosch produced a breakthrough battery for these bikes. …“with this motor you could put two kids on a bike and climb any hill in San Francisco.” And that has made all the difference. In their first year with the Bosch-powered bikes, the number of e-cargo bikes the New Wheel sold jumped to 61, then to 221 in 2018. Last year, they sold 479. And, just as important to Wiener, after the pandemic when the overall bike market tanked, sales of e-cargo bikes stayed strong…. Full article at https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/transportation-changing-families-lives-san-19532740.php.

2024-06-13. A ‘liquid battery’ advance. By Stanford Report. Excerpt: …Robert Waymouth, …is leading a Stanford team to explore an emerging technology for renewable energy storage: liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). Hydrogen is already used as fuel or a means for generating electricity, but containing and transporting it is tricky. “We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels,” said Waymouth, senior author of a study detailing this work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “We also discovered a novel, selective catalytic system for storing electrical energy in a liquid fuel without generating gaseous hydrogen.” …Daniel Marron, lead author of this study …developed a catalyst system to combine two protons and two electrons with acetone to generate the LOHC isopropanol selectively, without generating hydrogen gas. He did this using iridium as the catalyst. A key surprise was that cobaltocene was the magic additive. …a chemical compound of cobalt, a non-precious metal, has long been used as a simple reducing agent and is relatively inexpensive. The researchers found that cobaltocene is unusually efficient when used as a co-catalyst in this reaction, directly delivering protons and electrons to the iridium catalyst rather than liberating hydrogen gas, as was previously expected. Cobalt is already a common material in batteries and in high demand, so the Stanford team is hoping their new understanding of cobaltocene’s properties could help scientists develop other catalysts for this process. For example, the researchers are exploring more abundant, non-precious earth metal catalysts, such as iron, to make future LOHC systems more affordable and scalable…. Full article at https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/06/a-liquid-battery-advance.

2024-06-28. Chinese utility announces opening of large-scale battery storage facility: ‘The battery tech will continue to improve’. By Jon Turi, TCD. Excerpt: Large-scale battery storage systems are a no-brainer to handle the ever-growing influx of renewable energy without letting it go to waste. Since China has taken a global lead in using greener energy sources, it’s no surprise that one of its latest major storage systems to go online is using a less toxic approach. As Electrek reported, the Fulin Sodium-ion Battery Energy Storage Station began operating in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in southern China this May. The initial storage capacity is said to be around 10 megawatt-hours (MWh), but it expected to grow to 100 MWh at full capacity…”enough to power 35,000 households and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50,000 tonnes [about 55,000 tons] annually,” according to Electrek. …”The energy conversion efficiency of its sodium-ion battery energy storage system exceeds 92%. It’s comparable to the efficiency of common lithium-ion battery storage systems, at 85% to 95%.” Sodium-ion batteries are outside the norm in the storage industry, but they’ve gained attention due to lower costs and sustainability. The main ingredient is said to be 500 times more abundant than lithium and can easily be harvested from seawater. It’s also environmentally friendly and safer to transport than lithium. …Another interesting thing about sodium-ion batteries is that they can charge much faster than their lithium competitors. The utility shared with Electrek that the particular battery cells they use “charge to 90% in a mindblowing 12 minutes.”…. Full article at https://www.yahoo.com/tech/chinese-utility-announces-opening-large-120000696.html.

2024-06-05. How Electric Car Batteries Might Aid the Grid (and Win Over Drivers). By Jack Ewing, The New York Times. Excerpt: Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline models largely because batteries cost so much. But new technology could turn those pricey devices into an asset, giving owners benefits like reduced utility bills, lower lease payments or free parking. Ford Motor, General Motors, BMW and other automakers are exploring how electric-car batteries could be used to store excess renewable energy to help utilities deal with fluctuations in supply and demand for power. Automakers would make money by serving as intermediaries between car owners and power suppliers. Millions of cars could be thought of as a huge energy system that, for the first time, will be connected to another enormous energy system, the electrical grid, said Matthias Preindl, an associate professor of power electronic systems at Columbia University. …Mobility House, a firm whose investors include Mercedes-Benz and Renault, …buys power when solar and wind power is abundant and cheap, storing it in electric vehicles that are part of its system and plugged in around Europe. When demand and prices climb, the company resells the electricity. It’s a classic play: Buy low, sell high…. Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/business/energy-environment/electric-car-batteries-grid.html.

2024-05-01. China’s Electric Cars Keep Improving, a Worry for Rivals Elsewhere. By Keith Bradsher, The New York Times. Excerpt: Better batteries and falling costs underpin China’s push in electric cars. CATL, based in southeastern China and the world’s largest manufacturer of electric car batteries, announced last week at the Beijing auto show that a 10-minute charge of its newest battery would give a range of 370 miles. A 30-minute full charge would give a range of 620 miles, the company said…. Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/business/china-electric-vehicles.html.

2024-04-12. The EV Battery of Your Dreams Is Coming. By Christopher Mims, The Wall Street Journal. Excerpt: In the next five years, significant upgrades to the batteries in electric vehicles should finally hit the market. In the works for decades, these changes are likely to mean that by 2030, gas vehicles will cost more than their electric equivalents; some EVs will charge as quickly as filling up at a gas station; and super long-range EVs will make the phrase “range anxiety” seem quaint. …a new kind of battery which will hold more than 20% more energy than the previous type, and charging speed and range will also improve by up to 30%, says a BMW spokesman. …In theory, a [solid] lithium metal anode can hold 10 times as many lithium ions as a graphite one [that’s in today’s lithium-ion batteries]. All other things being equal, this means the energy density of a battery using lithium metal in place of graphite could be up to 50% higher. … engineers aim to deliver to automakers a battery that can add 100 miles of range in just 3 minutes…. Source – https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ev-battery-developments-five-years-d306be44.

2024-02-26. Tired of diesel fumes, these moms are pushing for electric school buses. [https://apnews.com/article/electric-school-buses-diesel-exhaust-environmental-justice-4263455c7d55e34acd6f35dceb6db7c0] By ALEXA ST. JOHN, Associated Press. Excerpt: Areli Sanchez’s daughter, Aida, used to be one of 20 million American kids who ride a diesel bus to school each day. Aida has asthma. When she was little, she complained about the smell and cloud of fumes on her twice-daily trip. “When she would come home from school or be on the bus, she got headaches and sick to her stomach. …Research shows diesel exhaust exposure can cause students to miss school and affect learning. …Diesel exhaust from school buses potentially affects one-third of U.S. students… according to federal data. It’s a known carcinogen plus it contains harmful nitrogen oxides, volatile gases and particles that exacerbate lung issues. It also contributes to global warming. …A few years after her daughter started having problems, Sanchez saw the opportunity to get involved in the nascent movement for electric buses. They don’t smell. They aren’t noisy. They cost more up front, but cost less to run and can meaningfully reduce emissions, making them a climate change solution. …a national field manager for the grassroots group Moms Clean Air Force…, [Liz] Hurtado appeals to school districts to buy electric buses. She schedules events for community members to see and drive electric vehicles, hosts webinars and meetings and teaches others how to reach out to legislators….

2024-01-17. Are You a Super Driver? Some States Want to Help You Go Electric. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/climate/electric-vehicles-high-mileage-drivers.html] By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: A small share of motorists [who drive, on average, about 110 miles per day] burns about a third of America’s gasoline, a study found. If more of those drivers switched to electric vehicles from gasoline-powered models, it would make a major dent in greenhouse gases from transportation, which have so far been slow to decline, according to a new analysis published on Wednesday by Coltura, an environmental nonprofit group based in Seattle. While the average American driver travels about 13,400 miles per year, people who buy electric vehicles today tend to drive them less than that, limiting the climate benefits of switching to a cleaner car. By contrast, the top 10 percent of motorists in the United States drive an average of about 40,200 miles per year and account for roughly one-third of the nation’s gasoline use. Persuading more of these “gasoline superusers” to go electric would lead to a much faster reduction in emissions, the Coltura report found. …That includes people like Pedro Jimenez, 40, who …can “easily” travel around 150 to 200 miles per day to different job sites…. He …typically spends around $200 to $300 per week on gas…a quarter or more of his pay. …Mr. Jimenez said he recently started thinking about buying an electric pickup truck as a way to save money. …Around 21 million Americans account for 35 percent of the nation’s gasoline use from private light-duty vehicles — cars, pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles, vans and minivans. That’s more gasoline than is burned each year in Brazil, Canada and Russia combined….

