Great article in Wired on new battery technologies being developed for electric vehicles leads me to discover something I really, really want (but can’t afford): the new Lightning GT. A British-built electric supercar. 700hp through motors in each wheel, 0-60mph in about 4 seconds, 250 mile range, and thanks to Altairnano’s nanotech re-engineering of lithium batteries, a 10 minute recharge time. Snag? The £150,000 cost. Even with the NZ dollar soaring, that’s not far short of $400,000. And only two seats.
Author: Gareth
Kill possums and save the world
Possums eat trees. Trees take carbon from the air. Kill possums, tree growth increases, and more carbon’s sucked out of the atmosphere. The Department of Conservation’s been keen on this idea for some time, to the extent of claiming last year that $200 million spent on possum and goat control would sequester enough carbon to meet New Zealand’s complete Kyoto emissions overshoot. They’ve finally convinced the cabinet that this is worth pursuing: conservation minister Chris Carter announced yesterday [Scoop, Stuff] that DoC will tender for commercial investment in six carbon offset trials.
Details of the projects are still being developed but they are likely to be of two types. The first will set aside specific areas of conservation land for either replanting or natural regeneration of forests on land which was not in forest prior to 1989, thus making these measures Kyoto compliant. The second type of project, likely to be the largest of the two, will involve major pest control initiatives on conservation land to measure and assess increases in carbon storage, both through the removal of pests which may emit methane and through increased growth in shrubs and trees with the pests gone.
Interestingly, Carter notes:
“Companies have already been approaching DOC with multi-million dollar conservation and carbon storage proposals. The government’s decisions mean that all New Zealand companies are put on a level playing field in a tender process for the carbon storage opportunities conservation land offers.
The fraud of endangered cranks
The NZ Climate “Science” Coalition updates its web site with a shiny new look, and new articles from David Bellamy and Vincent Gray. Dr Gray’s NZ Climate & Enviro Truth Newsletter #150 isn’t very interesting, being mainly devoted to one of his perennial hobbyhorses – the IPCC and prediction versus projection – but it does give him the chance to vent some anti-environmentalist spleen:
“Biodiversity” is another environmentalist absurdity. It seeks to claim that there is some sort of moral superiority in actual numbers of species present in an ecosystem…
…Then we have the fraud of “endangered” species. There is no record of any one of them ever becoming actually extinct. I tried asking Google for a list of organisms that had recently become extinct. The number was very small, about the same as for the past 400 years.
Breathtaking stuff. Meanwhile, the whiskery botanist indulges in a few favourite sceptic tropes, before ending on a clearly heartfelt plea
New Zealand leads the world in the eradication of feral plants and animals making restoration of the natural ecosystems that kept the biosphere in balance long before the IPCC was invented. Habitat destruction and the loss of biodiversity is one of the greatest threats to climate and landscape stability. I beg your government to continue to lead the world in this sustainable endeavour.
Bellamy manages to use all the words Gray hates in a couple of sentences. Clearly climate crankdom is a broad church…
Do android farmers dream of electric tractors?
Here’s a way to reduce agricultural emissions: the electric tractor. Global Public Media make the case for the electric tractor as a means to eliminate fossil fuel use (and helpfully explain why farms can’t be self-sufficient in biofuels):
This week we took a (petroleum-powered) scenic drive through the redwoods to the Mendocino coast to visit Stephen Heckeroth and demo his “Solar Electric Tractor.
What a difference a decade makes…
Ford and Chrysler have just announced that they’re joining the US Climate Action Partnership, a body set up to “call on the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.