2024-01-08. US to invest $1bn in plan to move from diesel to electric school buses. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/08/us-school-buses-diesel-electric] By Aliya Uteuova, The Guardian. Excerpt: The US has announced nearly $1bn in grants to replace diesel-powered school buses with electric and lower-emitting vehicles. The Environmental Protection Agency will disburse funds to 280 school districts serving 7 million children across the country in an effort to curb harmful air pollution and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. …Diesel emissions have been linked to higher rates of asthma, cancer and school absenteeism. Communities of color and people living in low-income neighborhoods are more likely to suffer from higher rates of air pollution. Eighty-six per cent of grant recipients are in school districts that serve low-income, rural and tribal communities, according to the EPA. The new funds mean so far nearly $2bn has been awarded to add about 5,000 clean buses to schools across the country. The program draws from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law that carved out $5bn to equip schools with clean buses over five years, and is part of a broader federal strategy that aims to spend 40% of investments in environmental justice communities….

2024-01-01. China Auto Giant BYD Sells More Electric Vehicles Than Ever. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/business/byd-2023-sales.html] By Claire Fu and Rich Barbieri, The New York Times. Excerpt: The Chinese corporate giant BYD said Monday that it sold three million battery-powered cars in 2023, its most ever, capping a turbulent year for China’s electric vehicle industry. …BYD last year sold 1.6 million fully electric vehicles and another 1.4 million hybrids, which are powered by both batteries and gasoline. Together that is a 62 percent increase over 2022. BYD is also making money, tripling its profit to $1.5 billion in the first half of last year. …the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers… said it expected sales in 2024 to rise again, to 11.5 million. …companies are pouring money into factories and research, often fueled by loans from state-owned banks and assistance from municipalities….

2023-12-09. Tiny Electric Vehicles Pack a Bigger Climate Punch Than Cars. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/business/energy-environment/two-three-wheel-electric-vehicles.html] By Somini Sengupta, Abdi Latif Dahir, Alex Travelli and Clifford Krauss, The New York Times. Excerpt: Big Oil faces a tiny foe on the streets of Asia and Africa. The noisy, noxious vehicles that run on two and three wheels, carrying billions of people daily, are quietly going electric — in turn knocking down oil demand by one million barrels a day this year. In Kenya and Rwanda, dozens of start-ups are vying to replace oil-guzzling motorcycle taxis with battery-powered ones. In India, more than half of all new three-wheeled vehicles sold and registered this year were battery-operated. Indonesia and Thailand are also encouraging electrification of motorcycle taxis. China dominates the market. Its government began promoting electric vehicles decades ago in a bid to clean its smog-choked cities, which explains why a vast majority of the world’s electric two-wheelers are in China. The shift to electric mobility overall has reduced global oil demand by 1.8 million barrels every day…. Two- and three-wheelers account for 60 percent of that reduction, or 1.08 million barrels. …Electric vehicles also solve the more immediate problem of air pollution, which the World Health Organization links to an estimated seven million premature deaths annually. The big shift to tiny electric vehicles is underappreciated in the United States and Europe, where, despite the popularity of electric bicycles and scooters, the focus has been mainly on cars.….

2023-12-05. Will guilt-free long-haul flights ever be possible? Here’s what we know. [https://www.cnn.com/travel/the-long-road-to-guilt-free-flying-climate/index.html] By Jacopo Prisco, CNN. Excerpt: Aviation faces a steep climb towards a greener future. Although it has, like many other industries, committed to slashing its planet-warming pollution by 2050, it is not on track to reach its target… …the sector currently accounts for around 2.5% of global carbon emissions, its actual climate impact is actually higher, because of the emission of other greenhouse gases and the formation of heat-trapping condensation trails created by jet engines. Meanwhile, demand for air travel is projected to steadily rise, with the global fleet of commercial airplanes doubling in size by 2042 to keep up, according to Boeing. …Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is a type of alternative jet fuel that can curb carbon emissions by up to 80%. It …is usually made from plants that have absorbed carbon dioxide (CO₂) during their lifetime. When burned, that CO₂ is returned to the atmosphere, whereas burning traditional jet fuel kerosene made from fossil fuels releases CO₂ that had been previously locked away. …SAF…is …between 1.5 to 6 times pricier than regular jet fuel. …the most promising tech currently seems to be hydrogen …. [Gökçin Çınar, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan] reckons that hybrid electric planes — powered by both traditional and electric engines — will be introduced as early as 2040, but that they will be limited to regional aircraft, with capacity for up to 100 passengers. “In the longer term, widebody aircraft could integrate mild electrification, but the bigger impact would come from hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuels,” she says.

2023-11-24. Relax, Electric Vehicles Really Are the Best Choice for the Climate. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/opinion/electric-vehicle-tesla-hybrid.html] By Stephen Porder, The New York Times, opinion piece. Excerpt: …I am familiar with trepidation about electric vehicles; …worry about running out of battery power far from a charging station; …the upfront costs… though the E.V. has a lower total cost over the life of the car. …Those concerns will likely diminish in 2024 as money from the Inflation Reduction Act flows into building more charging stations and making discounts for electric vehicles available right at the dealership. …while there are environmental concerns with [electric vehicles], they are dwarfed by the benefit they provide regarding climate change. …Cobalt, another key component of batteries, has been in the public eye because of its scarcity and the horrific working conditions for miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those conditions need to be addressed, but it’s a mistake to view them in isolation. Oil extraction has its own horrific human and environmental costs, as does climate change. …Happily, an increasing number of E.V.s, including those of Tesla and the Chinese automaker BYD, no longer use cobalt in their batteries in most markets because the performance of cobalt-free alternatives is rapidly improving. Within a decade, many batteries may be built with sodium in place of lithium. …anyone who has already switched to an electric vehicle knows it is more fun to drive, and saves time. …And because electric vehicles have fewer parts — no gas tank, no exhaust system, no catalytic converter, no radiator, no fuel injector, no timing belt — downtime for repairs is practically eliminated….

2023-11-13. Exxon Mobil Plans to Produce Lithium in Arkansas. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-lithium-arkansas.html] By Clifford Krauss, The New York Times. Excerpt: Exxon Mobil said on Monday that it planned to set up a facility in Arkansas to produce lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicles, which pose one of the biggest challenges to the company’s oil business. …the announcement signals that the large oil company intends to hedge its big bets on conventional fossil fuels with at least some investments in cleaner forms of energy that are needed to combat climate change. …The announcement does not represent a fundamental shift in corporate strategy, but it is an acknowledgment that battery-powered vehicles will increasingly compete with cars and trucks fueled by gasoline and diesel. It could also open the door for southern Arkansas to emerge as a major source of lithium. Most of the metal today comes from Australia and South America, and much of it is processed in China….

2023-11-03. Electric Planes, Once a Fantasy, Start to Take to the Skies. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/business/electric-planes-beta-technologies.html] By Niraj Chokshi, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Over …16 days, [Chris Caputo] and his colleagues flew the plane, a CX300 built by their employer, Beta Technologies, down the East Coast. They would make nearly two dozen stops to rest and recharge, flying through congested airspace in Boston, New York, Washington and other cities. When the journey came to an end in Florida, Beta handed the plane over to the Air Force, which will experiment with it over the next few months. The trip offered a vision of what aviation could look like years from now — one in which the skies are filled with aircraft that do not emit the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming up the Earth. …the CX300, a sleek, futuristic plane with a 50-foot wingspan, large curved windows and a rear propeller …is designed to carry about 1,250 pounds of cargo and will be followed soon after by the A250, which shares about 80 percent of the CX300’s design and is outfitted with lift rotors to take off and land like a helicopter. Both aircraft, which Beta markets as the Alia, will eventually carry passengers, the company says. …Beta is one of many companies working on electric aviation. …Early on, electric aircraft are expected to compete mainly with helicopters and cars and trucks….

2023-10-05. New technology uses good old-fashioned wind to power giant cargo vessels. [https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1200788439/wind-power-cargo-ships-carbon-emissions] By Scott Neuman, NPR. Excerpt: Well over a century after the Age of Sail gave way to coal- and oil-burning ships, climate change concerns are prompting a new look at an old technology that could once again harness wind to propel commercial cargo ships — this time with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Imagine what looks like Boeing 747 wings with movable flaps, set vertically on a ship’s deck. The vessel cruises under minimum power from its giant engine as computerized sensors adjust the fiberglass wings to take advantage of the wind’s speed and direction. This wind-assisted propulsion saves a substantial amount of fuel and reduces the carbon belching from the ship’s stack. Many experts think the idea has the potential to navigate the notoriously dirty shipping industry toward a greener future. …About 90% of the world’s goods — everything from soybeans to sneakers — are transported by sea. The tens of thousands of ships used to get these goods to global markets account for an estimated 3% of the world’s carbon emissions each year, a figure that exceeds Japan’s annual emissions. Left unchecked, the shipping industry’s greenhouse gas emissions are expected to grow 50% by 2050…. See also New York Times article In Shipping, a Push to Slash Emissions by Harnessing the Wind.

2023-09-30. Where German Cars Falter, E-Bikes Gain in Power. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/30/world/europe/germany-ebikes-transportation.html] By Melissa Eddy, The New York Times. Excerpt: Germany’s automakers are facing steep challenges as they convert to battery-powered lineups and confront rising competition from China. But business is booming in another corner of the German transport industry: e-bikes. Sales of bicycles in Germany reached a record 7.36 billion euros, or $7.8 billion, in 2022, with e-bikes accounting for nearly half of sales, according to the German Bicycle Industry Association. The group is forecasting that this year, for the first time, Germans will buy more e-bikes than conventional models. Electric bicycles and scooters are the backbone of what’s known as micromobility, seen as crucial to cutting the carbon emissions of transportation and helping to ease pollution and congestion in European cities….

2023-09-25. Air Force eyes supply missions for its first electric air taxi. [https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/09/air-force-eyes-future-logistics-missions-its-first-electric-air-taxi/390614/] By BY AUDREY DECKER, Defense One. Excerpt: Joby Aviation delivered its battery-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to Edwards AFB in California. The U.S. Air Force will soon begin testing how it will use battery-powered planes to transport people and cargo. …The aircraft holds one pilot and four passengers, can carry a payload of up to 1,000 pounds, and flies at speeds up to 200 miles per hour, said Greg Bowles, head of government affairs for Joby. It will primarily fly missions between 25 to 50 miles, “but the aircraft has the capability to do a lot more than that,” Bowles told Defense One on Friday. If the Air Force decides to use the aircraft in operations, it could be to fly cargo and personnel short distances in the Pacific. The Joby aircraft could be helpful within “some of the island clusters that don’t have those large ranges,” said Col. Tom Meagher, AFWERX Prime Division Chief. “Some of the possible long-time use cases are just-in-time parts, people to repair aircraft. Think of it kind of like a hub-and-spoke type of logistics scenario,” Meagher said….

2023-08-30. Hydrothermal enrichment of lithium in intracaldera illite-bearing claystones. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh8183] By THOMAS R. BENSON, MATTHEW A. COBLE, and JOHN H. DILLES, Science. Excerpt: Developing a sustainable supply chain for the global proliferation of lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles and grid storage necessitates the extraction of lithium resources that minimize local environmental impacts. Volcano sedimentary lithium resources have the potential to meet this requirement, as they tend to be shallow, high-tonnage deposits with low waste…. Illite-bearing Miocene lacustrine sediments within the southern portion of McDermitt caldera (USA) at Thacker Pass [Nevada] contain extremely high lithium grades (up to ~1 weight % of Li), more than double the whole-rock concentration of lithium in smectite-rich claystones in the caldera and other known claystone lithium resources globally (<0.4 weight % of Li). Illite concentrations measured in situ range from ~1.3 to 2.4 weight % of Li within fluorine-rich illitic claystones….

2023-08-19. How gas station economics will change in the electric vehicle charging future. [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/19/how-gas-station-economics-will-change-in-the-ev-charging-future.html] By Cheryl Winokur Munk, CNBC. Excerpt: …Gas station numbers have been decreasing at a sharp rate in the past three decades and the trend is expected to continue, with at least a quarter of service stations globally at risk of closure by 2035 without significant business model tweaks, according to consulting firm BCG. …Gas stations making the switch to electric vehicle charging will be investing in Level 3 chargers, which are the most powerful and generally charge in 20 to 30 minutes, but for multiple units can incur investment costs between $500,000 to $1 million. …Major oil companies are supporting franchise filling stations, including BP and Shell, and in the U.S. there are numerous federal, state and utility-based incentives for commercial businesses to purchase and install fast chargers. …Franchise car dealers are also increasingly getting on board, thanks to pushes from automakers like GM and Ford. As of late last year, 65% of Ford’s dealers had opted into the EV certification program (a little under 2,000, according to data shared by Ford), as it has started to make the role of car dealers central to the EV transition process. The National Automobile Dealers Association said in a May release that franchise owners will spend an estimated $5.5 billion on EV infrastructure across OEM brands, with per store costs ranging from $100,000 to over $1 million….

2023-07-16. A New Job for Electric Vehicles: Powering Homes During Blackouts. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/business/energy-environment/electric-vehicles-backup-power.html] By Ivan Penn, The New York Times. Excerpt: Some energy experts say battery-powered vehicles will increasingly help keep the lights on and support electric grids, rather than straining them….

2023-05-26. The Unequal Benefits of California’s Electric Vehicle Transition. [https://eos.org/articles/the-unequal-benefits-of-californias-electric-vehicle-transition] By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: An uptick in clean vehicles has improved air quality in wealthier communities over marginalized communities in California, a new study finds. California has some of the most aggressive climate laws in the country, including its Clean Vehicle Rebate Project, which incentivizes the purchase of electric vehicles (EVs), plug-in hybrids, and fuel-cell vehicles. The state has issued more than half a million clean vehicle rebates since 2010. A new study shows that the program is having a mixed effect on air quality. …Furthermore, EVs increase the load on power plants, which are disproportionally located in marginalized communities….

2023-05-08. In Norway, the Electric Vehicle Future Has Already Arrived. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/business/energy-environment/norway-electric-vehicles.html] By Jack Ewing, The New York Times. Excerpt: Last year, 80 percent of new-car sales in Norway were electric, putting the country at the vanguard of the shift to battery-powered mobility. …The country will end the sales of internal combustion engine cars in 2025. …There are problems, of course, including unreliable chargers and long waits during periods of high demand. …But the air in Oslo, Norway’s capital, is measurably cleaner. The city is also quieter as noisier gasoline and diesel vehicles are scrapped. Oslo’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen 30 percent since 2009, yet there has not been mass unemployment among gas station workers and the electrical grid has not collapsed. …Levels of nitrogen oxides, byproducts of burning gasoline and diesel that cause smog, asthma and other ailments, have fallen sharply as electric vehicle ownership has risen. …Oslo’s air has unhealthy levels of microscopic particles generated partly by the abrasion of tires and asphalt. Electric vehicles, which account for about one-third of the registered vehicles in the city but a higher proportion of traffic, may even aggravate that problem. …Oslo is also targeting construction, the source of more than a quarter of its greenhouse gas emissions. …At a park in a working-class Oslo neighborhood last month, an excavator scooped out earth for a decorative pond. A thick cable connected the excavator to a power source, driving its electric motor. Later, an electric dump truck hauled away the soil….

2023-05-04. Carmakers are pushing electric SUVs, but smaller is better when it comes to EVs. [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/04/electric-vehicles-suvs-us-vehicle-fleet] By Oliver Milman, The Guardian. Excerpt: In a sign of how the US’s fixation upon large SUVs and pickup trucks is now infiltrating the nascent EV market, General Motors…said that the Michigan plant currently churning out Bolts will switch to new electric models of the Silverado and the GMC Sierra – hulking, and more expensive, alternatives that will probably provide the auto company a greater financial return than the modest Bolt. …Experts warn that the supersized nature of new EV models is also worse for the environment than smaller options, requiring large amounts of mined rare minerals such as lithium and cobalt for their huge batteries and using more energy to move their enormous frames around US streets. …While electric vehicles are always a better option for the climate than an exact equivalent powered by gasoline or diesel, rankings by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) show that the largest EVs are actually worse than more compact gas cars due to the emissions embedded in their creation…. F

2023-04-12. Why China Could Dominate the Next Big Advance in Batteries. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/business/china-sodium-batteries.html] By Keith Bradsher, The New York Times. Excerpt: …batteries, mostly made of lithium, have powered the rise of cellphones and other consumer electronics. They are transforming the auto industry and could soon start doing the same for solar panels and wind turbines crucial in the fight against climate change. China dominates their chemical refining and production. Now China is positioning itself to command the next big innovation in rechargeable batteries: replacing lithium with sodium, a far cheaper and more abundant material. Sodium, found all over the world as part of salt, sells for 1 to 3 percent of the price of lithium and is chemically very similar….

2023-03-23. Cargo ships powered by wind could help tackle climate crisis. [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/23/cargo-ships-powered-by-wind-could-help-tackle-climate-crisis] By Jeremy Plester, The Guardian. Excerpt: Cars, trucks and planes get plenty of blame for helping drive the climate crisis, but shipping produces a large portion of the world’s greenhouse gases, as well as nitrogen oxides and sulphur pollution because ships largely use cheap heavy fuel oil. …one solution is to use wind-powered ships. …new hi-tech wind-propulsion can be fitted to existing ships to cut fuel use, supplying between 10% and 90% of a ship’s power needs…. Wind is free, blows harder at sea than on land and weather-routing software uses sophisticated algorithms to plot the fastest and most fuel-efficient voyage. A wide range of wind-powered devices for ships have been designed, using sails, kites or rotors that look like vertical cylinders. …Already more than 20 commercial cargo ships use wind power to cut their fuel use….

2023-03-20. Biden will let California lead on electric trucks, despite industry protest. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/03/20/epa-california-waiver-electric-trucks/] By Anna Phillips, The Washington Post. Excerpt: The Biden administration will approve new California rules to cut tailpipe pollution and phase out sales of diesel-burning trucks, according to three people briefed on the plans, a move that could jump-start the nation’s transition to electric-powered trucks and help communities harmed by diesel pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency intends to grant California “waivers” to enforce environmental rules that are significantly tougher than federal requirements and that state regulators have already approved, said these individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement was not yet public. The new policies could have a profound effect on the air Californians breathe. Heavy-duty trucks account for nearly a third of the state’s smog-forming nitrogen oxide and more than a quarter of its fine particle pollution from diesel fuel. Both of these harmful pollutants are linked to asthma, other respiratory illnesses and premature death. Environmental advocates on behalf of Black and Latino Californians, who are more likely to live near ports, huge warehouse complexes and major highways, have long pleaded with the state’s regulators to strengthen pollution limits on the trucks whose fumes waft through their neighborhoods….

2023-03-14. Volkswagen Will Invest $193 Billion in Electric Cars and Software. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/business/volkswagen-electric-vehicles-batteries-investment.html] By Melissa Eddy, The New York Times. Excerpt: Volkswagen said on Tuesday that it would spend $193 billion on software, battery factories and other investments as it aimed to make every fifth vehicle it sold electric by 2025. The automaker, the world’s second biggest after Toyota, will also focus on expanding its presence in North America, where it has struggled for years, and becoming more competitive in China, one of its most important markets, said Oliver Blume, Volkswagen’s chief executive….

2023-02-12. Electric vehicle batteries require precious minerals. That old cellphone may be the solution. [https://abcnews.go.com/Business/electric-vehicle-batteries-require-precious-minerals-cellphone-solution/story?id=96977978] By Morgan Korn, ABC News. Excerpt: That old laptop, cellphone and TV remote may have a newfound purpose: powering the next generation of electric vehicles. Luxury brand Audi recently partnered with Redwood Materials, a battery recycling startup, to collect rechargeable batteries found in everyday consumer devices — phones, hearing aides, electric toothbrushes and video game controllers. …Devices dropped off at dealerships are shipped to Redwood’s Nevada facilities for the sorting, recycling and remanufacturing of cobalt and lithium — two minerals required for EV battery production. …Growing interest in EVs has accelerated the push for valuable minerals like cobalt, nickel and lithium that are extracted from overseas mines at heavy environmental and humanitarian costs. Recycling of consumer batteries can reduce the forced extraction of precious minerals and create a domestic supply that meets the government’s and automakers’ EV goals, according to Alexis Georgeson, Redwood’s vice president of government relations and communications. …Redwood also recycles “end-of-life” battery packs from automakers like Toyota, Ford, Volvo, Volkswagen and Audi. Lithium, nickel and cobalt are extracted and remanufactured into cathode — a core component of an EV battery…. See also New York Times article Energy Dept. Will Lend $2 Billion to a Battery Component Maker.

2023-02-10. Electric Vehicles Could Match Gasoline Cars on Price This Year. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/business/electric-vehicles-price-cost.html] By Jack Ewing, The New York Times. Excerpt: Competition, government incentives and falling raw material prices are making battery-powered cars more affordable sooner than expected….

2023-02-01. Rinse and Repeat: An Easy New Way to Recycle Batteries is Here. [https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/02/01/an-easy-new-way-to-recycle-batteries-is-here/] By Aliyah Kovner, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized electronics and enabled an accelerating shift toward clean energy. These batteries have become an integral part of 21^st century life, but we’re at risk of running out before 2050. The main elements used in each battery – lithium, nickel, and cobalt metals as well as graphite – are increasingly scarce and expensive, and there is little environmental or fair-labor oversight of some of the remaining international supply chains. There is a pressing need to start reusing the materials we’ve already dug up and to make the battery production process safer and more equitable for all. A team of scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has invented an award-winning new battery material that can check both boxes. Their product, called the Quick-Release Binder, makes it simple and affordable to separate the valuable materials in Li-ion batteries from the other components and recover them for reuse in a new battery….

2023-01-24. Revealed: how US transition to electric cars threatens environmental havoc. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-vehicles-lithium-consequences-research] By Nina Lakhani, The Guardian. Excerpt: By 2050 electric vehicles could require huge amounts of lithium for their batteries, causing damaging expansions of mining….The global demand for lithium, also known as white gold, is predicted to rise over 40 times by 2040, driven predominantly by the shift to electric vehicles. …by 2050 the US alone would need triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market, which would have dire consequences for water and food supplies, biodiversity, and Indigenous rights. …In the best-case scenario – comparing the status quo in which EV battery size grows and US car dependency remains stable – with ambitious public transit, city density and recycling policies, the lithium demand would be 92% lower….

2023-01-19. Could Air Someday Power Your Flight? Airlines Are Betting on It.. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/travel/airlines-climate-change-fuel.html] By Paige McClanahan, The New York Times. Excerpt: By the middle of this century, most cars and buses should be powered by renewable energy, while bikes, electric trains and your own two feet will continue to have little impact on the climate. And if global aviation achieves the goal it adopted last year, then your 2050 flight from New York to Hong Kong will result in “net zero” carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. …new technologies are in the works, including hydrogen-powered aircraft, fully electric planes and synthetic jet fuel made from carbon extracted from the atmosphere….

2023-01-13. Sweden Says It Has Uncovered a Rare Earth Bonanza. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/business/sweden-rare-earth-minerals.html] By Stanley Reed, The New York Times. Excerpt: A Swedish mining company said this week that it had found Europe’s largest known deposit of coveted rare earth metals, critical to many green technologies including electric vehicles, in a far northern part of the country within the Arctic Circle. The world’s production of rare earths is dominated by China. The discovery by LKAB, a state-owned company, creates the prospect that Europe could over time develop a domestic source of these minerals. “This is good news, not only for LKAB, the region and the Swedish people, but also for Europe and the climate,” Jan Mostrom, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement….

2023-01-13. Private jet emissions quadrupled during Davos 2022. [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/13/private-jet-emissions-quadrupled-davos-2022] By Helena Horton, The Guardian. Excerpt: Private jet emissions quadrupled as 1,040 planes flew in and out of airports serving Davos during the 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting. Climate campaigners accused the rich and powerful of hypocrisy in flying in on private jets to a conference discussing climate breakdown….

2023-01-07. Federal rebates are expected to create a surge in electric vehicle buyers. Key things to know before you make the leap. [https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/federal-rebates-expected-create-surge-090505897.html] By Karl Ebert, USA Today. Excerpt: At the start of 2022, just 5% of vehicles sold in the U.S. were battery-powered electric cars and trucks or plug-in hybrids. That’s expected to rise to 9% by the end of the year and near 50% by 2030 thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act‘s consumer and manufacturer incentives. …There’s a phenomenon known as “range anxiety,” and it remains a real concern for electric vehicle drivers taking longer trips. …This year, the number of vehicles that can go 300 or more miles on a full charge nearly tripled, from five to 14, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. …According to McKinsey and Co., the average person drives 30 miles a day. …it’s very common in a two-car household to have one car that you use to get around town and another car that you use for road trips …In that case, you can get an EV that’s going to be an around-town car….

2023-01-02. Hitting Record, Electric Cars Sales in Norway Near 80% in 2022. [https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2023-01-02/hitting-record-electric-cars-sales-in-norway-near-80-in-2022] By Reuters. Excerpt: OSLO (Reuters) -Almost four out of five new cars sold in Norway last year were battery-powered, with Tesla the top-selling brand for the second year in a row, registration data showed on Monday. Seeking to become the first nation to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025, oil-producing Norway has until now exempted battery-powered fully electric vehicles (BEV) from taxes imposed on rivals using internal combustion engines (ICE). The share of new electric vehicles rose to 79.3% in 2022 from 65% in 2021 and from a mere 2.9% a decade ago, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said….

2022-12-21. Electric Cars Are Taking Off, but When Will Battery Recycling Follow?. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/business/energy-environment/battery-recycling-electric-vehicles.html] By Niraj Chokshi and Kellen Browning, The New York Times. Excerpt: Benjamin Reynaga used power tools to hack his way into a beat-up hybrid Honda Fit at an auto dismantling plant at the edge of the Mojave Desert until he reached the most important part of the car: its lithium-ion battery. …It would be disassembled nearby and then sent to Nevada, where another company, Redwood Materials, would recover some of the valuable metals inside. The plant where Mr. Reynaga works, in Adelanto, Calif., is at the front lines of what auto industry experts, environmentalists and the Biden administration believe could be an important part of a global shift to electric vehicles: recycling and reusing metals like cobalt, lithium and nickel. If batteries past their prime supply the ingredients for new ones, electric cars, trucks and vans would become more affordable and environmentally sustainable. …Venture capitalists, automakers and energy companies are pouring money into dozens of start-up recycling companies in North America and Europe. …But for all the optimism, this new business faces a daunting challenge: Few batteries will be available to recycle for a decade or more….

2022-12-20. Your Mail Truck Is Going Electric. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/climate/postal-service-electric-trucks.html] By Brad Plumer, The New York Times. Excerpt: In a win for the Biden administration, the United States Postal Service said it would spend nearly $10 billion to create one of the largest electric truck fleets in the nation. …The United States Postal Service announced on Tuesday that it planned to buy at least 66,000 electric vehicles by 2028. …intends to stop buying gas-powered delivery trucks altogether after 2026. …When the Postal Service made public a plan in February to replace up to 165,000 older mail trucks, many of which are 30 years old and lack air-conditioning, it announced that only 10 percent of the new vehicles would be electric. The rest would be gasoline-powered and get an estimated 8.6 miles per gallon when the air conditioning was turned on. That triggered a fierce backlash from Biden administration officials and Democrats in Congress, who warned that all those new gasoline-powered trucks would stay on the road for decades, spewing heat-trapping pollution into the air all the while….

2022-12-09. Workers at E.V. Battery Plant in Ohio Vote to Unionize. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/business/economy/ev-battery-union.html] By Noam Scheiber, The New York Times. Excerpt: The autoworkers union has long worried about the transition to electric vehicles, first noting in a 2018 research paper that electric vehicles require about 30 percent less labor to produce than internal combustion vehicles. …A report last year by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, estimated that the transition to electric vehicles could cost at least 75,000 U.S. auto industry jobs by 2030 if the government did not provide additional subsidies for domestic production, but could create 150,000 jobs if those subsidies were forthcoming. …Under the union’s contract with the Big Three automakers, veteran rank-and-file production workers make about $32 per hour. New hires start at a substantially lower wage and work their way up to that amount over several years. By contrast, companies that make electric vehicles or their components typically pay workers hourly wages in the midteens to the mid-20s….

2022-11-13. Electric Vehicles Start to Enter the Car-Buying Mainstream. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/13/business/electric-vehicles-buyers-mainstream.html] By Jack Ewing and Peter Eavis, The New York Times. Excerpt: While sales are still skewed toward affluent buyers, more people are choosing electric vehicles to save money. …Electric vehicles are starting to go mainstream in the United States after making earlier inroads into the mass markets in China and Europe. …Battery-powered cars now make up the fastest-growing segment of the auto market, with sales jumping 70 percent in the first nine months of the year from the same period in 2021, according to datafrom Cox Automotive, a research and consulting firm. Sales of conventional cars and trucks fell 15 percent in the same period….

2022-11-09. World’s biggest carmakers to build 400m more vehicles than 1.5C climate target will allow. [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/10/worlds-biggest-carmakers-to-build-400m-more-vehicles-than-15c-climate-target-will-allow] By Royce Kurmelovs, The Guardian. Excerpt: Researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the University of Applied Sciences of the Industry in Bergisch Gladbach and Greenpeace Germany compared the rate at which the world needed to embrace zero-emissions vehicles with the rate at which major car companies were planning to produce various models. The report, which focused on 12 carmakers globally, showed some of Australia’s most popular brands – Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai/Kia – were on track to make far more petrol and diesel cars than is sustainable if the world is to limit global heating to the Paris climate agreement target of 1.5C….

2022-11-01. It’s electric! Technique could clean up mining of valuable rare earth elements. [https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-electric-technique-could-clean-mining-valuable-rare-earth-elements] By Dennis Normile. Excerpt: Electric cars, wind turbines, and LED lighting all help keep the environment clean, but making them can be a dirty business. The high-performance magnets in motors and generators and the glowing phosphors in LEDs and flat screens all depend on substances called rare earth elements (REEs). And capturing REEs from the clay deposits in which many are found requires leaching agents that pollute soil and groundwater. Now, a Chinese group has developed—and tested on tons of soil—an approach called electrokinetic mining that relies on electric currents to free the REEs, sharply reducing the need for polluting chemicals. The strategy, described this week in Nature Sustainability, could be “a game changer, providing that it is feasible at a large scale,” says Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven. …electrokinetic technology might offer a cleaner alternative. The approach, in which electrodes on the top and bottom of a volume of soil induce an electric field, speeding the movement of the leaching agent and the ions it extracts, is already used in soil remediation and has been proposed for copper and gold mining. It has “the real potential to outperform traditional mining techniques in terms of efficiency, environmental impacts, and economics,” says Riccardo Sprocati, a specialist in the technology at the Technical University of Denmark. The Chinese team started with a bench-top experiment, then scaled up to 20 kilograms of material, and finally moved to a field test at an actual ion-adsorption deposit, trying the technique on a 14-ton hunk of clay. The method extracted a higher percentage of the REEs more quickly than conventional leaching and needed less ammonium sulfate. It also left the soil cleaner and reduced contaminating elements in the leachate, which could simplify processing. The team calculates that the process could cut mining costs by about two-thirds.…

2022-10-18. There’s lithium in them thar hills – but fears grow over US ‘white gold’ boom. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/18/lithium-mining-nevada-boom-car-battery-us-climate-crisis] By Oliver Milman, The Guardian. Excerpt: Deep in the parched landscapes of Nevada, there is a stirring boom. The mining of lithium holds the promise of a treasured resource that can help slow disastrous global heating. Spurred by a growing demand for battery parts essential for electric vehicles, the US’s only major lithium mine, in Silver Peak, a remote outpost situated in desert scrub and nascent Joshua trees a three-hour drive north of Las Vegas, is doubling its production. Across Nevada, there are more than 17,000 prospecting claims for lithium, a soft metal dubbed “white gold” by investors due to its scarcity and increasing value as clean energy components, with several new major projects now planned. This surge is a critical step in tackling the climate crisis according to Joe Biden’s administration, which has used cold war-era emergency powers to force a ramp up in the domestic mining of lithium and other materials needed for electric cars, heat pumps and other clean energy technology. But the prospect of this new era of mining has unnerved some environmentalists and native American groups. Three-quarters of all known deposits of lithium in America are found near tribal land, igniting fears that a decline in destructive fossil-fuel mining could simply be replaced by a new form of harmful extraction. Plans for a major, controversial new lithium mine in northern Nevada – a 1,000-acre site called Thacker Pass – will “will turn what is left of my ancestral homelands into a sacrifice zone for electric car batteries”, Shelley Harjo, a member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, has warned, all still without meeting the burgeoning thirst for lithium. …The 5,000 tons of lithium coming from Silver Peak is enough to make batteries for 80,000 electric cars. Even doubling this output will make a relatively small dent in the amount of lithium required – half of all cars sold in the US will be electric by 2030, according to some forecasts, with about 26m EVs on the road by this time.…

2022-10-14. Australians who’ve sworn off flying: ‘If you get on a plane, you’ve undone a year’s worth of good’. [https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2022/oct/15/australians-whove-sworn-off-flying-if-you-get-on-a-plane-youve-undone-a-years-worth-of-good] By Katie Cunningham, The Guardian. Excerpt: Forgoing air travel is challenging in a country without convenient alternatives. But Australians who have stopped flying feel it’s a sacrifice proportionate to the climate crisis. …an organisation called Flight Free, which encourages Australians to stop flying. …“The climate emergency puts us in a non-normal kind of world,” Carter says. “Being in an abnormal situation means we need to do things differently.” He likens inaction to watching TV while one’s house is burning down. “It’s that way of looking at it.”…

2022-10-07. Nations Agree to Curb Emissions From Flying by 2050. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/climate/aviation-emissions-net-zero.html] By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times. Excerpt: After almost a decade of talks, the nations of the world committed Friday to drastically lower emissions of planet-warming gases from the world’s airplanes by 2050, a milestone in efforts to ease the climate effects of a fast-growing sector. …Previously, companies had relied on offsetting aviation’s emissions growth through tree-planting programs or through yet-to-be-proven technology to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. But to reach net zero, companies and governments would need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in increasingly efficient planes and cleaner fuels to sharply reduce emissions from air travel itself. And even those investments are unlikely to be enough, compelling countries and companies to adopt policies to curb flying itself, by scrapping fuel subsidies or halting airport expansion plans, for example, or ending frequent flier programs. That puts the onus on the world’s richest countries, which account for the bulk of global air travel. The richest 20 percent of people worldwide take 80 percent of the flights, according to estimates by the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit think tank. The top 2 percent of frequent fliers take about 40 percent of the flights. …Emissions from global commercial aviation made up about 3 percent of global emissions in 2019, and had surged more than 30 percent over the previous decade before the coronavirus pandemic hit and traffic slumped. But air travel has come back with a vengeance, making action to address rising emissions imperative.…

2022-09-27. For China’s Auto Market, Electric Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/business/china-electric-vehicles.html] By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu, The New York Times. Excerpt: …This year, a quarter of all new cars purchased in China will be an all-electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid. By some estimates, more than 300 Chinese companies are making E.V.s, ranging from discount offerings below $5,000 to high-end models that rival Tesla and German automakers. There are roughly four million charging units in the country, double the number from a year ago, with more coming. While other E.V. markets are still heavily dependent on subsidies and financial incentives, China has entered a new phase: Consumers are weighing the features and prices of electric vehicles against gas-powered cars without much consideration of state support. The United States is far behind. This year, the country passed a key threshold of E.V.s accounting for 5 percent of new car sales. China passed that level in 2018. …Already the biggest E.V. market, China also has one of the fastest growing, with sales expected to double this year to about six million vehicles — more than the rest of the world combined. Of the world’s top-10 best-selling E.V. brands, half are Chinese, led by BYD, which lags only Tesla in global market share and is starting to ship its electric cars abroad. And it’s not just the car sales that are thriving in China. The Chinese battery manufacturers CATL and BYD are the biggest players in the industry, while Beijing holds a tight grip on access to critical raw materials.…

2022-09-20. How a Quebec Lithium Mine May Help Make Electric Cars Affordable. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/business/electric-vehicles-lithium-quebec.html] By Jack Ewing, photographs by Brendan George Ko For The New York Times. Excerpt: About 350 miles northwest of Montreal, amid a vast pine forest, is a deep mining pit with walls of mottled rock. The pit has changed hands repeatedly and been mired in bankruptcy, but now it could help determine the future of electric vehicles. The mine contains lithium, an indispensable ingredient in electric car batteries that is in short supply. If it opens on schedule early next year, it will be the second North American source of that metal, offering hope that badly needed raw materials can be extracted and refined close to Canadian, U.S. and Mexican auto factories, in line with Biden administration policies that aim to break China’s dominance of the battery supply chain. …Dozens of lithium mines are in various stages of development in Canada and the United States. …Most lithium is processed in China, …lithium processing requires expertise that is in short supply, .…

2022-09-06. In Energy Crunch, Germany Turns Down Heat but Won’t Limit Autobahn Speeds. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/world/europe/germany-autobahn-speed-limits.html] By Christopher F. Schuetze, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Germany is trying any range of measures to combat an energy crisis that is only expected to worsen this winter. Public buildings can be heated to just 66 degrees and most private pools not at all. Starting this month, billboards and other landmarks go dark at 10 p.m. The government has even extended the lives of two of the country’s last nuclear reactors. But the one thing Germany will not do, apparently, is put a general speed limit on the fabled autobahns, a proposal raised — and shot down — even though it could save gasoline and cut carbon dioxide emissions. …The German Environment Ministry found that if a speed limit of 100 kilometers per hour, about 62 miles per hour, were put in place on the autobahns, with an 80 k.p.h. limit on other roads, Germany’s 48 million automobiles could save 2.1 billion liters of fuel every year. If drivers actually kept to that speed, 5.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions could be saved, about 3 percent of all CO2 emitted from transportation. If drivers kept to a speed limit of 130 k.p.h., or 80 m.p.h. — a more realistic limit — the savings would drop to 1.9 million metric tons, or just above 1 percent of total transportation emissions.…

2022-08-30. This Remote Mine Could Foretell the Future of America’s Electric Car Industry. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/business/economy/electric-cars-us-nickel-mine.html] By Ana Swanson, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Talon Metals… is proposing to build an underground mine near Tamarack [Minnesota] that would produce nickel, a highly sought-after mineral that is used to power electric vehicles. …But mines that extract metal from sulfide ore, as this one would, have a poor environmental record in the United States, and an even more checkered footprint globally. …it could spoil local lakes and streams that feed into the Mississippi River. There is also concern that it could endanger the livelihoods and culture of Ojibwe tribes whose members live just over a mile from Talon’s land and have gathered wild rice here for generations. …current supply chains for electric vehicle batteries — and the batteries that would be needed for the electric grid that would charge that fleet of vehicles — rely on some adversarial and heavily polluting foreign nations. Much of the nickel that goes into car batteries is produced by strip mines that have decimated rainforests in Indonesia and the Philippines, releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide before being refined in Chinese factories powered by coal. Another source of nickel is a massive mining operation north of the Arctic Circle in Norilsk, Russia, which has produced so much sulfur dioxide that a plume of the toxic gas is big enough to be seen from space. Other minerals used in electric vehicle batteries, such as lithium and cobalt, appear to have been mined or refined with the use of child or forced labor. With global demand for electric vehicles projected to grow sixfold by 2030, the dirty origins of this otherwise promising green industry have become a looming crisis.…

2022-08-25. California bans sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 in milestone step. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/24/california-ban-sales-gas-powered-cars-2035] By Dani Anguiano, The Guardian. Excerpt: Thursday’s vote is among the first of its kind and will be an example to other states when setting zero-emission standards. …In 2021, only 12% of new cars sold in California were zero-emission, according to Carb, though about 16% of cars sold in the first three months of this year were electric. The new rule would require the state reach 35% of sales by 2026, 68% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. It would not affect cars that are already on the road.… See also New York Times article about the ban as well as California E.V. Mandate Finds a Receptive Auto Industry.

2022-08-16. A Frustrating Hassle Holding Electric Cars Back: Broken Chargers. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/business/energy-environment/electric-vehicles-broken-chargers.html] By Niraj Chokshi, The New York Times. Excerpt: …The chargers where people refuel [electric] cars are often broken. One recent study found that about a quarter of the public charging outlets in the San Francisco Bay Area, where electric cars are commonplace, were not working. A major effort is underway to build hundreds of thousands of public chargers — the federal government alone is spending $7.5 billion. But drivers of electric cars and analysts said that the companies that install and maintain the stations need to do more to make sure those new chargers and the more than 120,000 that already exist are reliable.…

2022-06-23. Can farm and food waste power tomorrow’s airplanes? [https://www.science.org/content/article/can-farm-and-food-waste-power-tomorrow-s-airplanes] By Robert F. Service, Science Magazine. Excerpt: It’s a painful truth for people who fly: …Air travel is among the most carbon-polluting human activities. A round trip from New York City to London emits nearly 1000 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per passenger…. Annually, airplanes spew some 920 million tons of CO₂, accounting for roughly 3.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Derek Vardon is hoping a yellowish, foul-smelling liquid will help change that. The fluid is a collection of short, chainlike molecules called volatile fatty acids (VFAs) from decaying food waste, …. In a process he and colleagues developed, the VFAs are vaporized, then …knit the VFAs into longer chains called ketones. …the ketones are piped to another reactor …to make kerosene, aka jet fuel. Vardon, a chemist who spent most of the past decade at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is betting this food-to-fuel process and others that convert different forms of waste “biomass” into fuel represent the future of air travel, and the world’s best hope for dramatically reducing  the  greenhouse gases it generates. In March 2021, he and his colleagues detailed the technology in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with calculations revealing the resulting jet fuel could be nearly as cheap as the petroleum-based version. …the net emissions from bio-based jet fuel would only be a fraction of those from fossil fuel. In October 2021, Vardon bet on his technology, leaving NREL to become chief technical officer of Alder Fuels, a startup aiming to produce sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs). …In fall 2021, United Airlines committed to buying 5.7 billion liters of SAFs from Alder, the largest such aviation deal at that time. …More than a dozen SAF startups have formed in recent years in the United States, China, Japan, Singapore, India, Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Canada. …For now, SAF producers create just 100 million liters of fuel per year for an industry that consumed more than 360 billion liters in 2019…. By 2030, the market for SAFs may grow by 70-fold, to nearly $15.7 billion, according to Markets and Markets.…

2022-05-15. The Tesla Effect: Snowmobiles, Boats and Mowers Go Electric. By Jack Ewing, The New York Times. Excerpt: STOWE, Vt. — Snowmobiles are part of the winter soundtrack in this part of Vermont, at their worst shattering the stillness of the forest like motorcycles on skis. But the motorized sleds bouncing along a wooded mountain trail in February were silent except for the whoosh of metal runners on snow. The machines, made by a start-up Canadian company, Taiga, were battery-powered — the first electric snowmobiles to be sold widely — and symbols of how conveyances of all kinds are migrating to emission-free propulsion. Taiga is also offering battery-powered personal watercraft, another form of recreation where the gasoline version is regarded in some circles as a scourge. While electric cars get most of the attention, electric lawn mowers, boats, bicycles, scooters and all-terrain vehicles are proliferating. In some categories, battery-powered machines are gaining market share faster than electric cars are conquering the auto world. …The environmental benefits are potentially significant. Unlike cars and trucks, outboard motors or lawn mowers do not usually have catalytic converters to reduce harmful emissions. They are noisy, and they often use lower-quality fuel. A gasoline lawn mower generates as much pollution in an hour as a 300-mile car trip, according to the California Air Resources Board.… [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/15/business/electric-snowmobiles-boats-mowers.html]

2022-05-14. In London, a Long-Awaited High-Tech Train Is Ready to Roll. By Mark Landler, Photographs by Andrew Testa, The New York Times. Excerpt: LONDON — When Andy Byford ran New York City’s dilapidated subway system, fed-up New Yorkers hailed his crusade to make the trains run with fewer delays and lamented his premature exit after clashes with the governor at the time, Andrew M. Cuomo. …Straphangers even took to calling him “Train Daddy.” Nobody calls Mr. Byford Train Daddy in London, where he resurfaced in May 2020 as the commissioner of the city’s transit authority, Transport for London. But on May 24, when he opens the Elizabeth line — the long-delayed, $22 billion-plus high-capacity railway that uncoils from west and east underneath central London — he might find himself again worthy of a cheeky nickname. …Heathrow Airport has had a subway link for decades. When the Elizabeth line’s next phase is opened in the fall, passengers will be able to travel from Heathrow to the banks at Canary Wharf in East London in 40 minutes; that is a prime selling point for a city desperate to hold on to its status as financial mecca after Brexit. All told, the line has 10 entirely new stations, 42 miles of tunnels and crosses under the Thames three times.… [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/world/europe/london-train-crossrail.html]

2022-05-10. Just one of 50 aviation industry climate targets met, study finds. By Damien Gayle, The Guardian. Excerpt: The international aviation industry has failed to meet all but one of 50 of its own climate targets in the past two decades, environment campaigners say. A report commissioned by the climate charity Possible assessed every target set by the industry since 2000 and found that nearly all had been missed, revised or quietly ignored. The charity says the findings undermine a UK government plan to leave airlines to reduce their emissions through self-regulation.… [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/10/just-one-of-50-aviation-industry-climate-targets-met-study-finds]

2022-04-16. The Battery That Flies. By Ben Ryder Howe, The New York Times. Excerpt: A new aircraft being built in Vermont has no need for jet fuel. …Amazon and the Air Force are both betting on it. …a long-held aviation goal: an aircraft with no need for jet fuel and therefore no carbon emissions, a plane that could take off and land without a runway and quietly hop from recharging station to recharging station, like a large drone. …Electric motors have the virtue of being smaller, allowing more of them to be fitted on a plane and making it easier to design systems with vertical lift. However, batteries are heavy, planes need to be light, and for most of the last century, the e-plane was thought to be beyond reach.… [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/business/beta-electric-airplane.html]

2022-04-11. Truck Makers Face a Tech Dilemma: Batteries or Hydrogen? By Jack Ewing, The New York Times. Excerpt: Even before war in Ukraine sent fuel prices through the roof, the trucking industry was under intense pressure to kick its addiction to diesel, a major contributor to climate change and urban air pollution. But it still has to figure out which technology will best do the job. Truck makers are divided into two camps. One faction, which includes Traton, Volkswagen’s truck unit, is betting on batteries because they are widely regarded as the most efficient option. The other camp, which includes Daimler Truck and Volvo, the two largest truck manufacturers, argues that fuel cells that convert hydrogen into electricity — emitting only water vapor — make more sense because they would allow long-haul trucks to be refueled quickly. …Battery-powered trucks sell for about three times as much as equivalent diesel models, although owners may recoup much of the cost in fuel savings. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will probably be even more expensive, perhaps one-third more than battery-powered models, according to auto experts. But the savings in fuel and maintenance could make them cheaper to own than diesel trucks as early as 2027, according to Daimler Truck.… [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/business/electric-hydrogen-trucks.html]

2022-03-30. US transition to electric vehicles would save over 100,000 lives by 2050 – study. By Nina Lakhani, The Guardian. Excerpt: …Analysis by the American Lung Association highlights the public health damage caused by the world’s dependence on dirty fossil fuels, and provides a glimpse into a greener, healthier future – should political leaders decide to act. According to the report, swapping gas vehicles for zero-emission new cars and trucks in the US would lead to 110,000 fewer deaths, 2.8m fewer asthma attacks and avoid 13.4m sick days by 2050. The shift would lead to a 92% fall in greenhouse gases by 2050, generating $1.7[trillion] in climate benefits by protecting ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructure from rising sea levels and catastrophic weather events including drought and floods.… [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/30/us-electric-vehicles-save-lives-public-health-costs-study]

2022-03-22. Colorado Welcomes Arrival of New Zero-Emissions Big Rigs. By Colorado Department of Transportation. Excerpt: New all-electric trucks will help Colorado meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals and save consumers money. Roads in Colorado will soon be seeing green 18-wheelers — big trucks with plenty of power but zero emissions. …Colorado Energy Office Director Will Toor and Colorado Department of Transportation Office of Innovative Mobility Chief Kay Kelly on Tuesday joined officials from Nikola, Wagner Equipment and the Colorado Motor Carriers Association to hail the arrival of the electric big rigs. A Nikola Tre truck, on display at the Capitol Tuesday, is a fully battery-electric vehicle (BEV) offering a range of up to 350 miles. Beginning in 2023, Wagner will also include the Nikola Tre hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles as part of its portfolio of trucks. “Colorado recently released a draft Clean Truck Strategy, which is among the most comprehensive plans in the U.S. to build and scale the market for zero emission trucks,” said Toor. “…The strategy includes ambitious plans to transition to zero-emissions electric and hydrogen trucks and buses. …Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles like tractor trailers represent less than 10% of all the vehicles on the road but are responsible for 22% of on-road transportation greenhouse gas emissions as well as ozone precursors.… [https://www.codot.gov/news/2022/march/colorado-welcomes-arrival-of-zero-emissions-big-rigs]

2022-03-19. $87.50 for 3 Minutes: Inside the Hot Market for Videos of Idling Trucks. By Michael Wilson, The New York Times. Excerpt: …Citizens Air Complaint Program, a public health campaign that invites — and pays — people to report trucks that are parked and idling for more than three minutes, or one minute if outside a school. Those who report collect 25 percent of any fine against a truck by submitting a video just over 3 minutes in length that shows the engine is running and the name of the company on the door. The program has vastly increased the number of complaints of idling trucks sent to the city, from just a handful before its creation in 2018 to more than 12,000 last year.… [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-car.html]

2022-03-17. For Car Designers, E.V.s Offer a Blank Canvas. By Paul Stenquist, The New York Times. Excerpt: The internal combustion engine is exiting stage left. While it provided great transportation and performance thrills for many years, it will no longer play a leading role. In its place under the hood will be, well, very little. Ready or not, the curtain is going up on electric vehicles, and most of their mechanical components don’t sit where fossil-fuel engines once performed. Electric motors — far smaller than gasoline engines — are mounted between the wheels. A large transmission no longer gobbles up passenger space. No drive shaft is needed, thus no tunnel in the middle of the floor. The rear seat doesn’t have to be positioned to provide room for a fuel tank. The E.V.’s power source — the battery — is heavy and large but of minimal height. Situated within the area protected by the wheels, it serves as part of the chassis — a structural member. Nearly all the parameters of vehicle packaging have changed. Given a new and radically different platform on which to build vehicles, designers are rethinking their approach; the sheet metal that adorned gas-guzzlers can be a misfit here. …The size and weight of the battery compel it to be placed low and between the wheels, Mr. Langer said. That allows for a flat floor. The cowl — a structural element between engine compartment and passenger area — can be moved toward the front, increasing interior space. …The Lucid team took advantage of starting with a clean sheet. According to Mr. Jenkins, the Lucid Air has the largest “frunk,” or forward trunk, of any consumer-aimed E.V. … [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/business/electric-vehicle-ev-design.html]

2022-03-15. Fairfax County Public Schools expands electric school bus fleet amid rising gas prices. By Christy Matino, ABC8 News. Excerpt: FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. (WDVM) — Fairfax County Public Schools are going green in hopes of saving some green.
Parents and officials gathered on Monday to celebrate the addition of new electric school buses to their fleet. This brings the county one step closer to its goal of obtaining all-electric school buses by 2035. Dropping diesel for electric buses is a trend seen in school districts across the DMV, and the soaring cost of gas makes it the perfect time to switch over. “Higher prices at the pump highlight the need accelerate our transition to a clean energy economy, and offer affordable and convenient transportation options that are less vulnerable to these price spikes,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan.… [https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/ga-price-school-district-expands-electric-school-bus-fleet-amid-gas-price-increases/] See also Battle of the Buses: Diesel vs. Electric (youtube)

2022-03-07. E.P.A. to Tighten Tailpipe Rules for the Biggest Polluters on the Road. By Coral Davenport, The New York Times. Excerpt: The Biden administration on Monday proposed strict new limits on pollution from buses, delivery vans, tractor-trailers and other heavy trucks — the first time in more than 20 years that tailpipe standards have been tightened for the biggest polluters on the road. The new draft rule from the Environmental Protection Agency would require heavy-duty trucks to reduce emissions of nitrogen dioxide by 90 percent by 2031. Nitrogen dioxide is linked to lung cancer, heart disease and premature death. The E.P.A. also announced plans to slightly tighten truck emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is driving climate change. The new rules for nitrogen oxide pollution would apply to trucks beginning with the model year 2027, while the carbon dioxide rules would apply to trucks starting with the model year 2024.… [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/climate/trucks-pollution-rules-epa.html]

2022-02-23. USPS finalizes plans to buy mostly gasoline-powered delivery trucks. Here’s what experts say is wrong with that. By Jacob Bogage and Anna Phillips, The Washington Post. Excerpt: The U.S. Postal Service finalized plans Wednesday to purchase up to 148,000 gasoline-powered mail delivery trucks, defying Biden administration officials’ objections that the multibillion-dollar contract would undercut the nation’s climate goals. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy disregarded requests from the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency this month to reconsider replacing the delivery fleet with 90 percent gas-powered trucks and 10 percent electric vehicles, at a cost of as much as $11.3 billion. The contract, orchestrated by DeJoy, offers only a 0.4-mpg fuel economy improvement over the agency’s current fleet. The decision is a major blow to the White House’s climate agenda. President Biden has pledged to transition the federal fleet to clean power, and apart from the military, the Postal Service has more vehicles than any other government agency. It accounts for nearly one-third of federally owned cars and trucks, and environmental and auto industry experts argue that the agency’s stop-and-start deliveries to 161 million addresses six days a week provides an ideal scenario for using electric vehicles. EPA officials said the Postal Service vastly underestimated the emissions of its proposed fleet of “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles,” accusing the mail agency of fudging the math in its analysis to justify the massive purchase of internal-combustion-engine trucks.… [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/23/usps-trucks-epa-climate-change]

2022-02-15. Affordable housing for teachers? California owns plenty of land for that. By Ivan Natividad, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: New research from UC Berkeley has the potential to influence state policy aimed at providing affordable housing to public school teachers and staff. The report, “Education Workforce Housing in California: Developing the 21st Century Campus,” was published today by UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools, the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at Berkeley, and cityLAB at UCLA. The research, developed in collaboration with the California School Boards Association and funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, looked at tens of thousands of potential California housing sites and found that counties across the state own public land that can be designed and developed to house public school teachers and staff. Researchers found that the scarcity of affordable housing in California impacts the quality of K-12 education because public school teachers and employees often cannot live in the communities where they work. … [https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/affordable-housing-for-teachers-california-owns-plenty-of-land-for-that/] Why is this article related to Energy Use chapter 9? Because if people live close to their work, they expend less energy (and emit less greenhouse gas) than commuting far distances.

2022-02-08. Why This Could Be a Critical Year for Electric Cars. By Jack Ewing and Neal E. Boudette, The New York times. Excerpt: Sales of cars powered solely by batteries surged in the United States, Europe and China last year, while deliveries of fossil fuel vehicles were stagnant. …While electric vehicles still account for a small slice of the market — nearly 9 percent of the new cars sold last year worldwide were electric, up from 2.5 percent in 2019, according to the International Energy Agency — their rapid growth could make 2022 the year when the march of battery-powered cars became unstoppable, erasing any doubt that the internal combustion engine is lurching toward obsolescence. …The auto industry is on track to invest half a trillion dollars in the next five years to make the transition to electric vehicles, Wedbush Securities, an investment firm, estimates. That money will be spent to refit and build factories, train workers, write software, upgrade dealerships and more. Companies are planning more than a dozen new electric car and battery factories just in the United States. “It’s one of the biggest industrial transformations probably in the history of capitalism,” Scott Keogh, chief executive of Volkswagen Group of America, said in an interview.… [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/business/energy-environment/electric-cars-vehicles.html]

2022-01-11. Is Norway the Future of Cars? By Shira Ovide, The New York Times. Excerpt: Last year, Norway reached a milestone. Only about 8 percent of new cars sold in the country ran purely on conventional gasoline or diesel fuel. Two-thirds of new cars sold were electric, and most of the rest were electric-and-gasoline hybrids. …electric car enthusiasts are stunned by the speed at which the internal combustion engine has become an endangered species in Norway. …Norwegians started with much of the same electric vehicle skepticism as Americans. That changed because of government policies that picked off the easier wins first and a growing number of appealing electric cars. Over time, that combination helped more Norwegians believe electric cars were for them. …if Norway could do it, the U.S. and other countries could, too. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and climate scientists have said that moving away from combustion engine vehicles is essential to avoiding the worst effects of a warming planet. U.S. electric car sales are increasing fast, but at about 3 percent of new passenger vehicles, percentages are far lower than those in most other rich countries. So what did Norway do right? …the country’s policies focused first on what was the least difficult: nudging people who were considering a new car to go electric. Norwegians who bought new electric cars didn’t have to pay the country’s very high taxes on new vehicle sales. That made electric cars a no-brainer for many people, and it didn’t hurt people who already owned conventional cars or those who bought used ones.… [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/technology/norway-electric-vehicles.html]

2022-01-9. EasyJet will be first airline to use green hydrogen on commercial flights. By Nigel Rosser & Barry Ellams, Wales Online. Excerpt: EasyJet is set to become the world’s first major airline to use green hydrogen fuelled aircraft on commercial flights. The low budget carrier is planning to use eco-friendly hydrogen cell technology on passenger flights as early as 2030 in an attempt to slash its carbon footprint. …Cranfield are being backed by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the Government who have awarded them £7.5 million for development. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has also given the project his approval. …Experts say hydrogen fuel cells have zero emissions, no battery charge and flight turnaround time is comparable to that of conventional fuels, with fuel costs significantly lower. Converting electricity to hydrogen to make the fuel is also carbon-zero. Cranfield are currently developing a nine-seater Britten-Normander plane to fly for 60 minutes with 45 minutes reserve fuel time. By 2030 they believe far longer flights of up to four hours can be achieved.… [https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/easyjet-first-airline-use-green-22695010]

2022-01-03. H2 Clipper Will Resurrect Hydrogen Airships to Haul Green Fuel Across the Planet. By Edd Gent, SingularityHub. Excerpt: …Hydrogen is increasingly being seen as a promising alternative for … hard to decarbonize sectors. It has a higher energy density than natural gas and can either be burned in internal combustion engines or combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to create electricity. …much of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas and therefore not much better than fossil fuels, in theory you can also make it by using renewable electricity to power electrolyzers that split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Producing green hydrogen economically is still a huge challenge,…. But transporting hydrogen remains a sticking point: Areas that are abundant in renewable energy such as sun and wind are not always close to where the hydrogen is needed. …a start-up called H2 Clipper has an ingenious workaround. …build airships that simultaneously transport hydrogen and use it as a lighter-than-air gas to provide the aircraft with lift. …its airships will also use hydrogen fuel cells to power their engines. …the H2 Clipper will be able to cruise at about 175 mph, which would allow it to ferry cargo 7 to 10 times faster than a boat. It also has a cargo volume of 265,000 cubic feet—8 to 10 times more than most airfreighters—and can carry up to 340,000 pounds of payload 6,000 miles at its standard cruising speed. Between distances of 1,000 to 6,000 miles, the airship could carry a ton of cargo for as little as $0.177 to $0.247 per mile—a quarter of the cost of airfreight. …US law currently bans the use of hydrogen as a lift gas in airships. …not surprising, seeing as the era of the airship came to an abrupt end nearly a century ago after the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg went up in flames. H2 Clipper deals with this issue in their FAQs, pointing out that hydrogen storage technology has undergone rigorous testing in the automotive industry thanks to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, with no recorded explosion to date. The company says this is because hydrogen’s very fast expansion rate means that it typically disperses too quickly for an explosion to happen.… [https://singularityhub.com/2022/01/03/h2-clipper-will-resurrect-hydrogen-airships-to-haul-green-fuel-across-the-planet/]